The Decalogue Comes to the Suffering

Beginning To Read the Ten Commandments

To begin the Decalogue is to begin with the God who found us in our suffering.

The Word, Out of Egypt

Most of the classic discussions of the Decalogue which I’ll keep at my elbow for the duration of this series—Ephraim, John Calvin, Martin Luther, the Catholic catechism, Aquinas, and a few other moderns—begin with a straightforward discussion of the first commandment.

I see your hand in the back:

Yes, what exactly the first commandment is is debated. We’ll get there.

Where was I? Right—most of them begin with a discussion of the first commandment, but this is, it seems, to omit the framework which helps us to recall that we are entering first and foremost into the space created by the ever-speaking Word, who took on flesh, who gives the Spirit, and who gives under the appearance of ten statements one singular word.

For the Decalogue, in both Exodus and Deuteronomy, despite their textual variations, both begin in the same place, with the same reminder:

“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”

To foreground the Decalogue with this statement is not to deny their transhistorical value, or to restrict the Decalogue to only to the house of Israel, but to help us to see what kind of word is being given. It is a word by God to the people, and it is through this word that God continues to be visible to the people, hidden otherwise in cloud and fire. Andthe shaping of this word offers in its phrasing an identification of the one giving this word by way of where the word-giving began and how the word-giving began.

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

Where the Word Begins is Not Where It Ends

The first question—the social location of the word-giving—is a question which preoccupied a great deal of the late 20th century. To quote the late James Cone on the question of Exodus:

There is no revelation of God without a condition of oppression which develops into a situation of liberation. Revelation is only for the oppressed of the land. God comes to those who have been enslaved and abused and declares total identification with their situation, disclosing the rightness of their emancipation on their own terms. God not only reveals to the oppressed the divine right to break their chains by any means necessary, but also assures them that their work in their own liberation is God’s own work¹.

The words of the Lord come first to the enslaved, and perhaps only to those who know what it is to be enslaved. Cone’s words here are instructive in two ways. First, he reminds us of that which is obscured by beginning our study with asking about what counts as idolatry, as Martin Luther does. Cone reminds us that the word is given to those who had no word, and in a way which makes them a people. Cone reminds us that the word is passed to them, and not to the Egyptians, and that God begins in humility and lowliness: from the very act of creation as making that which is not God, to the Son becoming incarnate, humility and God’s presence are companions². Cone reminds us, in other words, that God is not obliged to privilege rulers in giving gifts of creation, much less divine ones.

But he is instructive in another way, in that he overcorrects, investing the act of divine revelation with a justifying logic for those it is given to, that so long as the aim is “emancipation on their own terms”, God is bound to respect it. This is an Exodus without Jonah, and certainly without an Acts without the Gentiles, oppressors and breathers of mayhem, to whom this word will be given.

The word of the Lord comes to those who are being brought out of slavery, and this is not an equalized condition. For either one is dying or being brought to life, and Israel and Egypt are not on equal ground here³.

But just in the rearview mirror, the death which Israel has been brought out of has been accompanied by the deaths of Egyptians young and old. No part of Egypt has escaped the spectre of death which came with Israel’s escape, dead in their beds or on the sea floor. And so, without equating the two, an interesting echo appears which will reverberate down through the sands, beginning here at Sinai, but which will make its way back to Egypt: this word is for you as well.

For the Decalogue, as Aquinas will put it, exists as an instantiation of the natural law, the logic of the Decalogue secured in it descending from God’s own character, the character which provides for creation. And in this way, too, the Decalogue is for those who lay no claim to it: God is the Lord, murder remains murder, adultery remains adultery⁴.

We are not yet ready to take up the question of law, public school walls, or national covenants, but suffice it to say that, if Aquinas is right, then it matters less that the Decalogue is a judgment and a gift both toward those who it began with and those who have not yet taken it up yet.

How The Word Proceeds

That this word—which did not come to Egypt first, but which Egypt will be bound to—is not only for Israel brings us to ask another question: under what condition did this Word come to us? In slavery, of course. Israel will not be able to forget it, reminded of this fact each time they read the covenant, each time they celebrate Passover.

That this Word proceeds from Israel even to Egypt has told us that the gift of God is not one for only those who received it first, but even for those who are enemies. This is possible, I think, because in the misery of Israel, we find a figure of the world writ large. Through Abraham, the world is blessed, and through Jacob’s house, a nation not of his family is saved from famine. And so, the fashion in which the word comes to them tells us something of how God comes to us, writ large.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer will refer to this as promeity, a Latinized word which one could translate as “for-us-ity”, that when God acts, it is not for God’s own benefit (as God has no needs). And so, when God acts for salvation, sending the Son and the Spirit, offering gifts upon gifts, it is for no reason other than gratituity to ones who God leads through shadows of death, through miseries great and small. That the miseries of the oppressor are less than those of the oppressed does not make them any less miseries, for what God makes right in us corresponds to what has gone wrong. Egypt has other slaveries it has committed itself to, and that enslaving Israel was part of Egypt’s own enslavement to its gods: misery begets misery.

The house that God found Israel in was, in other words, a house of bondage: it was the house where the bound bound others, and that the Word will come into all of that misery, even if it comes to the most miserable first. That Christ came first to Nazareth did not preclude Jerusalem, nor to the poor preclude the faith of the centurions, though the latter’s journey was like that of a camel through the eye of a needle. It is in this variegated, diffuse misery that God comes and that the Word arrives, offering itself as a covenant, a gift, a light.

That the Decalogue begins as a Word to those in suffering sets us up to hear it well: that the Word is not given as a burden to those in defiance of it, or as a new form of misery, but as a gift, an escape from death into the desert, where a people will learn their God.

1. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 45-46.

2. It is an intriguing and important question to ask whether humility is that which God exhibits as the character that is God. Matt Wilcoxen’s fine book Divine Humility gets very much into the weeds on this question, walking with Augustine, Barth, and Kate Sonderegger through this question of whether humility is a quality fit to name God with.

3. Contemporary equations of multiple forms of damage under the heading of trauma-inducing makes for an equalizing move which is, ironically, dismissive of the unique suffering that is Egyptian slavery. I wrote about this in a way:

4. In his “The Blue Cross”, G.K. Chesterton cheekily puts it this way:

"Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don't they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don't fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, `Thou shalt not steal.'"

I’m not really a Chesterton fan, but he has a nice turn of phrase.