Much has been written about the ten commandments this past summer! Even in Europe, from where I just returned, the controversy over the public display of the ten commandments in Alabama, was constantly on the airwaves. I thank that Alabama judge for the incredible and unexpected free advertisement for this 9 month series on the Ten Commandments--this first of our 1st Thursday gatherings.

Welcome to each and every one of you! It is great to have you here for another year as we patiently walk through the deserts of our own lives each month this year together. Not unlike Moses who first received the ten commandments in the desert of Sinai, you and I are here to receive the 10 commandments each month into our hearts and minds and hopefully in a new and helpful way . For even with the recent removal of that two ton public display from the courthouse in Alabama, there is no way the 10 commandments can be removed from our collective and individual memories as a people, as men and women of faith.

The 10 commandments are, after all, too much a fundamental part of our lives, our journeys, our ultimate freedom. They are another name for freedom. These 10 words, as they are often referred to, were written on every human heart as the universal moral law valid for every time and every place even before Moses received them from God on Mount Sinai. They can never be removed from our hearts nor can they be permanently removed from our collective memories regardless of our religion. The 10 commandments, after all, are the Word of God and God's Word can never disappear or be taken away from us with impunity.

I would like to begin this series of First Friday meditations with a text from Matthew's Gospel, a text found in all three of the synoptic gospels- Matthew, Mark and Luke, a text entitled the Rich Young Man. It is the same text used by our Holy Father 10 years ago at the beginning of his magna carta on the moral life, the encyclical letter entitled Veritatis Splendor, (On the Splendor of Truth) (VS) a text which has been a great inspiration to me in preparing these nine talks on the 10 commandments.

In that text, we read that "someone approached" Jesus and asked Him a question. We have no idea who that "someone" is. It could be you or I. No name is given. It is probably just as well. Put yourself in that scene right now. Try and ask Jesus the same question: "Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?" Is this even the kind of question you would raise today? When was the last time you thought about "eternal life?" Most of us are focused, perhaps unduly, on the pressing demands of the here and now with our time sheets, palm pilots, Covey-Franklin habits of successful time management skills ingrained in us, emails, voice mails and faxes.

And yet, the third question that most of us--born in the fifties and before, learned from the old Baltimore catechism (which is still valid today) was "Why did God make you?" The answer: "God made me to know him, love him , and serve him in this world , and to be happy with him forever in the next." St. Augustine teaches that our hearts are restless until they return to you for all eternity. So it is a good question, one worth contemplating in our "here and now world."

How does Jesus answer the question? He says directly: "There is only One who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments." He doesn't list rules and regulations, at least initially. No, He speaks of the good. "The good is belonging To God, obeying him, walking humbly with him in doing justice and in loving kindness." VS lI

Almost immediately, He then tells him to keep the commandments. As if to appropriate the Jewish law, Jesus enumerates the commandments in summary form and makes them His own--you shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness, honor your father and your mother; love your neighbor as yourself. When the rich young man told Jesus he had done all of that, Jesus told him to live the love command in its most radical form--go sell what you have and give to the poor. The commandments "are the first necessary step on the journey towards freedom, its starting-point. 'The beginning of freedom,' St. Augustine writes, 'is to be free from crimes...such as murder, adultery, fornication, theft, fraud, sacrilege and so forth. When once one is without these crimes (and every Christian should be without them), one begins to lift up one's head towards freedom. But this is only the beginning of freedom, not perfect freedom....'" VS 13

Only then did Jesus say: "Then, come, follow me."

I learned from that encyclical a most significant lesson which Jesus was trying to teach the rich young man in the text from Matthew 19. The moral life for a Christian is not simply about rules and regulations as important and indeed essential that the 10 commandments are. Fundamentally, however, the moral life is about life in Christ Jesus, about following Him and living in Him which is made possible first of all because of our baptism into Him and from all the graces that flow from Him, from the sacraments, from our prayer, from our lives of service. VS ll No mere human effort alone succeeds in our fulfilling the law no matter how hard we try. "This 'fulfillment can come only from a gift of God : the offer of a share in the divine Goodness revealed and communicated in Jesus. ...What the young man now perhaps only dimly perceives will in the end be fully revealed by Jesus himself in the invitation: 'Come, follow me.'" VS ll This is the key to understanding how these commandments speak to us in our day and how they should be a part of our lives as followers of Jesus Christ.

The 10 commandments, the 10 words, give us guidance, make it possible for us to know the Truth as He gives the Truth to us. And Jesus teaches us that "the truth will set you free." (Jn 8:32) In His very Person, Jesus is the Splendor of Truth. And Jesus came not to destroy the law, the law of Moses but to fulfill the law. He fulfilled the law precisely in and through His very person. In His dying, rising, and sending the Holy Spirit, He sends His life to us and His love. He pours His love in us by the power of the Holy Spirit which enables us to live as He teaches us. We discover Him, the Truth, through faith and reason, but fundamentally the end of our search is a Person, not an ideology or simply a set of rules and regulations. Jesus is another name for the Truth, for the Truth about God and the Truth about the human person and the truth will set us free.

The Christian life is thus about a love affair with the Person Jesus. The rules and regulations of that relationship are a part of a covenant first given to the Jewish people in the ten commandments (or Decalogue) on Sinai, a covenant relationship, which set them free from their oppressors, and gave them a new way of living. One writer said it this way: "The giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, one of the most earth-shattering experiences in the entire Bible, fused a rag-tag collection of fleeing former slaves into a people and spawned a moral system that undergirds Western civilization. So important is the Decalogue that it is recorded twice:once at the beginning of the Israelites' journey in the desert (Ex 20:1-17) and again just before their entry into Canaan.(Deut 5: 6-21)" All the more did Christ give you and me a new way of living and loving in and through Him and our daily relationship with Him. In Baptism, you and I were freed from the slavery and inheritance of sin and made sharers in His life, a life destined for life eternal.

In this series on the ten commandments, I will follow a three-pronged approach for each commandment. For those of you who went to law school or any professional school, the methodology of a three pronged approach is certainly not foreign to you.

With each commandment, and next month we will cover the first and second, I will focus on three aspects of each commandment.

First--the Israelite (Hebrew) understanding of the commandment in question. Through a description of the text, we will examine how the commandment speaks to them.

Second---what effect did the Christ event, if any, have on the commandment in question. How did Christ "fulfill" it? The Sermon on the Mount will be helpful here. For example, the 5th commandment states: "You shall not kill." What Jesus says is that "everyone who grows angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment." There are many other examples.

Third--some practical and pastoral implications of each commandment in our lives today. The new catechism and a book by Fr. Alfred McBride O.Praem. entitled, The Ten Commandments (Sounds of Love from Sinai), will assist us here.

Now what do we hope these nine meditations will accomplish? I have four points.

l.) To come to know the commandments and their implications for us.

Since most of us learned the 10 commandments (Decalogue) when we were children, the tendency may be for us to remember them simply through the eyes and ears of children. Normally we think of two tablets--the first three commandments concerning love of God and the second seven involving love of neighbor. I will not embarrass anyone today by asking him/her to recite from memory either tablets of the 10 commandments.

Certainly for those of you who grew up since the Supreme Court decision in 1980, Stone v. Graham, you have not been able to read them on the wall of public schools. You do know the number ten as you know there are 12 apostles, 7 dwarfs, 8 beatitudes, 9 fruits of the holy Spirit, 7 habits of highly effective people. Did you know that the biblical basis of the 10 commandments is found in two places in the Old Testament? They are based in Deut 5 (generally thought to be the later text)--Mt. Horeb--right before entry into the promised land AND Exodus 20--Mt. Sinai--in the desert ( a three hour climb at 2 a.m. which many of us made a number of years ago when we were in the Holy Land). We will be helped by part three of the catechism of the Catholic Church were there exists an excellent explanation of each of the commandments. Finally, Fr. McBride lists them as 10 values--a helpful way to understand them. He writes "One by one, you will see how God's ten affectionate words liberate us for: l.)faith, 2.) holiness, 3.)gratitude, 4.) care, 5.) life, 6.) fidelity, 7.) honesty, 8.) truth, 9) purity and 10.) generosity.

2.) To understand that, for Christians, the 10 commandments are not abolished. Moreover, we are empowered to live them in a new way.

This is the most important lesson from Mt 19. We are invited to rediscover the law in the person of Jesus Christ who is the perfect fulfillment of the law. "Do not think I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have come, not to abolish them, but to fulfill them." (Mt 5:17) It will become clear that Jesus, while underscoring love as the principal commandment, built upon and expanded what Moses was given on Mt. Sinai.

Our Holy Father made this point so beautifully in the Sinai desert on February 26, 200l, during his last visit to the Holy Land. It was there at the orthodox monastery of St. Catherine at the foot of Mt. Sinai--a monastery which includes a magnificent mosaic of the Transfiguration--that he presided over a Liturgy of the Word with texts of the Exodus and St. Mark's account of the Transfiguration. It was there at the foot of Sinai that he said: "Sinai finds its fulfillment on another mountain, the mountain of the Transfiguration, Mt Tabor, where Jesus appears to his Apostles shining with the glory of God. Moses and Elijah stand with him to testify that the fulfillment of God's revelation is found in the glorified Christ." And in the spirit of the glorified Christ, you and I are empowered to live the commandments in a new way.

Continuing in that homily, the Pope says: "So when St. Paul writes that we 'have died to the law through the body of Christ' (Rom 7:4), he does not mean that the Law of Sinai is past. He means that the Ten Commandments now make themselves heard through the voice of the Beloved Son. The person delivered (you and me) by Jesus Christ into true freedom is aware of being bound not externally by a multitude of prescriptions, but internally by the love which has taken hold in the deepest recesses of his heart. The Ten Commandments are the law of freedom: not the freedom to follow our blind passions, but the freedom to love, to choose what is good in every situation, even when to do so is a burden. It is not an impersonal law that we obey; what is required is loving surrender to the Father through Christ Jesus in the Holy Spirit. In revealing himself on the Mountain and giving his Law, God revealed man to man himself. Sinai stands at the very heart of the truth about man and his destiny."

The preacher of the Papal Household, Father Raniero Cantalamessa, in his book, Life in Christ, writes perceptively that: "St. John says that 'the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ'. If we apply this today to ourselves in the Church, it means that man can make the law and founders can make rules of life, but only Jesus Christ, with his Spirit, can give the strength to live them." (p.130)

Precisely, the figure of the glorified Christ on Mt. Tabor, in the Transfiguration account, reminds us that only in Christ, who died and rose for us, is it possible the commandments, given on Mt. Sinai, can be lived. This is what Pope John Paul means when he says that Tabor fulfills Sinai. To imitate and live out the love of Christ is thus not possible by our strength alone. This is the good news of the gospel. We become able to live out the commandments, in a new way, by the virtue of the love of God poured into our hearts. The new law is not content to say what we must do. It gives us the power to do what is true and right. This is what is new about the Good News of the Gospel, what Jesus came to give us. This is a word of great hope for us who are called to live the commandments as the basis of our lives and as our hope for eternal life.

3.) To come to see that in responding in love in following the commandments is how we follow Christ.

"The way we may be sure that we know him is to keep his commandments. Whoever says, 'I know him,' but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word, the love of God is truly perfected in him. This is the way we may know that we are in union with him; whoever claims to abide in him ought to live just as he lived." (l John 2: 3-6)

"Follow me." That is the most important invitation of Christ to us as it was to the rich young man. Scripture says he went away sad because he had many possessions. My hope is that each of us will go away, day in and day out, happy. We do this when we seek to follow the commandments. In other words, it is the actual attempt to live the commandments, in doing what we are asked to do, (with God's help) that we come into relationship with God, that we come to know and love Him. This profound awareness has had an incredible effect on my spiritual journey. I hope you will experience the same point that in one's effort to follow the commandments, precisely in that effort do we come in contact with the living God and His deep and abiding love for us. "If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in his love." (John 15: 10)

4.) A basis for our daily examination of conscience.

Hopefully, a deepened study of the commandments will help us in the on-going challenge to form our consciences and give us a deeper spiritual freedom which results from confessing our sins regularly and living the love commands of our Lord.

I wish to end with this quote from Second Corinthians which summarizes the difference between the Old and New Testaments and helps us to see how in Christ the commandments presented to the rich young man and you and me, are truly another name for freedom-- "To this very day, when the old covenant is read the veil remains unlifted; it is only in Christ that it is taken away. Even now, when Moses is read a veil covers their understanding. 'But whenever he turns to the Lord, the veil will be removed.'The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. All of us, gazing on the Lord's glory with unveiled faces, are being transformed from glory to glory into his very image by the Lord who is the Spirit." (2 Cor 3: 15-18)

Finally, this is my prayer for each of us this year-- to be in touch with the Holy Spirit in our lives, the spirit of love, to seek the energy to live the commandments of God with a renewed sense of love, to ask the Holy Spirit to teach us the Father's real intention in each of the commandments and to come to study and know the commandments and their implications in our daily lives more and more. Amen