27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
~Exodus 20:17
 
But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.’
~Matthew 21:38
 
The last five of the Ten Commandments are ultimately about desire. Do not kill; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not witness falsely. These are different from the tenth only in length and in terms of the object. In place of an act, the last prohibits a desire. It is as if the shapers of the list started enumerating acts of violence and realized the list could go on forever, so turned to the root of these actions.
 
Desire.
 
We tend to desire what our neighbor has or what our neighbor desires. We also don’t like to really talk about this! Rivalry, in other words, exists at the very heart of human social relationships—even if we prefer not to dwell on it. And this rivalry lies at the root of our violence toward one another (cf. commandments 6-9) introducing fragility into human relations. There is an important paradox in this rivalry in that the antagonism that arises from it leads to imitation—to the competing for the same thing, behaving in similar ways. This can swing both ways, of course. The record is pretty clear about our capacity to return violence with violence. But goodness, gentleness, forgiveness, peace can also build up a head of steam.
 
The apostle Paul intuits in Philippians (3:10-11) that Jesus also invites imitation: “ I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”
 
But Jesus wants us to imitate his desire to become the perfect image of God. He wants us to imitate his imitating of his Abba. In contrast to all the gurus and influencers who want us to imitate them, neither the Parent nor the Son desires greedily or egotistically. God gives graciously—without keeping a ledger. God lets the weeds grow along with the wheat until the harvest. This kind of desiring may just be the only kind that leads us to peace.
 
Enter into worship.
 
Readings: Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20 † Psalm 19 † Philippians 3:4b-14 † Matthew 21:33-46
 
About the Art: Haring, Keith. Ten Commandments, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt University Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://act.library.vanderbilt.edu/artworks/58898 [retrieved September 22, 2026]. Original source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/90155419@N00/3108432455/.
 
Keith Haring's series of works entitled The Ten Commandments. The exhibition took place from September 1 to November 17, 1996, at the Museum Fridericianum and the Alte Brüderkirche in Kassel, Germany. The Ten Commandments series, created in 1985, consists of ten large, seven-meter-high panels. Haring painted these works for his first solo museum exhibition, at the CAPC in Bordeaux, France.

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