Small Catechism: The Ten Commandments                                    W 1^st Lent Midweek (Ash Wednesday)

Made to be Broken

            In the name of him who fulfilled all righteousness for us, dear friends in Christ: This evening we begin once again our annual Lenten pilgrimage:  a forty day journey of inward searching, repentance, and reflection upon God’s Word that takes us from wherever we are in our Christian walk, steadily and inexorably with our Lord Jesus into the dread valley of death’s shadow to it’s darkest place – a blood stained cross and a cold, dark tomb.  It is, historically, the Church’s most penitential season; a time for sinners such as ourselves to think about our countless offenses against God and the unimaginably high price our loving Savior willingly paid to redeem us from what we so richly deserved.  And no doubt we will grow in God’s grace by using this Lenten-tide in that way.

But in times past, especially in the early days of the Christian Church, when most of the people coming into it were coverts from Pagan religions, Lent was also a period of intense training for those who were going to be baptized during the Vigil of Easter (that would be the Saturday night before Easter morning). It became a tradition to bring in the new coverts on that night so that, in Baptism, they could literally “be buried with Christ” at the same time the church observed Jesus’ rest in the tomb. And then, coming up out of the water, the new convert would rise again to new life with Jesus on Easter morning. It was a wonderful way to reinforce the meaning and power of Baptism.  And because they had been fully prepared by the thorough training they received during Lent, these newly baptized people would be full communicate members of the church at that point, and so, like Thomas the other disciples, they would then go into the Easter morning Divine Service and see their risen Lord and actually touch his wounds in the Sacrament of Holy Communion – and thereby be assured that their God and Lord had taken away the guilt of their sin.

Anyway, recognizing that one of purposes of Lent has been to instruct people in the fundamentals of the faith, I thought it might be good for us to use this year’s series of evening devotions to return to our own preparations for becoming communicant members by reviewing together the Small Catechism – the little book that most of us “cut our spiritual teeth on”.  My hope and prayer is that our time spent in this pursuit will revive and update some dimming recollections, and perhaps even push us to a higher level of understanding and faith.

We begin this evening with the Ten Commandments, which we reviewed together a few moments ago.  It’s probably the part of the Catechism that most of us remember best because it’s what we all learned first; that, and even with their explanations, they are the shortest part of it.  But it’s an especially fitting place to begin this evening as we enter the penitential season of Lent, for looking into the Law we see the whole problem of the human condition described – and the reason we need a Savior from sin.  Now, obviously we could examine each commandment separately, and go into detail about what it means and how to apply it and so on; but that would take all night – and my guess is that if I were to try, some of you would be ready to issue me your own “ten commandments of sermon writing”; number one being:  thou shalt be brief.  So instead, I’d like to address a couple broader questions; namely, “What are the Ten Commandments?” and from God’s perspective, “What are they for?  Why did the Lord give them to us?”

The answer to the first question is relatively simple.  The Ten Commandments are a basic summary of what we call the Moral Law – that is, those laws that deal with basic questions of right and wrong, and good and evil.  The one notable exception is the Third Commandment about keeping the Sabbath – which properly belongs to what we would call the Ceremonial Law, which are those laws God has given that tell us how he is to be worshipped and that invariably reveal Christ our Savior to us in some way.  But setting that one aside for now, all of the others describe the divine standards of righteous and godly behavior.  Or, if we wanted to distill them down to their very essence, the commandments are descriptions of what it means to love.  Recall that when he was asked, “What is the greatest commandment?” Jesus replied, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your strength, and with all your soul.  And”, he said, “the second is like it:  you shall love your neighbor as yourself.  In these two commands are contained all of the Law and the prophets.”

St. Paul echoed this thought in his letter to the Romans [13:8b-10] when he wrote: [H]e who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law. [For] The commandments, “Do not commit adultery,” “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.  So there you go:  the Ten Commandments tell us what love is.

The next question is a little more challenging though – more challenging that it appears at first.  We ask, “Why did God give us the Commandments?  What does he expect us to do with them?”  Seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?  The obvious answer is, “So that we would know God’s will and apply it to our lives.”  Or this: “So that we who are sinners would amend our evil ways and live lives that please the Lord.  God gave us the commandments because he expects us to obey them.”  That makes perfect sense – but it turns out that it’s perfectly wrong. That’s the answer of a Pharisee – the people that Jesus condemned as hypocrites.  Anyone who takes the commandments and imagines that he is pleasing God by attempting to obey them is such a hypocrite.  No sinner ever pleased God by cleaning up his act and trying to live according to the Ten Commandments.  If anything, in the process of trying to be more obedient, the person actually made his spiritual condition worse and more deserving of God’s wrath.

Now at this point, maybe you’re sitting there wondering if I’ve gone completely off the deep end.  “What kind of preacher are you, anyway?  If God didn’t give us his Commandments with the expectation that we would obey them, what on earth did he give them to us for?”  The answer may surprise you.  Perhaps at some time you yourself or someone you were with was caught in the act of breaking a minor rule, and when called on it, gave this rather flip response: “Hey, laws were made to be broken.” Listen carefully:  at the risk of offending you, in the case of God’s moral laws, that’s exactly right.  God gave us his commandments so that we would break them. 

Let me explain: it turns out that even without a single commandment being given, there was enough cause in the court of divine justice to condemn every one of us with what’s called original sin, that is, the curse of sin and death passed to each of the descendants of Adam and Eve brought about by their disobedience to God.  I’ll be talking more about that this Sunday.  But for the time being, we can take to heart what the psalmist wrote: “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” That sin alone – that inherited guilt – was enough to convict you before Almighty God and justly send you to hell forever.  That, however, is a difficult concept that most people have trouble grasping.  It’s hard to see why we should be condemned for someone else’s sin.  It doesn’t seem like it has anything to do with us – that one act of rebellion so long ago.  And so, the Scripture tells us, in his mercy, God gave us the Law so that the trespass would increase – that is, he gave the commandments to make you even more guilty than you were before – so that instead of convicting you on just one count of being a sinner, he could throw the whole book at you and charge you with each and every violation.  This is what I mean when I say that the Ten Commandments were made to be broken – so that by learning them we would know that we were breaking them and thereby earning for ourselves God’s wrath and judgment.  The Lord knows you can’t obey his commandments – that is, behave in a truly loving way.  He gave them to you so that you would know it too.

And this is where we see Luther’s keen theological insight in writing the Catechism the way he did.  We look at the commands and tend to minimize them.  We think, “The Law says don’t murder; and well, I haven’t killed anyone.” (– at least I’m assuming that most of you haven’t.)  But what Luther did was to marry the corresponding positive idea with the each of the negative prohibitions.  And in doing that, he was only following the pattern Jesus gave in the Sermon on the Mount. You remember how Jesus taught, “You’ve heard the command that says don’t murder.  Very well; but let me tell you what murder is:  if you’re angry with your brother without cause, or if you call him a name, or if you wish him ill of any kind, or fail to help him when you could, then you are guilty of murder.”  Luther is saying the same thing.  It’s not just harming your neighbor that’s prohibited.  If you fail to help and support him in his needs when you could, you’re guilty of not loving him – and therefore you have violated the command and stand condemned.  So, likewise, if you neglect your children or your old parents, if you resent someone’s success, if you say “serves him right” when something bad happens to him – if you do anything to him you wouldn’t want to happen to you, or fail to support him like you yourself might wish to be helped, you’re guilty of murder in the first degree and deserving of everlasting hellfire.

And you should thinking, “By that definition, I am committing murder this very second!”  Yes, that’s exactly right.  And let me emphasize it’s not just this command, but all of them.  God gave the commandments so that we would break them and thereby know how far we are from being the very minimum of what he demands.  We even see this in the Old Testament account of the Commandments being given.  Moses has the two newly minted stone tablets, still warm from being inscribed by the finger of God.  And the first thing he does when he sees what the people have been doing in his absence is to thrown them down and break them to bits.  The action showed graphically what the people had already done to the commands.

They needed to see that – and so do we.  The commandments were made to be broken so that by seeing what we have done to God’s perfect and holy Law we may be made to be broken.  We’re to look at that little pile of fractured stone at Moses’ feet and come to horrified realization “I did that to God’s holy Commandments  – and I keep doing it.  And every day I stand on them and spit on them and grind their fragments into the dirt with my heel – and still, can you believe it?  I have the foolish temerity to think that when I consciously don’t treat God’s commandments with such violent contempt as I might, he ought to be pleased with me for my faithful obedience.  I’m absolutely pathetic.  That’s what it means to be broken:  to have the sense of your own goodness crushed completely – to stand before God guilty and without excuse and justifiable terror over what you know to be the resulting consequences.

Strangely enough, you are at that point far, far closer to the Lord than any person who strives with all of his might to live according to the Commandments, for the Lord resists the proud and casts down the mighty; but he exalts the humble and lifts up the weak.  Again, as the psalmist said, “A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” Those thus made to be broken by the Commandments they’ve so despised and abused are directed to turn their trust away from themselves entirely.  There’s nothing – no hope there.  But there is for us a Savior:  God’s own Son who kept the Commandments whole and perfect for us – who was obedient and faithful for us.  And who for us and for our countless offenses was despised and abused and broken by God and by men – to include ourselves:  for it is he we assault and offend against when we break the Commandments.  But trusting in him and his sacrifice for us we given by grace what we could never attain by obeying the commandments, for in him we have salvation from sin, righteousness, and life eternal.

Concerning the Ten Commandments, much more could be said about their meaning and other uses; but for this Ash Wednesday evening we’ve come far enough if we understand these two things:  that the Commandments define what it means to love, and that they were made for breaking – for breaking by us so that our sins would increase and we could more clearly see our lost condition and thus be made broken and sorry before the Lord.  May God in his mercy use his commandments to so break us that we may be made whole in Christ Jesus our Lord.  In his holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!