Matthew Hester—Year A Proper 22

Anthony: So, let’s get to the text. Our first passage of the month is Exodus 20:1–4, 7–9, 12–20. I’ll be reading from the New Revised Standard Version, the updated edition. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 22 in Ordinary Time, October 4.

Then God spoke all these words, ² “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; ³ you shall have no other gods before me. ⁴ “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. … ⁷ “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses his name. ⁸ “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. ⁹ Six days you shall labor and do all your work. “Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you. … ¹³ “You shall not murder. ¹⁴ “You shall not commit adultery. ¹⁵ “You shall not steal. ¹⁶ “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. ¹⁷ “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, male or female slave, ox, donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” ¹⁸ When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they were afraid and trembled and stood at a distance ¹⁹ and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen, but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.” ²⁰ Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid, for God has come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you so that you do not sin.”

So, Matthew, before giving any of his words, the commandments, God identifies himself, the indicative of grace here, as the one who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

I’m curious. The Scripture’s always reshaping our imagination about Jesus. How does this introduction shape our apprehension of God and the commandments, and what does it reveal about God’s relationship with Israel?

Matthew: Yeah. That’s a great question. Honestly, I think that opening line just right there at the start of the reading: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt,” for me that is what sets the tone for what’s being communicated.

Because God doesn’t begin with, “Obey these commands and then I’m going to deliver you.” No, he says, ” I am the Lord your God. I’ve already brought you out.” And I think of it this way: liberation comes before legislation, right? Grace precedes the command.

And of course in the experience, Israel, they don’t keep The Commandments in order to become the people God rescued. They’re given these commandments because they’ve already been rescued.

And I think that distinction is huge because religion has often reversed the order, right? We can easily turn to the biblical story and we can say it this way, “Behave correctly, believe correctly, perform correctly and perhaps God will accept you.”

But Exodus begins somewhere entirely different. God hears the cry of an oppressed people, and he enters their suffering, and he delivers them from Pharaoh, brings them through the sea, and only then what he’s actually doing here is he’s teaching them how to live like free people.

You don’t even know how to live. You’ve lived in bondage for so long and so I’m trying to show you some ways to live freely. And so, I actually don’t primarily hear or even navigate the 10 Commandments as like this arbitrary list of like divine demands.

I receive them as like ethics of a liberated community, and I think that even helps us approach the topic just a little … it lets it breathe. So, you think about it. You’ve been delivered from an empire that’s built on exploitation, built on violence. It’s built on hierarchy, slavery.

But listen, guys, I honestly, I think what’s happening here is God is saying, “Don’t recreate Egypt among yourselves.”

Because usually what we do is we default to what brings us comfort. If you think about it, when Israel is up against the Red Sea they complain very quickly and it’s so interesting. What’s their initial complaint? At least back in Egypt we had beef stew. That’s my paraphrase. In the King James, it says the flesh. We had the flesh pots of Egypt. So, if nothing will speak to you, your stomach will. That’s for sure. And so, you think about how they were treated.

Pharaoh treated human beings as commodities. So, then, look: so don’t steal. There, there’s so much here that we could unpack. Egypt, it was sustained and expanded by violence. So, you know what, guys? Don’t murder. Empire ― it survives through deception, accusation. You know what? So don’t bear false witness.

You can see it’s really an antithesis is what’s going on here. It’s an antithesis of what you came out of. Pharaoh’s economy, it’s built on endless acquisition. So, you know what? Don’t covet. Don’t covet what belongs to your neighbor.

And then probably most radically for me, is that Pharaoh demanded endless production. But Yahweh says, “You’re going to have to rest. This is going to be so important.”

Anthony: That’s right. Oh, wow.

Matthew: Sabbath actually becomes this embodied declaration that your worth is not determined by how many bricks you produce. That is beautiful to me.

And I think God isn’t simply saying, “Here are the rules required to keep me happy.” What he’s doing is actually forming a people who’ve been delivered from one way of being human, and now they’re learning another way to be freed humans.

And ultimately, I would say as a Christian, I think Jesus brings that whole trajectory into its fullest clarity. He doesn’t just intensify legal codes. You ever notice that in his ministry? No. He reveals the life toward which the law was pointing. Love God, love your neighbor, love your enemy, forgive, serve reconcile, refuse retaliation.

And so, the relationship ― it begins not with Israel’s performance but with God’s initiative. I brought you out. So, the whole start of their relationship was, “I’m your deliverer. I’m not your taskmaster.” And so, for me that’s beautiful.

Anthony: It is beautiful. And we see in Jesus he’s always reshaping imagination. “You’ve been told this, but I say to you,”

As he reshapes the way that we think, and that’s … I’m going to hang on to what you said: liberation before legislation. That’s beautiful. I may steal that one and not give you credit. I hope that’s okay. But, …

Matthew: You have permission.

Anthony: All right. So, the people’s response to this God was fear and awe. Yeah. Why do you think the narrative includes this reaction immediately after these words are given, and what might that reaction teach us today?

Matthew: Yeah. First I want to say this. I want to give Israel here a little bit of grace because I’ve tried to put myself in whatever capacity that I can in their position. So ,you look at these hundreds of years of slavery. The way that they relate to a master is, it’s suffering. It’s unreasonable. It is… It’s just terrible.

And so, now they’re being told to trust someone else and I think we’d be foolish to just imagine, “Oh, yeah, I’d completely trust. I’d fully trust.” Yeah, I wonder, again this has been generationally experienced at this point.

And that distance language to me is actually not surprising. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not surprising. So, you think about the manifestation there. There’s the thunder, the lightning, smoke, trumpet blasts, the trembling earth.

And their conclusion is, “Hey Moses, you talk. You go talk to God for us. We don’t want God speaking directly to us because we’re afraid that we’re going to die.” And so, right there, their fear produces distance.

It’s not literal distance. It’s the same kind of distance that I think Paul is picking up on in the New Testament when he says that we were enemies of God in our own minds because of our wicked behavior.

So, the fear component is a master at producing perceived distance, and so that really becomes kind of one of the, I would say, one of the recurring tensions in the whole Biblical story. Humanity continually perceives God through fear. And so they approach God through distance, through mediation, boundaries, sacrifice. It evolves into priesthood, temple curtains, categories of clean and unclean.

But this is still fascinating, and if we’re not careful, we miss it because we’ll just read right over it. Moses immediately says, “Don’t be afraid.” He’s telling them, “Don’t be afraid.” And it’s almost a paradox in the text because they are. They’re experiencing something terrifying. But Moses says, “Don’t be terrified.”

I think that’s important because Scripture records humanity’s developing encounter with an understanding of God. And as Christians, we don’t stop at Sinai to determine what God is ultimately. What do we do? We keep reading until the arrival of Jesus, because Jesus brings that perfect clarity that was hidden, that was still that veiled perspective in these moments.

Even Moses wasn’t seeing God clearly. He was still seeing, he was still seeing God as it was through a veil. And so, you think about Hebrews, Hebrews even brings us a beautiful contrast and I know we’re jumping way into the different part of the overall text, but Hebrews brings this contrast, and it even tells us, “You have not come to the mountain of terror, darkness, gloom, tempest. You haven’t come to Sinai. You’ve come to Mount Zion.” and then it’s pretty astonishing. Hebrews says, “We’ve come to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant.” So, the distinction is Sinai and Moses ― that’s not it. No. You’re at Mount Zion, and Jesus is the mediator of this new covenant.

And so, I’m not … I wouldn’t say we dismiss Sinai, but we also don’t embrace it as like the final lens through how we understand God. Jesus is the lens. And so, at Sinai, the people stand at a distance; but in Jesus, God closes that distance. The word becomes flesh. You can’t get any closer than that.

And once we’re exposed to the beauty of Christ, all of that apprehension begins to melt away. And with that, the vain imaginations, the things we built even psychologically. What do I mean by that? Like we preach Jesus, but our imagination of God is, there’s still thunder and smoke and distance, and we’re afraid of getting too close. We’re convinced that God is perpetually disappointed, easily angered, waiting for us to cross the line. But Jesus reveals a God so different than we ever imagined, and it’s who God had always been.

Yeah. And I just love that thought, “You don’t have to stand at a distance anymore.” and I hope that we can hear that today.

Anthony: Absolutely. Love moves toward the other, doesn’t it?

Jesus, the Father, the Son and the Father in face-to-face relationship, everything hinges on that and the communion of the Spirit. God moved toward us. The Word became flesh. There’s no need to be afraid. He has revealed Himself most vividly in the person of Jesus, and I like to think of it we fix our gaze on Jesus, and it’s okay to stare because the more you stare the more you fall in love with this God who loved us first.

Matthew: Yes. Amen and amen.