The Resurrection and the Ten Commandments
This essay is based on a talk given in 2007 at a youth meeting.
The time of the Great Fast, Holy Lent, is considered spring in the spiritual journey of the soul and the communal life of the church at the same time. The thinking can be extended so that we may consider the Resurrection as summertime: vitality, power, vigour, conviction, and everything viewed against the brilliance of the sun, and its heat energizing all. It's the second last, major episode in the Christ's work of salvation. And as this episode is sadly tuned out by reruns of the Crucifixion and the miracles he performed, the Resurrection should get all the prime-time it deserves.
Without the Resurrection, Paul teaches us that our faith is empty and we have no hope. (cf. 1 Cor. 15:20) For what use can the bloodied Incarnate God be on the Cross, with sins forgiven and the stain of sin at last reversible but nothing else after that? How can that prayer of sin be transferred to us if all we believe in is the Cross and the Resurrection is a fuzzy, inaccessible afterthought?
The Resurrection can then really bring up those questions, What next? That's it? We know the sequence: crucifixion, burial, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost. It's been explained and spiritualized to us before. For some, to spiritualize - that is, to make personal the events of Christ's salvific work – suffices. More is recognized for those who seek more or are not satisfied by spiritualization.
The culture and social traditions don't exactly help. A long period of fasting is crowned by a night of eating meat and dairy again. The hype around meat, Easter Eve, and the hymnology of Holy Week becomes overbearing. Past Saturday night, fasting and the Great Fast dissolves into a forgettable vapour that will only condense and reform next year. The Resurrection becomes this vague idea we jabber on about for 50 days after. Priests and servants report a sudden drop in attendance, devotion, and eagerness in congregants and attendants of ministry. If the Resurrection passes us by unnoticed, was not our fasting of 50 days pointless? That question bothers me. And what bothers me more is that I don't know how to make sense of the Resurrection. The Great Fast is manageable and same is said about the events of the Holy Week; it's not difficult to think back to our own times in our lives where we were going about, doing good at work, home, or church, and we were unfairly punished or banished by the status quo. The cross is an appropriate metaphor for the unfairly and fairly punished though. For the unfairly punished, the cross conjures up our sympathy and compassion. For the fairly punished, it quenches our thirst for justice and affirms our need sometimes to see the transgressor humiliated. It's the same self-satisfying glee and masked joy in which we indulge when we hear of a serial rapist or murderer receive the death penalty. Justice is served, we reason.
The rabbis and Jewish leaders who faciliated the crucifixion of Christ may have shared in this second reaction to the Cross. That man deserved it! And in the same radius, John and the Theotokos Mary shared the other view, their distraught sorrow encapsulated in simplicity the phrase of the Agpia: "... but my heart burns when I look at your crucifixion which You endured for the sake of all, O'; [sic] My Son and My God." Both views gaze at the Cross; one wishes for the life to be returned and the other death to hasten itself.
Christ asks for a drink. He is given vinegar. Then, he cries out: "It is finished!" One party rejoices and the other is horrified. The Master is dead. We, as spectators of this story through Scripture, wonder how the Master can cry out this finale equal parts victory and pain when he is still to rise from death and ascend to heaven? Shouldn't he have said that after he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven? What is finished?
An examination of the Greek tense of the phrase tetelestai reveals that the work has been completed once for all and the results of the work are abiding continuously. (footnote on Jn. 19:30, The Spirit-Filled Bible, p. 1611) So, the main work was to be crucified and the results were the Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost. So, truly Christ came to die and be nailed for all.
What a frightful and difficult life; to live, knowing you came to stretch out your hands in salvation 3 years later. How lonely and agonizing is that? The comforting fact is that Christ was able to enjoy the firstfruits of his work on earth immediately after the Cross. Christ took the Law to its logical extremities and became the sacrificial lamb. Imagine the horror if Christ was to die and we were all to enjoy the harvest of his work, and he would never rise. If that would have happened, Christ is truly not divine. But he did and he is. This is not to say that the resurrection of Christ was needed to prove he is divine. It does though solidify the fact that he is.
Going back to the Golgotha, let us stand with those in sorrow and those in gleeful joy. It seems as if the moralists triumphed. And on the outset, they did. But in a queer sense of irony, a prophecy of the upcoming events comes to us in a line from the recent film The Shape of Things. It is not a spoken line but appears in the background on a wall behind Rachel Weisz during her final climactic exchange with Matthew Perry. The line goes as follows: 'Moralists don't belong in art galleries.' This line acts as a buttress, reminiscient of a Greek chorus, to Weisz's character and her recent actions. She justifies her entire charade of a relationship experiment with Perry's character as her opus art project, a grand statement of art. It's not in the scope of this essay to talk about the rest of this great film. Go, watch, rent, or buy it.
Moralists don't belong at the Cross, in our churches, or in the Christian faith altogether. The Cross and its fruits prove this. If Christ was crucified, he died, and the law still remained, we would have still been under the curse of the law. (cf. Gal. 3:13) We could extend this to say we would have been still under the curse's perpetuators: the moralists. It's sad that we're still unofficially badgered and dominated by moralists.
The Resurrection is a new life that completes and expands the Law, the Ten Commandments. The prevalent misconception is that the Ten Commandments are a set of timeless moral principles, applicable to any civilization and modern, rational secular government. It is argued that these moral principles provide for the foundations of a functioning society. Rather ironic that it's becoming unconstituitional, taboo, and cause for ridicule and psychiatric evaluation to live by or quote the Ten Commandments in the public arena.
The Ten Commandments were given after the delivery of the Israelites from Egypt. It's an integral part of the soteirological narrative of the Old Testament. It set up the covenant relationship between God and his people; Paul explains this in Galatians: "the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ." (Gal. 3:24) To divorce the Ten Commandments from this specific context is to be a fool. It is clear then that the Commandments is a prototype of morality. The full implementation of that prototype is Christ himself.
The Ten Commandments is also not some dry, literal moral code, as others argue, that is no longer applicable to New Testament Christians. These people will quote Romans and Galatians, speaking of how the just live by faith only. It only takes a methodical comparison of the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, the core expression of the Gospel. The structure of the Ten Commandments is not mirrored in the Sermon on the Mount, but the content is.
The first 2 commandments speak of the central location God occupies in the life of the believer and the nation. God declares who he is, the exclusivity in worshipping him, and his terms on how to do so. The New Testament develops the original idea further and shows the reasoning behind the original commandment: "No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon." (Mt. 6:24)
Exodus 20:7 maps to Matthew 5:33-37. The original commandment dictates the usage of God's name, Deutoronomy expands this into the nature of oaths, and Christ fulfills this by instructing us on our integrity in keeping our word and making promises.
The original commandment concerning the Sabbath is expanded in the New Testament. It's not a clear, linear mapping; we don't want to burden the text. But there still seems to be an alignment of concerns. The commandment in Exodus speaks about the nature of work, its place in the life of the believer, and how rest is important in context of worship. Christ unpacks this to talk about the human aspect: worry and anxiety.
The same mapping can be done for the 6th and 7th commandments: "You shall not murder" and "You shall not commit adultery". For sake of length, this won't be explained in detail as the relationship between the two parts is clear. Christ takes the commandment and unpacks it further in the Sermon on the Mount.
For the commandments covered, we can see how Christ expanded and revealed the full potential of what the Israelites failed to achieve. One commandment which we haven't covered so far shows another, and the most important, aspect of Christ fulfilling the Law: "You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy." (Mt. 6:43-44)
You shall love your neighbour is from Leviticus 19:18: "... but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord." Hate your enemy refers to the instructions laid down in Deutoronomy 33:3-6, directing the Israelites on how to deal with the other nations around them. A radical shift follows in Christ's narrative; he reverses the trend. "But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you ..." (Mt. 5:44)
On the authority of being the Expression of God, Christ charts a new course for the believer. He shows the new course earlier in the chapter he instructs us to offer the other cheek to those who slap us on the first. Much of the Sermon on the Mount is directed in this new course. The Old Testament Law focused on the right covenantal relationship with God to enable the faithful to maintain a clear and focused worship of God. God separated Israel from the nations as he knew and saw how intermingling brought sin and destruction into his people. Perhaps it is safe to extrapolate that if the Israelites had kept the Law in the Old Testament, perhaps God would have shown them the new course set in the New Testament without Christ needing to die on the Cross. It is a contemplation to be considered.
After purityy and wholeness of the self must come the purity and healing of the other. The work of God starts in the core of the person and grows until it permeates the whole world around the self. This seems to be the life now called for by Christ for us through his church.
This also brings us back to the Crucifixion scene and the Resurrection. At the Crucifixion scene, all the different dimensions we've explored find their roots. The final act of death on the Cross brings the new course of the New Testament and the way of the Law back to one epicentre of resolution, like two axes meeting at 0. That's all humanity knew of at that point: the law and the message of Christ. They even seemed to be diametrically opposed; the man was charged for blasphemy. But he dies and rises again, making the Law anew and elastic. It is not elastic in that it can be bent to be disobeyed, but it can be expanded to include the entire spectrum of human behaviour: internal, external, and the effect on the surrounding world. No longer is morality upheld for the wholeness of Israel, but for all creation. This flies in the face of modern Christianity in our churches, members protecting themselves with statements like "I don't do that, I'm Coptic" and "To be Christian is to be morally pure".
The Resurrection, as designed by God, enables all creation to be truly 'moral'. For God never meant morality to be a self-gratifying pleasure mechanism that enables a select few to exclude and guilt the most into behavioural confinement. Morality, as God sees it, is for all creation to live in the way God intended: in wholeness, harmony, and unbroken communion.
The Resurrection offers us the power and hope to continue the new course by Christ in this mortal body, once under the curse of the Law but now liberated by the Cross and its original nature restored in baptism. At the Cross, Christ cried out courageously, It is finished, in full sight of the moralists who delivered him to bodily death.
It is finished; moralists don't belong in his art gallery, his kingdom.
