Murder and the Renewal of the World

The 6th Commandment, Pt. 1

Murder names not just an unjustified death, but the refusal of life we cannot manage.

Beginning the Second Table

Before Christmas, we had worked our way through the first table of the Decalogue, concluding with the commandment regarding parents and children.

One of the threads we have been tracing is the way in which the worship of God is connected with the gods that have been left behind in Egypt, gods which are predictable and managed. We saw that the escape from Egypt was not a deliverance from this world so much as it was a warning that this temptation would be with them always. And we saw that, in beginning with the child-parent relation, our lives already always mirror the unpredictability that the old gods promise to put away. But in that unpredictability, there is life, and in God, life everlasting.

It’s a wild world.

The summit of the first table—the parent-child relationship—is the hinge which opens up into all other relationships, but what kind of hinge is it?

It cannot be a shift from God to the world, for we have already made the transition away from the commandments which focus on God, and toward commandments which deal with one another. We have already shifted toward the world in all of its complexity. What I want to propose as a thread to follow as we continue to move through the Decalogue is this:

We are moving from a wild God into a wild world,

with similar kinds of temptations following us.

Revering God above all else turns us away from treating God as a promissory note, and toward God as God. Refusing the graven images moves us away from a God who can be molded and toward a God who is God. And in revering parents, we enter into a world through the most uncontrollable ordinary there is: birth.

With the shift toward the remaining five commandments, we enter into the various domains of the world—marriage, commerce, law, our neighbors—a world filled with others who bear, in flesh, temptations of this kind: to mold the world into a hospitable place, a world other than God’s.

Murder and the Refounding of the World