A MOVIE TO REMEMBER

NOVEMBER 26, 2006

Paramount Movie Studios recently released a 50th anniversary DVD edition of Cecil B. DeMille's classic, The Ten Commandments. It is reportedly the fifth most profitable movie of all time, if ticket prices are adjusted for inflation. When the movie came out in 1956, the price of admission was fifty cents. Yet, the movie grossed over $65 million dollars. That’s about $838 million dollars in today’s money.
It is conceivable that if the movie were re-released in theaters today, enough people would go to see it to cause it to move up in the rankings. This is in spite of the fact that the movie is long, moves at a slow pace, has few “action scenes”, and uses special effects that look amateurish today. Should anyone doubt the power of religious themes like The Ten Commandments to attract moviegoers today, they need only recall the immense popularity of Mel Gibson’s recent The Passion of the Christ.
Why was The Ten Commandments so popular? Because, in spite of the secularized version of America served up by today’s movie and TV studios, we remain a deeply religious people. The Ten Commandments matters because it tells us who we are at the deepest core of our identity – people whom God has chosen and saved, and with whom he has entered into an everlasting covenant.
Liberation from slavery was virtually impossible in the ancient world. Yet it happened to the ancient Israelites, and not by their own cunning or daring, but by God’s mighty hand. The covenant God established with this people was a covenant of love. The Ten Commandments were the terms of the Covenant.
This point is so often forgotten: in giving the Israelites (and us) the Ten Commandments, God was simply not imposing his will or subjugating the Israelites. No, he was showing them what kind of covenant he wanted, and what kind of covenant people. The Ten Commandments teach the demands of respect and love. They reveal what really matters to God, and what, therefore, should really matter to us. They open our minds to what it really means to be human.
Without the Ten Commandments, we would not know how God wants us to show allegiance, devotion, and gratitude. We might have guessed wrongly, for example, that he wanted us to offer human sacrifices, or kill others as infidels, or build a pyramid in his honor.
But no, what God wanted was goodness. He wanted people to live and act in conformity with the way he had created them – in his own image and likeness.
To watch the movie The Ten Commandments, and see the Israelites living under pharaoh’s whip, is to remember the fundamental human condition of slavery in sin into which we were born. It is to remember we cannot be free without God’s help, which we must seek and on which we must learn to depend. Nor can we be free without letting God guide us, just as the Israelites had to do during their forty-year sojourn in the desert. It is to remember that God has called us all to a covenant with him, and that he is ever faithful. It is to remember our origin and destiny, the meaning of life, and what is required to live a human life.
Pharaoh, in his pride, refused to heed the voice of God, speaking through Moses, and as a result he and his people suffered plagues and the loss of his military strength when his charioteers were drowning in the Red Sea. The lesson should not be lost on us today in our secular society that shuts the voice of religious leadership and the authority of the moral law out of the public square, where the laws are established under which we must live.
The lesson is that when we do not subject ourselves to God’s authority, we will soon attempt to subject others to our own authority, attempting to carry out God’s role in our life. Let us embrace God’s authority in our lives, so that we may live in freedom, enjoying even now delight in the joys of heaven, our land of milk and honey.


+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 05-Jun-2008 9:48 sitemap