“God spoke all these words. He said, ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no gods except me” (Exodus 20:1-3). In these words, we are introduced to the basis of the Ten Commandments given by God through Moses to the nation of Israel during their sojourn in the desert. The Commandments of God are rooted in love and are a revelation of love. They are inspired by the love of God who responds to the oppression and slavery of his people in Egypt with the good news of liberation. Because God wants his people to enjoy life and liberty and to realise their true identity as human beings created in the image and likeness of God – and not as slaves – He gives them divine ordinances to order their lives. In saying “I am the Lord your God,” God invariably meant I am doing this because I love you; because I seek your good; because I want your happiness.
The Commandments confer rights and responsibilities and set the boundaries of human actions. The first three Commandments spell out the basis of our relationship with God, while the remaining seven Commandments set out the basis of our relationship with our neighbour (see Exodus 20:1-17). Love is the driving force. When a Scribe asked Jesus which is the greatest Commandment in the law, Jesus said: “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and the greatest commandment. The second is like this: you must love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:35-40). Jesus reduced the Ten Commandments to two: love of God and love of neighbour. We may even further reduce them to one simple commandment: the commandment to love. Again, we may further reduce them to just one word: Love. As St Paul says, “Love is the fullness of the Law” (Romans 13:10).
If the Commandments are rooted in the love of God for each one of us, what should our response be to those Commandments? The answer is this: we respond to God’s Commandments with love in return for love. Jesus says, “If you love me, keep my Commandments” (John 14:15). But is this truly our own Christian response? In a society saturated with the battle cry for individual freedom and liberation from all forms of restraint, are there not many Christians who believe that the Commandments are burdensome and conclude that Christianity is a difficult and an oppressive way to live? Do we not sometimes think that God is a sadist who gives us too many rules and laws because he wants to deprive us of our happiness? Do we not sometimes live with the impression that the Commandments are too difficult to keep and that it might just be better to ignore them? Do we not imagine that God makes too many demands on us and consider that he should just let us be?
The Commandments do not deprive us of our happiness. On the contrary, they are the trusted signposts and surest compass points to a happy and fulfilled life. Sadly in the name of an ostensible freedom, many Christians today are at the forefront of re-writing the rules of Christian morality. Our modern moral codes deliberately avoid talking about right and wrong, good and bad. Everything seems permissible, provided we can do it. When Pope Pius XII said in a radio message in 1946 that “the greatest sin in the world today is that men have begun to lose the sense of sin” he was absolutely right. Even in the Church of God many Christians would prefer a religion that offends no one; they would prefer a sermon that makes no mention of sin; they would love to serve a God that makes no demands on them. Many Christians seem to have given up the mandate to positively affect our culture with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, partly because many Christians are not convinced about why they are Christians. We seem to be comfortable with the way things are; we don’t want to be told that there is something we are not doing right.
In the Gospel of John (2:13-25), we see Jesus getting angry on account of the wrongdoings of buyers and sellers in the Temple. Jesus’ righteous anger is a practical demonstration of his love for God, which is the interior dimension of the Commandments. “Stop turning my Father’s house into a market.” In these words, Jesus sets the foundation for the sacredness of the house of God. But again, are many Christians today not become like the moneychangers in the Temple? Has the Church of God not become for many people a marketplace rather than a house of prayer and encounter with God? Like Jesus, zeal for the house of God should consume us. We need to resist the temptation to desecrate the House of God by according it the reverence it deserves. When they asked him for a sign for his action, Jesus invited his traducers to destroy the Temple and in three days time he will raise it up. As the Evangelist points out, Jesus was referring to the Temple of his Body.
Isn’t this what the Bible says when it speaks of our own bodies as the Temple of the Holy Spirit? If we look further today, isn’t it true that our secular culture has formed a cult around the worship of the human body? Has the human body today not become an object of commerce in human trafficking and sexploitation? Are our TV channels not filled with programmes that make fun of the human body and denigrate it? Are our magazines and billboards not filled with explicit caricature of the human body, turning it into an object of sensationalism and sexual fantasies? Having destroyed the truth about the human body, has our culture not succeeded in turning the worship of God into the worship of self? As Christians, we must destroy the temples we have erected in our lives to the worship of money, to the idolatry of sex, and to the narcissistic cult of power. Only God is worth our worship; only He deserves our total allegiance and unfailing obedience.
We need to rediscover the meaning of being Christian in our own culture and for our own times. Our evangelical witness to Gospel values will begin to have effect in our society when we give up trying to be like everyone else; when we accept that God is calling us to higher things and to a higher standard of living, far greater than the permissiveness that we find all around us. We need to rediscover the truth that being Christian is not being like everyone else. On the contrary, being Christian is about following the example of the God-Man, Jesus Christ. Christianity is neither a philosophical system nor an esoteric religion. It is a religion of encounter with the Crucified One who gives our lives new meaning. Only those who follow Jesus the Crucified One are assured of stability in their lives.
St Augustine who searched endlessly for truth in the great philosophies of his time did not find wisdom until he found Jesus and became a Christian. In his Confessions he said: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”
Ojeifo is a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Abuja.
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