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Getting Back To the Foundation of the Ten Commandments

Thou Shalt Not Kill

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This Fr. Gerry Creedon homily was delivered at St. Charles on March 23, 2003

The readings this weekend are relevant to what is going on in our Church and in our world. The Gospel for the Third Sunday in Lent has to do with Jesus making a whip, coming into the temple and upsetting the apple cart, in this case the moneychangers' tables. He wanted to cleanse the temple, get the money out of the church and bring back prayer.

People have used that Gospel story to indicate that Jesus was not a pacifist: after all, He used a whip. This Gospel story is about the need in the Church, conventional religion, to be cleansed, purified, and renewed. That was not just a message for the Pharisees but a message for us today. Jesus was someone who wanted reform, purification, and cleansing. The church today is in a time of crisis for a variety of reasons, including the crisis on sex abuse. Underneath this challenge, our church has the opportunity for growth, change, and renewal.

Shaking Things Up To Be in Tune with God

The season of Lent is a season traditionally set aside for such cleansing, not just individual cleansing. We have community celebrations of reconciliation to emphasize the fact that renewal has to affect the whole church, its corporate structures, parishes, and diocesan institutions. We need to be reshaped.

That was the promise of John XXIII back in 1964 (Aggiornamento), bringing the church up to date. The move to shift things back the way they were isn't exactly what the Gospel is talking about. It's shaking it up so we can be in tune with the spirit of God. New wine does not need old wineskins.

Getting Back to the Ten Commandments

The first reading for today is the text that many of us want to get back to. Some people say that all this renewal and catechesis give us only Gospel stories and crayons. Whatever happened to the Ten Commandants that were the foundation the old penny catechism? The first reading, which relates Moses' Ten Commandments, has things to say to us, especially the simple injunction, "Thou Shalt Not Kill."

It is still relevant today. Politicians, moralists, and even churchmen have added a lot of red print and fine print to qualify "Thou Shalt Not Kill." When is killing justified? When is it the lesser of two evils? We have rushed in with our red ink to qualify the simple ordinance of the Lord. Maybe it is a good thing to get back to the Ten Commandments and to struggle with the simplicity of "Thou Shalt Not Kill."

During the continuous TV coverage of the war on Iraq, a woman called in to question a General by asking, "During your description of the Iraq operations, you had a smile on your face. Why were you smiling?" He answered, "Well, I am Irish. My parents came from Ireland and we deal with death in an unusual way." He had been in three different wars so he was immune. He could smile. She thought it was offensive.

In TV wars we see the smoke, we see the fire, we see the buildings, and we see the precision bombs. Do we have precision cameras to see what is exactly happening inside of those buildings? We know somewhere that war does involve killing. We're touched and we pray and we need to pray. "Blessed are those who mourn" and the war surely is a time for us to be in solidarity with all of the victims, American, British, or Iraqi.

The Church Condemns Killing

In the conduct of war, Bishop Gregory, who is the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, writes on March 19, 2003,

"Every effort must be made to ensure that efforts to reduce the risk to U.S. forces are limited by careful judgments of military necessity and the duty to respect the lives and dignity of Iraqi civilians, who have suffered so much already from war, repression, and a debilitating embargo."

Source: www.usccb.org/sdwp/peace/stm31903.htm

In other words, reducing the risk needs to be part of the moral conduct of a war. He added,

"In all our actions in war, including assessments of whether 'collateral damage' is proportionate, we must value the lives and livelihood of Iraqi civilians as we would the lives and livelihood of our own families and our own citizens."

We bring a sense of compassion to the human cost of all who are in harm's way.

It is not unpatriotic to remember our Pope's comments from January 13, 2003 where he joined the question of war and life. This is a Pope who has taken seriously those injunctions like "Thou Shalt Not Kill." He has spoken about the culture of death, a civilization of love and a consistent ethic of life. War is more than TV fireworks.

The Pope says,

"First, a yes to life. Respect life itself and individual lives: everything starts here, for the most fundamental of human rights is certainly the right to life. Abortion, euthanasia, and human cloning, for example, risk reducing the human person to a mere object life and death to order as it were. War itself is an attack on human life since it brings in its wake suffering and death. The battle for peace is always a battle for life."

So we are sensitive to the human cost for all involved in the struggle. We bring to the altar table today our own families who are separated by war and who especially experience the anxiety and stress of these days. We bring to our altar all who are affected by this action. We don't throw the cloak of respectability too easily over killings that happen in war. We believe in the sacred dignity of every human being on this planet. So we struggle and we pray. We do not delete the sections of the bible that are troublesome. "Thou Shalt Not Kill." Let's be more attentive to the bare, simple, human meaning of those words. Let's struggle with them and let's mourn.

Let us make our own the dream of the old soldiers from the First World War. Let us dare to believe as they did that this will be the war to end all wars.

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See also: Peace resources, including statements from the Pope and the US Bishops