4 th October: 18 th Sunday after Pentecost

A Place for the Commandments

There was a time when churches displayed the Ten Commandments on their walls to remind worshippers of the requirements of living within God’s Covenant. The code of what was and what was not acceptable was visually set forth. In contrast, moderns have been keen to replace traditional ways and reinvent the world in their own image. The desire to change everything is quite ‘heady’: let’s get rid of negative commands and restrictions and open everything up—that will make things better. Although it’s tempting to think we are cleverer than our ancestors, it’s dangerous to remove existing codes and practices especially if our forebears valued them.

In a desire for progress, the Ten Commandments are neglected if not dismissed as past their sell-by date. Who thinks that adultery is wrong any more, or that we should observe the Sabbath? These ancient rules no longer apply; we moderns can fashion better ones—so let’s replace them. But we’ve only got to look at the gigantic amount of legislation of modern society. We live in a hyper regulatory environment, besieged by regulations aplenty, whether it’s health and safety or safeguarding or all those other policies essential to every business and organization to protect them from litigation or to establish their politically correct credentials. When we look at this modern industry of rule-setting, its codes and policies, its micromanagement of our lives, we might think that we’d be better off with only ten guidelines for personal and communal living. So, have we gained anything at all by bracketing out the Ten Commandments at the same time as policies, codes, and regulations have expanded exponentially—not to mention the way social media frequently deems something as so unacceptable that it has to be blamed and shamed and outlawed?

Perhaps the Commandments are neglected because they’re challenging, and people want to avoid their power. Well, China seems threatened by them, and is sidelining the Commandments as part of its recent policy to make Christianity Chinese. Thus: ‘In March 2019, all churches in Luoyang county, Henan province were ordered to replace the Ten Commandments with quotes of President Xi Jinping and, in Jaingxi province, Biblical paintings in some churches were replaced with portraits of the president.’ ¹ So Chinese Christians are placed in an invidious position: required as faithful Christians to observe the Commandment to only honour and worship the Lord God, but as obedient Chinese expected to give pride of place to President Xi: his words and likeness. And we think we’ve got a hard job trying to be faithful Christians.

Of course, in enlightened Western countries, we think we know better. Although the furnishing of churches is not controlled by the state, threats to our faithfulness are more insidious. For example, we ignore the command not to covet in a consumer culture where we desire things all the time, often envious of those better off than we are. We ignore the command not to steal, as we desire that governments expropriate land to build a railway or pipeline or wind farm, or call for extortionate taxes on the rich. We ignore the command not to kill, as we call for assisted dying or for the termination of babies with manageable disabilities. We ignore the command not to bear false witness, whilst we too readily accept a knee-jerk accusatory culture and a diet of fake news and disinformation. I say all this to highlight the place that the commandments might still have and to wake us up to the fact that we are ignoring them, not engaging with them, not allowing these ten words to work on us and the way we live, whilst we allow all sorts of other ephemeral codes and ideas to supplant them.

And it’s precisely a wake-up call that we get in Isaiah 5. In this song of a vineyard, the prophet’s hearers cannot fail to agree with the judgement on the vine’s failure to produce fruit after all the care and attention it has received (v. 1–2). To their shock, the prophet holds a mirror up: their own nation has failed to deliver what God expects, and is, therefore, worthy of judgement (v. 3–4). God, who had lavished attention on his vineyard, expected it to produce good grapes: the fruits of righteousness, the good wine of justice and joy. Instead, the vineyard had produced the grapes of wrath: the workings of injustice and wails of distress (v. 7). Consequently, God would abandon the covenant community that had failed to live by the Commandments: exile would be the outcome and the land would be laid waste (vv. 5–6).

Similarly, the gospel is also a wake-up story about a vineyard. Like Isaiah, Jesus draws his listeners into the tale of a landowner establishing a vineyard—hedging round it, digging a winepress within it, and building a tower to protect it—and then letting it out to tenants (v. 33). At harvest, after two sets of servants turn up to receive the produce (v. 34) and are disgracefully treated (vv. 35–36), the landowner sends his son (v. 37); but the tenants want his inheritance (v. 38), so they slay him (v. 39). This brings Jesus to the crunch question for Israel’s leaders (cf. Mt 21:23). After all that has been done for the vineyard, what will the landowner do now that the tenants have killed both his servants and his heir (v. 40)? Jesus’ question is not a conundrum but a ‘set-up’: the answer is inexorable. The owner—as his listeners report—will ‘miserably destroy those wicked men’, and ‘will let out his vineyard’ to other workers who will ‘render him the fruits’ of the vine in due season (v. 41 kjv).

And when Jesus, like Isaiah, holds this mirror up to them, the leaders of God’s people are shocked, for the story exposes their violent rejection of God’s servants—both in the past and in the present—making them unfit for the Lord’s vineyard. So, the verdict of judgement that the nation’s leaders have just proclaimed upon the tenants in the story applies to them! Just as new tenants will be installed in the vineyard of the story, only those who produce the fruits of the Kingdom will have a place in God’s Kingdom (v. 43). The verdict they have so readily pronounced upon the tenants in the story—who broke virtually one third of the Commandments: Thou shalt not covet, steal, and kill—rebounds back on themselves. For they, too, have failed to keep the Commandments.

Although in the West the Ten Commandments are not being forcibly replaced as they are in China, the threat is that the Commandments are ignored within our culture as they are deemed redundant or replaced by endless rules generated by all and sundry. Today, if we will let them, Isaiah and Jesus wake us up to the risk of failing to tend the Lord’s Vineyard entrusted to our care by not providing a place for the Commandments.