October 5 (Worldwide Communion):
Exodus 20:1-20 / Psalm 19
We had a small Bible in our house when I was a child. It was cloth-covered, with a zipper. The picture on the cover was of Jesus and the children. The mothers of Salem stood in the background, in adoration. But that's not the picture I remember first. That one was inside: Moses, standing on a rock, towering over the people of Israel, holding the stone tablets high. Looking all of his 80 years. His eyes like glowing coals. I thought he was going to clobber them all with those slabs of granite.
This was my introduction to the Ten Commandments. When I had to memorize them for Sunday School, Moses stood over me, ready to drop the big rocks if I missed a beat. Fear isn't the best educational motivator, but it works. I still duck my head when I hear the Ten Commandments.
Fear is the problem many of us have with the Ten Commandments today. Take the fear away, and anyone can follow them. Take the fear away, and you take the life out of the words.
The Israelites were already afraid. They asked Moses to stand between them and God. They knew they couldn't survive meeting God. Moses told them not to be afraid. God had come to fill them with holy fear, so they would become a godly nation.
Don't be afraid. God has come so you will have fear. Doesn't sound right!
I'm not a great fan of John Spong, but I think he got it right in his book about the Ten Commandments. Fear is "a necessary part of the human covenant relationship with God."
We can live with the commandments if we admit there is a holy claim upon our lives, a demand upon our behaviour, "a mystical power present that we can never control, tame, or manipulate." Without this awe and wonder we can't say "we have experienced the biblical God." Yet holy fear is "foreign to our generation" (Beyond Moralism: A Contemporary View of the Ten Commandments, by Spong).
We Christians try to escape the fire on the mountaintop. We run into the New Testament. We hide behind Jesus, so when Moses lowers the boom, Jesus takes the hit for us. We speak as if Jesus' Father isn't the God who gave the commandments. But Jesus shows us how to love and obey this fearsome God.
Holy fear isn't the same as a child's fright at the picture of an old man, with fire in his eyes, holding two tombstones over his head, ready to bring them down hard. The closest comparison I can think of is the feeling we get when we realize that we are not in control of a situation. There's apprehension. There's also relief. And then the assurance that things will be okay, even if we can't see how, now.
I feel this fear at the Lord's Table. Wonder at the love. Amazement at the story. I feel small when I realize the greatness of the claim God makes on us at the table. Privileged to handle holy things, because we are holy in God's eyes. This is possible because, as John Calvin said, God accommodates God's self to us. God takes the initiative so we can enter God's presence and survive! God even calls us into partnership, in the gift called covenant.
God gives us gifts. Gifts like the Ten Commandments. All of God's gifts make claims on us. Call us to live worthy lives. God's greatest gift is the gift of God's self, accommodated to our life and our world, in Jesus.
Fear God, yes. Fear God, and come to the table, knowing that holy fear that drives away all reason to be afraid.
