Laws

The ten commandments were given to the people of Israel, redeemed from slavery in Egypt. Naively, I would think of these rules as indicating the people's side of the bargain. They were to obey God, but not in the sense of a servant doing the day-to-day bidding of a master or mistress, or a robot controlled by the transmitter in its creator's hand. The ten commandments were a framework, a broad set of rules, defining what it meant to be a citizen of the new dispensation.

We have moved on, haven't we? It would be difficult to summarise Jesus' attitude to the laws of the Old Testament. In one respect he made them even more difficult to follow, internalising their requirements. 'Thou shalt not kill', but you must not even harbour angry thoughts towards your brother. Elsewhere, though, he seems to relax their hold - the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

I think that I grew up believing that the ten commandments were absolute. Thousands of years old, perhaps, but still with an iron grip. I don't know, however, if that is the attitude of Christians to-day, or the church. I wonder if we can be inconsistent though - ignoring one commandment when it suits us, and trotting out another when we wish to make a judgement.