The Innocence of God: On the Third Commandment
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In the 19th century, it was common for American southerners to justify slavery by saying that it was approved of by the Bible and by God. In exactly the way James so beautifully described in his homily, this was a violation of the commandment to not take God’s name in vain. Because it’s a manipulation of the truth, which is that the Bible does not explicitly allow or disallow slavery – it assumes slavery. And there were Biblical laws protecting the rights of slaves that did not exist in the American south. For example, Biblical law forbids forcibly returning a slave who has run away, while this was ruled legal here with the Dred Scott decision in 1857. And yet this idea of the Bible condoning slavery was used to great effect. And so God and the Biblical tradition got associated with something evil.
In the actual Biblical tradition, this is considered unforgivable. The second half of the Biblical commandment to not take God’s name in vain says, “for God will not acquit a person who takes God’s name in vain.” It doesn’t say anything like that about murdering. It doesn’t say that about stealing or committing adultery. It doesn’t say that about any of the other nine commandments. It seems that, to the Biblical author, there’s something particularly unforgiveable about violating this particular commandment. As if this is the one that God takes personally. Violations of any of the other commandments merely reflect badly on the human who did it. This one, when violated, reflects badly on God. This one is about God’s reputation.
The word “take” in “take God’s name in vain” is a translation of the Hebrew verb nasa. A better translation may be to “pick up and carry off.” It was used in transactions in the ancient Near East to indicate the sealing of a deal. When you buy something and pay for it, it’s the moment that you nasa – pick it up to carry it away – that the deal is final. It connotes ownership. So in the case of this commandment, there’s a sense of picking up and carrying away God’s name. Claiming ownership; appropriating it.
The term “in vain” is another key term here. The Hebrew word is lashav, which means without meaning, outside of its proper meaning, common or unimportant, or without the sanctity that should be there. So we could rewrite the commandment: Do not appropriate God’s name in a way that nullifies the sanctity that should be there. Because God’s reputation is at stake. It’s a kind of libel. So then the question becomes – why not? So what if God’s reputation as a good and loving and just God gets tarnished? What happens then?
People lose faith. Not only the perpetrator, but everyone around them. Faith gets injured when the concept of God gets used opportunistically to justify evil acts. Faith gets injured when religious institutions or representatives of God act badly themselves. Extreme examples of this abound. LGBT people have become alienated from religious life in this country because of the supposedly Biblically-based claims about the sinfulness of their relationships. Muslims describe fleeing Islam because of the association with terrorism in God’s name. Jewish women have become alienated from the persistent image of an angry, patriarchal God, named with masculine pronouns.
And the Catholic Church, in the clearest example of all, has been hemorrhaging members since the child sex abuse scandals emerged. That the abuse was so pervasive and systematically concealed and that the perpetrators were God’s representatives (called “Father” in a tradition that calls God “Father”) has been soul crushing to Catholics around the world. Painful, even traumatic. Because in most of these cases, the defamation of God’s character does not just alienate the believer from the person or institution that did it, but from God itself. Our notions of God are intimately interwoven with the people and institutions that teach about God. It’s hard for anyone to disentangle them.
Ironically, Unitarian Universalism has benefitted from the violations of this commandment. So many of our members across the country were alienated from their faith and their birth religions when they were told that, for example, their favorite uncle was going to hell because he had not accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. I hear versions of this story almost every day. Many of them were exposed to institutions and religious leaders that pinned on God their own bigotry and small-mindedness. And this exposure was toxic. It was toxic to their faith, toxic to their lives in general. And so they left religion, often painfully disillusioned. To this day, even if they found Unitarian Universalism long ago, such people can be deeply suspicious of the idea of God or anything that sounds too “religious.” They still suffer from what is sometimes called Post Traumatic God Disorder.
What if you’re an atheist and there’s nothing at stake for you in whether people do or don’t have faith in God? Or you’re Richard Dawkins and you’d actually prefer if they didn’t? Then what meaning could this commandment possibly have? In this case, we need to go back and look at the concept of the name of God. “Do not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” What is the name in question? To understand this, we have to look at the preamble to the Ten Commandments. (We talked about this in the fall.) In this preamble God identifies Godself, saying “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.”
The word “Lord” in that sentence is just a placeholder for the name of God that’s actually written there, spelled YHWH. And it’s the same thing in the commandment about taking “the Lord’s” name in vain. The text actually says the Hebrew equivalent of the letters YHWH. You’re never supposed to try to pronounce that word because pronouncing it would limit it; make it finite. It’s the biggest word in the world. When you think about it, you really can’t pronounce it. Some people try to say “Yahweh,” but that’s really not it. It really is just four consonants together. YHWH. It’s all air and breath. This is considered the most sacred name of God. And it’s not even a name, it’s a form of the verb “to be,” like “I am becoming” or simply “I am.” That’s what you’re supposed to not take in vain. It’s a word that signifies the ground of being itself.
When you say, “that’s just the way it is,” the it that you’re talking about is that very same ground of being: existence, life, nature, human nature, reality. So we could re-write the commandment: “Do not appropriate the concept of ‘reality’ in a way that nullifies the sanctity that should be there. Because the reputation of life itself is at stake.” When someone wants to know how this world works, don’t project onto it your own prejudices; don’t claim that something painful or oppressive is just “the way it is.”
We do this all the time: “Boys will be boys” or “there will always be war” or “people will always act in their own economic self interest.” We throw up our hands and say, “well you have to lie and cheat and steal because that’s the way the world is.” The “is-ness” of the world is in question here. Is the world really like that or are you appropriating, claiming ownership of this concept of how the world is opportunistically in order to justify your actions, nullifying the sanctity that should be there?
A perfect example of this right now is the pro-gun lobby in this country. This lobby can only still exist post-Sandy Hook because of an argument that violates this commandment: “It’s nature, human nature to be violent. You’re always going to have people who want to shoot up a school and find some way to do it. So best to be realistic (realistic meaning “of or related to reality”) and arm everyone. So folks can fight back. Because that’s just how reality is.”
This is a defamation of the character of reality; taking the concept of reality in vain; appropriating it for one’s own purposes; ruining reality’s reputation. And what happens when you do this? What happens when the massacre of children is not enough to get any significant movement on gun control? What happens when we are told that it’s because we have to defend ourselves in an inherently violent world? What happens when we’re told that poverty and inequality are just part of the nature of life? What happens when we are told that corporations will never become responsible stewards of the environment because executives are always going to look out for number one and make money first and foremost? What happens?
People lose faith. People lose faith that anything can ever change. People lose faith in the world as a good and beautiful place. They come to feel unsafe, unable to be embraced by the universe. Or maybe, because this kind of libel against life is so commonplace, they never had the chance to gain faith to begin with.
What if we instead replied that that’s not the way the world is, that’s the way you’re making it through your actions? What if we said that when someone shoots up a school, that’s a distortion, not the expression of human nature? What if we said that our destruction of the environment is not because of our inherent selfishness but because of a shortsightedness that can be corrected with a better prescription? What if we stopped pinning injustice and oppression on “reality” and instead took responsibility for it ourselves? What if we actually defended the innocence of God and life itself from defamation?
Then I think we would live in a world where God could be God and life could be life and the sanctity of those ideas – the inherent goodness and beauty of the universe – could shine among us. We would take every opportunity to proclaim that the nature of the universe as we Unitarian Universalists know it is that of oneness and love. By keeping the commandment to protect the holiness of the ultimate, we would spread joy, not mistrust; safety, not peril. We would care for each other in this way – giving hope where hope is often hard to find.
