The Sixth
Commandment of the Decalogue states “Thou shalt not kill.” Most people have
understood this not to be purely pacifistic (as other parts of the Law, and the
Old Testament itself, contradict this interpretation), but rather more like “You
shall not murder,” which is
definitely more distinct for our society (they would not have been confused).
So how can we
keep the commandment not to murder? “Easy,” you might say, “Don’t kill anyone!”
And that seems obvious enough. And it is true. However, that is not all there
is. Why is it wrong to take a life impermissibly? Well, because, you are not permitted to do it! That is true but
altogether unhelpful. Why is it that it is impermissible?
Jesus gives us a
clue in the Sermon on the Mount, when he says if someone has hated his brother
in his heart, he has violated the Sixth Commandment. This always struck me as
austere. Is it really the same thing if I get unduly upset with my brother or
if I stab him to death? This interpretation results in people saying things
like, “If you hate your brother, you might as well go ahead and kill him!” This
is wrong for two reasons. First, killing him would be an additional wrong, not the same instance of wrong, so at the very
least there would be more sin in acting on the intention than merely the
intention itself. Second, it genuinely seems worse to kill someone in action
than in the mind. Note, I’m not saying it’s permissible.
But how then can
we reconcile this? I think we reconcile our moral intuitions with the teaching
of Jesus by understanding why the prohibition in the Sixth Commandment was
made. Human beings are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26, 2:7). There is no
higher being that could ever be other than God; to the extent we reflect him,
then, we are in that sense priceless. Thus, to kill a fellow human unjustly is
to disregard the image of God in him, and thus is an affront to God himself
(after all, what is rejected in image is a rejection of the one behind the
image [to burn something in effigy is nothing else but to wish harm upon the
one being caricatured; so to despise the image of God is nothing else but to
despise God himself]). If we agree that God is the most holy, and he alone is
to be worshipped and not supplanted, then the image of God in all human beings
must be respected.
But this means
that you cannot hate in your heart your fellow man. Why? Because that too fails
to recognize the image of God in man (or worse, explicitly despises it) and
thus does violence to the sacredness of God. Thus, whenever you hate your brother
in your heart, you are despising the One who created him. So we can see a
positive command in the prohibition: love the Lord your God with all your
heart, soul, mind, and strength (sound familiar? This is linked to the First
Commandment, and is called the greatest by Jesus!). Another implication: we are
to respect all of our fellow human beings as created in the image of God, not
just in word but in thought and deed. It can be expressed like this: Love your
neighbor as yourself (sound familiar? Jesus taught this as the second-greatest
commandment. Both of these can also be found in Deuteronomy 6). Thus, the Sixth
Commandment is intricately involved with the issues of human life: worship
toward God and love toward man.
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