You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not entice or force away our neighbor's wife, workers, or animals, or turn them against him, but urge them to stay and do their duty.Click through to find the relevance of this commandment to our daily lives.
If you read last week's devotion on the Ninth Commandment you'll recall that the definition of covet means to appreciate things not for their intrinsic beauty, but only for what we could get out of them. Jealous desire for possession goes hand in hand with coveting, as the value of everything around us centers on ourselves when we bend our minds in this way.
While the Ninth Commandment talks about coveting possessions, the Tenth speaks of coveting people and relationships. Granted oxen and donkeys are mentioned in there but in this case its the relationship of service between the owner and the animal that's important. So, too, with the manservant and maidservant. We don't have those today but most of us have had some experience working underneath others and having people working underneath us. The "servant" part isn't the key, rather that healthy working relationship. It goes without saying that the spousal relationship follows this pattern as well.
The Tenth Commandment reminds us that faithful people nurture faithful and good relationships not just for themselves, but for others. Everybody who's ever been a teenager knows the temptation the commandment steers us around. Who among us did not wish, at one time or another, that some of our friends' parents were ours instead? The grass always looks greener, right? This commandment reminds us to be grateful for the good relationships we have and also to be grateful that other people have their own good relationships too. Our friends' parents were very good parents...for them. No matter what it looked like from the outside, we probably wouldn't have been as happy as we imagined if we had been able to actually make the switch we desired.
This is true of marriages, family relationships, and friendships too. Our job is to encourage people in bonded relationships to support each other. We're not to tempt them away. Neither are we to recruit family members to our side of an argument against someone else, inside the family or out. We're not supposed to be jealous that our Best Friend Forever also has other friends, nor are we to get mad at our friend or our other friend just because they have a nice relationship.
Continuing...we're not supposed to upstage our co-workers to get all the credit. We're not supposed to steal clients or other people's employees through unfair practices. We're not supposed to be mad when somebody else gets to sing the solo in choir and we don't. We're not supposed to hog all the attention from our parents at the expense of our siblings, nor dominate the time of our teachers at the expense of other students.
When someone comes before us questioning their path forward in life one of our first instincts should be advising them to honor the commitments they've made up to this point as long as they're honorable and healthy. Even if we'd get personal gain from them breaking those commitments we should not encourage them to make a change for the sake of that gain alone.
Most of all we are to remember that our strength and wholeness come from being in loving relationship with the God who saved us. With the security of that irrevocable relationship in hand there's no need to try to wheedle our way between other people to get more attention and fulfillment. Instead we can freely support relationships, appreciating them for their own merits, beauty, and goodness without worrying how to turn them towards our own ends.
Ask yourself this week whether you've been faithful not just to your own commitments, but in encouraging other people to keep theirs in love. Stop for a second and think how many times you view people only in terms of their worth to you ("She's just a grocery clerk") instead of viewing them as fellow Children of God worth supporting for their own sake. If you've engaged in some of the practices above--re-reading carefully the part about recruiting friends and family to your side of an argument and away from their bond with the person you're fighting with--then ask for forgiveness and let those people go! In all things encourage people to be good to each other and you will understand more of what this commandment means. You'll also experience the added benefit of creating a loving environment around you that extends far beyond just the people you're closest to. When you're able to do this everyone will enjoy knowing you and you'll receive even more love and attention than you would have apart from this commandment, trying to bend everybody to serve you instead of serving them.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
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