After three full days of visiting many churches, historic sites, and museums in Rome, we had not yet seen the sculpture of Moses, Michelangelo’s magnificent masterpiece. I kept telling my nephews, “You cannot leave Rome without seeing Moses”. Trying to accomplish as many stops at churches and places during the half-day left in the city before flying back, we made sure to see Moses as soon as the church of San Pietro in Vincoli opened. Famous for his horns, which are really rays of light, Moses stayed in Michelangelo’s studio for almost three decades. Michelangelo’s other more important projects prevented him from finishing this project for one of the most famous tombs in the world, the tomb of pope Julius II. The statue of Moses is immense. He is in a sitting position. If Moses were standing, he would be twice a normal person’s size. His right arm holds the two tablets containing the Ten Commandments.
Today the Church offers for our reflection one of the most important parts of the Old Testament, namely, the 20th Chapter of the Book of Exodus that contains the Ten Commandments of the Law of God. God had rescued his people from slavery in Egypt. God had made a covenant with the people in the desert, in which God commits himself to be their God and tells them to be his people. The Ten Commandments show the uniqueness of the people’s religion and the minimum level of morality required to live in harmony. Keeping the Ten Commandments and the law of Moses was the way the people were to respond back in love to the love God had for them.
I would like to briefly talk about the division of the Ten Commandments. I will present you with a mental diagram of them to help you understand and remember them better. The Ten Commandments can be subdivided into two groups: the first three precepts which direct human beings to God, and the last seven precepts which direct human beings and their behavior toward other people.
The precepts follow a gradually descending pattern. The first three precepts order people to acknowledge God and be faithful to him alone, to reverence God’s name, and to offer God his due worship and service. In these three first precepts we see a movement from what is most interior and essential in religious virtue to what follows from it outwardly.
The second group of precepts also follow a gradually descending pattern, from what is most morally serious to what is less serious and purely interior. In the Confiteor (the “I Confess” act of contrition we use at the beginning of Mass) we acknowledge that we have sinned “in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done…” We can see that the last seven precepts are against sins of action, then sins of words, and finally sins of thought.
Indeed, the gradually descending pattern is shown in the fact that sins of action (from the fourth precept to the seventh precept) are more serious than sins of word (the eighth precept, literally, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor”). Following the descending pattern, sins of word are worse than sins of thought (the nineth and tenth precepts, those that start with the words “You shall not covet”).
The gradual descending pattern of moral seriousness is present in each subgroup of precepts. For example, the four precepts against sins of action show that we must first love and respect the persons that many of us are most indebted to for the gift of life and education, our parents. After that, taking the life of innocent people is bad, followed by the destruction of family life and social order through the awful sin of adultery. Sins of action end with the sin of stealing which deals not with people themselves but with external goods.
Finally, since the Old Testament must be seen through the lens of our Lord’s words and actions, it is the Lord who perfectly keeps the virtues that the Ten Commandments intend to promote. The Lord fulfills the Ten Commandments in perfection. He is God, he is our source of life, he is life itself, love itself, purity itself, and truth itself. In short, our keeping of the Ten Commandments shows our love for him. Let us humbly ask the Lord to grant us his grace to keep his saving words.