Do This and You Will Live
Exodus 20:1-20
First Reading for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Year A)
I make up TV shows in my head all the time. I had this idea for one called God Cops. It would be a normal police procedural, but the crimes investigated were violations of the Ten Commandments.
Just imagine the “Good Cop, Bad Cop” interrogation of a man who allegedly did some work on the Sabbath. Or the precinct’s frustration when someone who used God’s name in vain is back on the street because the judge rules that commandment is more about misrepresenting God than an exclamation. Or a cool, aviator glasses-wearing, mustache-sporting detective sliding across the hood of the car to take down a perp looking covetously at his neighbor’s cow all while a funky guitar riff is punctuated by a blast of horns.
It would have been glorious and would have made so, so many people angry. The inspiration behind this satiric ridiculousness was that people often seem really eager to police religious adherence. It is as if their whole conception at the root of following God is a notion of crime and punishment. You obey the commandments so the Almighty doesn’t throw the book at you and there are scores of people who believe they are deputized to carry that out.
Granted, that impulse comes honestly. Even in Exodus 20, there is mention of God’s punishment alongside mercy. Yet when we think of the Ten Commandments simply as rules that must not be broken, it kind of skews the way that we approach these guidelines for life and how we relate to God.
What if we’re supposed to live by these guidelines as an invitation into life rather than following them for fear of punishment? Fast forward many years past Sinai to when an expert of the law is talking with a Galilean rabbi. They are discussing the age-old question: How is one to live? Jesus asks the expert what is in the law and the man boils it all down to two core tenets: Love God with all your being and love your neighbor as yourself.
“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.” Do this and you will live. Do this and you will experience eternal life beginning now. Do this and you will taste the goodness originally intended for humanity. It is not following the rules so you don’t get the book thrown at you. That is based in fear and following God is based in love. If you love God and your neighbor, then you will do these things and really, truly live. And if you really, truly live then your life will gravitate towards love. We forget that sometimes.
One of my favorite TV shows from the last few years is The Good Place. The afterlife comedy/ethics crash course is a marvel of modern television because its focus is on what makes a person good. Over the course of four seasons, the series posits that what helps us get better—and the show is adamant that the “good” are just flawed people stumbling towards being better—is not promise of reward or fear of punishment, but love.
A character named Michael tries to prove this point as he appears before an all-powerful Judge ready to destroy this dumpster fire known as humanity. Michael points out that many of those dumpster fires are rooted in people who lack knowledge that they are loved. “The point is, people improve when they get external love and support. How can we hold it against them when they don’t?”
That gets the point across far better that God Cops ever could. What I guess I am saying is don’t be a God Cop. Don’t think that you can police people into being better through fear or reminding them how they are not living up to the rules. This whole life boils down to love. If people know that they are loved as they are by God more than they can imagine? If they experience love from a community? Then they—then we—might start stumbling towards being better people, the kind of people who love God and their neighbor. They might start seeing the commandments as an invitation to life, as a way to reciprocate the love that they have been shown.
That is how I want to approach my life and my faith. I want to do this and live.
