Exodus 20:17
Exodus 20:2-5
2“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 3 You shall have no other gods before me. 4 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them;” (NRSVUE)
Exodus 20:17
17 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” (NRSVUE)
Mark 12:28-33
28 One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” 29 Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 30 you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” 32 Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; 33 and ‘to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself’—this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” (NRSVUE)
Matthew 22:35-40
35and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (NRSVUE)
Luke 10:25-27:
25An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” 27He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.” 28And he said to him, “You have given the right answer;” (NRSVUE)
Today’s lesson, Exodus 20:17, is (by some counts) the Tenth Commandment, the one about coveting, but in discussing it we should begin with the Gospels’ more recent stories about experts in the law who either posed the question to Jesus of what was the greatest commandment, or asked him about how to inherit eternal life. In all three stories the answer is to love God and love our neighbor. (Interestingly, in the first two stories Jesus’s answer is validated by the experts, while in Luke’s account Jesus counters with a question of his own and the expert answers with the “Great Commandment” and Jesus provides the validation, “You have given the right answer.” The differences appear slight, but by the time of Luke we see a subtle but significant shift in who has the authority to pronounce on scripture.)
Glosses on these stories often cite Deuteronomy 6:4–5, Leviticus 19:18 and/or Micah 6:8 as sources for the summaries to love God and neighbor, but perhaps more interesting is to see what’s going on in the Decalogue, especially when we focus on the first and final commandments.
A close reading of the Ten Commandments shows that the Great Commandment” in the three Gospels need not call on Deuteronomy, Leviticus, or Micah. Any “expert on the law” could have seen the Commandments not as a list, but as a circle in which the Tenth Commandment comes back around to restate the contents of the opening of Exodus 20. The key lies in the verb “covet,” for covet conveys a sense of obsession, of wanting something so much that nothing else matters—not one’s friends, not one’s community, not one’s God. It’s panting after something—another’s household, wife, servants, animals—anything--not out of love, but out of desire and putting that desire ahead of God.
Where the phrasing of the Tenth Commandment suggests that coveting is a sin against one’s neighbor, its echoing of the first Commandment’s call to “have no other gods” nor to “bow down to them or worship them” reminds us of the unity that exists in loving both God and neighbor. We acknowledge this in Sunday worship when we confess “We have not loved You with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbor as ourselves.” Loving God and neighbor are one thing; coveting is something else.
Questions for Reflection:
- Consider the now rather quaint term blasphemy. In the early history of the Church it meant "to show active disrespect to God.” How do you understand that definition in relation to the Tenth Commandment against coveting?
- What do our answers to that question suggest about an economic structure built on endless consumerism, a “beggar thy neighbor” ethos and a society obsessed by FOMO? Especially when we realize that the Ten Commandments are addressed not only to individuals, but also the society as a whole? What is our personal responsibility for such a society?
- We Christians often pretend that Jesus brought something new into the world, only to turn around and assert his fulfillment of ancient scriptures. (Consider how many of us would react with “Huh?”to the subtitle of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s history, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, followed eventually by “Oh, yeah. I get it.”) What is gained and what is lost when reading the Hebrew scriptures as the basis for Jesus’s relationship to God versus predictions of Jesus as Messiah?
Prayer:
Lord,
You are Truth. Give us the insight to see the unity of your creation and the compassion and courage to act upon that insight—to see that loving you requires us to love our neighbor, whether across the oceans, at the border, or across town. We know that we fail. Trusting that your Grace does never fail, we strive to follow your will--not to covet what our neighbor has but to share what we and they have: your boundless love. Amen.
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