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How the FIRST COMMANDMENT is in a working unity with the Sexual Commandments (Sixth and Ninth Ones)

╬  God’s Commandments work together in unity.  As we learn to worship God, we find how so many connections occur in how we conduct ourselves in human relationships and activities, and strive to become The Body of Christ.  Our receiving Eucharist is so much a reaching out to “become what we receive.”  We seek unity to Christ in His True Bread and Real Body AND we seek unity with one another to become “embodied in Christ (1 Corinthians 12).”  The fact that God made us as sexual beings for Him adds to the mystery of our lives, and it is so much a part of our following Him. It is seen in Two Laws (#6 & #9) meant to match with the Inaugural One (Worship God alone).

╬  The Sixth Law was against adultery; the Ninth Law was to not covet a neighbor’s wife/house.

Let’s look first at the lesser understood of these two commandments—the Ninth Law.

╬ Though the Sixth and Ninth Law seem similar, an understanding of the 9^th Law was that a man’s house and his wife were put under a category of property.  When the 10 Commandments had gone through its second writing (Exodus was the first, Deuteronomy was the second—after Moses had all those traveling years in the desert with his people), the Exodus People were getting into all sorts of problems with one another.  This 9^th Law, then, in Moses’ emphasis, put the attention on the man of a household or tent, and told all others to “not set their hearts on anything that is his(the  husband’s)”   Or, to put it this way:  Every man to his place and what and who is there, but to none other.  

This Commandment sounds a bit like the 1^st Commandment, put in similar words:  Every man and woman and child to their own true place under God, and to none other.   God is our First Love.

Right?  Yet false gods and idols have tested the home of the believer for century upon century.  Too often, we have let the idols in the front door, not respecting the “House of the Lord” of who we are.

╬  In trying to understand this nomadic people’s law in our modern terms, let’s interpret the Ninth Law to say:  Don’t ruin another person’s house!  Don’t upset it by taking another man’s home and the life he has in it with his wife.  Don’t upset the home by taking from it.  Don’t even think about crossing the boundaries of this home. Respect their life in it.  Thus, this 9th Commandment is much less about sexual improprieties, as it is about disrespect to a house and the boundaries of a home and its people and things inside.   In comparison, we also must respect our Lord and His Temple (#1).

╬ The Sixth Law is the one much more about the sexual practices of people and the respect for the marriage union as what decent, God-fearing people will choose.  In Matthew 19, Jesus well knows that much time has passed since Moses’ was around, and He explains that the Law given to God’s people back then was to a “hard-hearted people” when divorce was given as an option for people of weakness, yet Jesus proclaims that a new era has begun when He will give His Spirit to others to live in holy love.   He said:  “so I now say to you:  whoever divorces his wife, except for “unchastity,” and marries another, commits adultery, and he who marries a divorced woman, commits adultery.”  The Church has studied much, of that word unchastity (porneia, in Greek) to help modern marriage unions, in crisis, to see things as Jesus sees them, as to what a marriage is, and what a marriage promise is all about.   The Church has also tried to promote the marriage builder of chastity and purity in people’s love.   We point such things as the prayer in the Bible of Tobit to the Lord, as he receives Sarah to his bed.  Tobit says: “I do not take this bride in lust, but in all nobleness of character.”  He proclaimed his chaste love, and that he had God-honoring love of his new spouse. 

The First Commandment asks all of us to come into a noble and inspired love with God, just as the Sixth Commandment wants marriages to be founded in a commitment for a lifetime.

╬ One thing is clear about Marriage and the 6^th Commandment:  Jesus did proclaim that a holy bond was made in His Name by believers marrying before God with their lives.  He says so in Mark 10: There He affirms that He is the Son of God Who Is The Designer of such a union of man & woman.  ╬ Another interesting thing about purity before God; God’s commandments hold us to a new reality that we are now vessels of the Lord’s Abiding Presence, and therefore we must act in holiness of life.  St. Paul’s famous question was:  “Do you not know that you are God’s temple now?” 

                                       A teaching series on the 1^st Commandment        con.t on other side

╬ When the fruits of the Holy Spirit are at work--such as in chastity, self-control and generosity—we are called to a new responsibility to our bodies and to how we display love as Christ’ follower.

For instance, the self-stimulation of our organs is essentially contrary to its purpose, so says the Catechism (CCC2352), as is the erotica just within our “self,” that pornography leads people into. It is interesting to note, then, how the 6^th Commandment agrees with the 1^st One in cautioning us about not becoming too self-absorbed in our humanity or idolizing self or anything else!  Rather--we are meant to relate to others and to The Other, Who is God.  We best live humanly in God-centeredness, as a temple-body of The Lord.  Holiness is not just for a place in a holy setting, like a tabernacle: Jesus is wanting to be “tabernacled” inside us.  (See John 1:10-15)  Jesus also said that His new commandment was how we could now “love one another” in His grace, that connects people with one another and to God.  (John 16, 1^st John 1-5)

╬ Likewise, the unnecessary interference (contraception) with the life-giving aspect of our loving others in coupled love is also breaking the Laws of God, both of the 6th and 1st Commandments.   The 6th Commandment is about the act of marital union, and it reminds us that God put the miracle of His life-giving Self into our most intimate marriage act.  We call this the gift of procreation, and it relates to the 1^st Commandment, because God is worshipped and adored through just not our prayers, but in our bodily surrender to God’s ways.  We call this the Sacrament life.  Marriage is meant to be a Sacrament.  The Bible says in Psalm 139 how we are “wonderfully made” and “knit in our mother’s womb”—and when the sacredness of love and life are kept together in a marriage, it helps the couple be a Sacrament of worship to God in their shared lives.   Since the time of procreating offspring/children is limited, it is hoped that God’s creative time in the couple’s physical journey will be respected with an openness to life.   The couple also has their choice and discernment and freedom to use in celebrating a “God of life” over them and working through them to add to His children.  The point is--- God comes among us—and we appreciate how He is life-giving.

In today’s 5^th Sunday first reading, we hear of God “opening ways” that life may “spring forth” even in “the desert…in the wasteland” come “rivers (of life)… for My chosen people to drink, the people whom I formed for Myself (Isa. 43).”    Strange gods have contra in them; Our God has openness.

╬ Homosexuality (CCC2357) contains actions “contradictory to natural law, and are intrinsically disordered,” so teaches the Church.  Scripture gives some admonitions of it, such as in Romans 1:26-28, in which St. Paul describes a troubling situation in the local church when “God gave them up to (this) base mind and improper conduct.”  Homosexual acts are not in the way of human mating that Jesus describes that “in the beginning, God made them male and female… so the two could become one flesh.”  As to the conflict with the 1^st Commandment, it goes back to our identity of God as One who offered us the marvelous gift of procreation, or as Pope John Paul II described as “He invited us to be co-creators with God—a privilege of love and life—to be operating in our bodies with the fruitfulness of God Himself.”  Homosexual unions are fundamentally closed to the gift of life.  The Catechism says that they do not “proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complimentarily.”  Yet it sensitively adds, that for persons with “this inclination,…it constitutes for most of them a trial.  They must be respected with respect, compassion, and sensitivity… to God’s will in their lives.”

╬ As regards the Nature of Love, and some cooperation with God in family plans, the Bible first concentrates of the good of the married couple.  It asks for mutual submission.  “For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise, the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does.”  As 1 Cor. 7: 4 says:  Both are made for the other.   Pope John Paul II described this way into Holy Matrimony simply as “mutual self-giving.”   He called the submission of love as “an act of self-donation.”    Donations are free and generous by definition, aren’t they?   The next verse of St. Paul’s message says: “Do not refuse one another, except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you may devote yourself to prayer, but then come together again, lest Satan tempt you through lack of self-control.” These words above show, again, the connection of the 6^th Commandment with the 1^st One.  We live out our love covenant to others in a self-surrender, and the inspiration of this sacred approach to loving is found in our Love of God and worship of Him, along no other strange god in His place in us.  

╬ As we heard in our homilies today, we live in a culture with many sex-crazed strange gods and  idols of sensuality. As for Human Sexuality—God created it, Satan perverted it, we can reclaim it!   

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