The Commandments Part 2

EWTN Global Catholic Radio and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Shin. This 50-part series was recorded on photograph records in the 1960s and the sound quality is sometimes limited. But the word of God spoken by Archbishop Shin is timeless. And now here is Archbishop Fulton Shin. Peace be to you. Intweeting the commandment that was said that the first three treat of our duties to God and the last six of our duties to neighbor. In between the two is the fourth commandment, which is honor thy father and thy mother. This commandment has been placed in between the two because it is a bond between both God and neighbor. The justice that we owe our parents is very close to the justice that we owe to God. And it is also related to the justice we owe our neighbor. After God it was our parents who gave us life. And this fourth commandment, therefore is the commandment which not only links the two, but which also provides best of all for the future of our civilization. Napoleon was once asked when does the education of a child begin? And the answer 20 years before the child is born in the education of the mother. There is much truth to this because the parents take the place of God in the home. The child is so much clay in the hands of the parent. And how that child is molded will decide the future of it. When God gave to the parents the child, he made a crown for that child in heaven, and were be to the parents who do not fulfill the high destiny and vocation of that child. Hence one of the greatest dangers facing children can be the example of their parents. The frequency begins at home. Parental delinquency becomes juvenile delinquency. And the divine law, therefore regarding the two, has been clearly put in sacred scripture. There is a double relationship. In the epistle of the Colossians we read first of all of the relationship the children should have to parents. Then later on the relation that parents have to children. First of all children in relationship to parents. Children must be obedient to their parents in every way. It is a gracious sign of serving the Lord. In other words it is accounted as obey God himself. Now the parents in relationship to children. And you parents must not row your children to resentment, or you will break their spirits. You must therefore be that gentleness that characterizes the mercy of God toward us. What a beautiful lesson of obedience is given to us in the divine child of Nazareth. There is no evidence that he ever gave to Mary and Joseph just a nominal right to command. After the scripture says, he lives there in subjection to them. Imagine God's subject to man. God before whom the angels and principalities and powers crumble is subject to Mary and to Joseph for Mary's sake. There are the two great miracles of humility and exaltation. The God-man obeying a woman and the woman commanding the God-man. Very fact that he became subject to her and doused her with power. And that obedience lasted for thirty years. By this wrong span of voluntary obedience he revealed that the fourth commandment is the bedrock of family life. In a larger way, how else could the primal scene of disobedience against God be undone, except by the obedience in the flesh of the very God who was once defied? He was Joseph who said, I will not obey and even caught up that echo. Down the ages it's inflection traveled, warming its way into the nook and crevices of every family where there was gathered a father and mother and a child. Here is something to remember. As parents surrender their legitimate authority and primary responsibility to their children, the state begins to take over. When the parents no longer bring up their children in the love and fear of God, and the children they come through an hour to the liquids, then the state takes over the home and takes over the children. That is why obedience in the home is the foundation of obedience in the commonwealth, or in each instance, conscience submits to a trustee of God's authority. If it be true that the world has lost its respect for authority, it is only because it has lost its first in the home. And as we said before, as the home loses its authority, then the state begins to become tyrannical. There was a bond established between the home and the state. It was democracy that put man on a pedestal. It was feminism that put woman on a pedestal. But neither democracy nor feminism can live a generation. Unless the child is first put on a pedestal and such is the significance of Nazareth. How our Lord warned too about caring for the child. Does he put it? And if anyone hurts the conscience of one of these little ones that believe in me, he had better have been drowned in the depths of the sea with a millstone hung about his neck. It is not to be thought, however, that obedience in the home does not include every other kind of obedience. That commandment embraces what is known as the virtue of pieta or piety, and it involves family and neighbor and the state. All authority comes from God. And this commandment obliges us to obey. To remember when Pilate boasted that he had power to condemn our blessed Lord, our Lord said that he would not have the power unless it came to him from above. So Scripture tells us, every soul must be submissive to its lawful suburb. The authority comes from God only. And all authorities that hold sway are of God's ordinance. It is very beautiful to realize that both St. Paul and St. Peter asked for obedience to civil rulers, even though the civil ruler was nearer, we'll put them both today. We will also find that those who love God are always the great pain we have. Whenever there begins to be a decline of patriotism in the country, there was always a decline of belief in God. That brings us now to the other commandments, the fifth to the tenth. Our blessed Lord said that we were to love our neighbor as ourselves. Now how do we love ourselves? Well we love ourselves very much. We enter into a room. We look for the best chair. We do not buy the clothes that will look most unattractive upon us. We choose desserts with considerable discretion in regard to taste. In fact, we love ourselves very much. But there are also some things we do not like about ourselves. We do not hate ourselves when we are bourgeois and loud and insulting to others or make excessive demands upon our neighbor, or when we tell on fruits that hurt our friends. You see, therefore, we can love ourselves and hate ourselves. What is it that we love in ourselves? Therefore we love what is good in ourselves and we hate what is bad in ourselves. Applying that to our neighbor, we love what is good in them and we hate what is sinful in them. So we love the sinner and we hate the sin. We love the neighbor as a spiritual self, but we do not necessarily love him as a carnal self. Our blessed Lord, therefore, tied together, loveth himself and loveth neighbor and loveth ourselves. There could therefore be two great errors. One is to love God without loving our neighbor and the other would be to love our neighbor without loving God. We are often invited to take part in brotherhood weeks, brotherhood causes. As much talk as the brotherhood of man, all that is very good and true, but how can we be brothers unless we have a common father? To leave the fatherhood of God out of the brotherhood of man is to make us all a race of illegitimate children. The love of neighbor is not to be standardized solely upon our love of ourselves, but rather upon the way that our Lord has loved us. And that is the way He put it. This is my commandment that you should love one another as I have loved you. But who is my neighbor? The one who lives next door? Probably, particularly if he be an enemy. In the power of the good Samaritan, it was not the one who lives next door, but the one who as far as the way that turned out to be the neighbor. We can never tell an advance who is our neighbor. I just to say the neighbor involved in love your neighbor. The neighbor can be a friend, just as our blessed Lord was a friend of Lazarus, and the neighbor could be an enemy. As was the case of the man who was injured on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, the neighbor is the one who was in need. As regards interior esteem, interior value, the saints certainly have more of our esteem than do sinners. But on his earth charity must be guided by the greatness of misery, first spiritual misery than corporal. If there are two who are in misery and both are equally needy, then we can give to the one who is closest to us either by blood or by friendship. We said that the neighbor can also be the enemy. And our blessed Lord gave us this counsel, but I tell you, love your enemies. You good to those who hate you. Pray for those who persecute at himself, you. Love of enemies is actually the touchstone to prove whether or not our love is truly divine. And our blessed Lord said that before we bring a gift to him that they offer, we should go and be reconciled to our brother. Does any conflict between us? And our Lord did not say, if you have something against your brother, your brother said, if your brother has something against you. Now how can we be related to our neighbor? Now by mind, by body, and then as regards things, first of all our mind, we can be bound up with our neighbor and our thoughts, desires, resolutions, the way we speak to them, the way we listen to them. And we can be related to our neighbor and body. We may work with them, we may work for them, and then too there can be pleasure as regards the communication of body with body. Finally, we can be bound to our neighbor's regards things, money, land, and property, the whole economic order. We are taking these three mind, body, and mind because they are or other things, because they are the sources when they are disordered and perverted. Of the three major kinds of sin, pride, which refers to the mind, lost to impurity, which refers to the body, and finally, abyss, which refers to things. Now let us take up our relationship to the neighbor as regards our thoughts or mind. Here we deal with temptations because they are holy in the mind. There are three elements to temptations. Suggestions, delight, consent. You cannot sin in your mind until there is consent. The consent comes from the will, not from the feeling. First the suggestion may come from the eye, the ear, the memory of the imagination. A suggestion to sin just as Eve was tempted by the word of Satan. And secondly, there can be delight, and that can even be physical. We can feel the repercussion of the thought in our body. It does not make any difference how long that feeling may endure. There is no sin until. There is consent. I will to consent to that thought, or I will not to consent to it. We are not there for to think that we are bad simply because we are tempted. We are tempted because we are human. It is only the consent which is wrong. Now our relationship is regards the mind who our neighbor obliges us therefore to speak the truth and why the truth? Well simply because no other moral virtue can grow up without it. And furthermore because of the sacrament of confirmation we receive the spirit of truth. And also because the membership of the mystical body becomes more intimate. The saint Paul tells us when we are bound together by truth. And the reason we are asked therefore to be truthful is simply because the whole incarnation is truth. Remember that the word became flesh. In other words the inner word or the thought of God became flesh became externalized. And so too is the sun as the image of the father. So what I say externally or with my lips must be the image of what is in my mind internally. The word became flesh and welcome amongst us. Therefore all sins against truth are forbidden like lying and boasting, defaming, character, injuring and others, good name, rash, judgment, falsely accusing others, denying our faith even under persecution, hypocrisy. And then even resolving to do something that is evil even when we are unable to carry it out. Everyone can commit murder by thinking about it. Resolving to do it even though the thought never passes into act. That is why the commandments say thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's life, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods. Our blessed Lord said any man looking after a woman and lusting after her, half already committed adultery with her in his own heart. See the church does not wait, or rather our blessed Lord does not wait until a thought passes out into act. He is not interested just in hygiene. He keeps clean all of the motivation to action. For all of the little rivers that run into the ocean are kept clean and the ocean itself will be kept clean. Next we come to the body. Our body and also the bodies of others. Now the reason the body is deserving of respect is because, well, in the natural order, it is bound with the soul to constitute a person and in the supernatural order. It becomes the temple of God because we are in the state of grace. So St. Crescripture says to us, I appealed to you by God's mercies to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, consecrated to God and worthy of his acceptance. I believe that we already said before very often people who go in for excessive luxury of body are very often naked on the inside. And more the solar is clothed with virtue, the less need there is of external display. So we have to take care of our body and we do so not just for biological reasons, but we do it in order to better maintain our spiritual moral life. Now this does not mean the sickness is incompatible with holiness, it is not. We have to take care of our sickness, diminish our temptation, unite that with the passion of our Lord and it assures us also the promise of glory if we suffer in His name. We have to remember that everything in the mind can be also in the soul, not only on the mind but also on the body. Therefore as regards our own body there will be no sexting as taking our own life because that belongs to God or a woman there will be no sexting as abortion, there will be no taking the lives of uncurable persons, there will be no evil thoughts or desires against the neighbor and be no solitary sins, no drunkenness, no other sins against the body which you will find mentioned in the prayer book and as there will be no sins against our own body so not against the body of the neighbor like murder, abortion, adultery and the prevention of the fruit of love. Finally we are related to our neighbor by things. Private property is the external guarantee of human freedom. The right to property is personal but the use of property is social. Hence we are bound to our neighbor and charity to give arms, the superfluities of the rich are the necessities of the poor. Unless it lured that I was sick and you visited me, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink. There will therefore be also, as regards things great charity, particularly to the missions of the church in pagan lands. As the Holy Father said, this is the charity that surpasses all other charities as heaven earth and eternity time. All sins therefore is regarded. Everything sins will be avoided, there will be no stealing. If there be stealing, there will be the restitution of what was stolen. If we do not know the person from whom something was stolen, then we will give a similar amount to charity. We will repair for unjust damage. We will give a full work for a day's pay. There will be the payment by employers of a living wage. There will be no cheating, no cutting of corners. As the scriptures says, thou shalt not carry two different weights in thy wallet. One heavy, one light. They just wait and the true thou shalt always use. The law of such navely is hateful to the Lord thy God. He is the enemy of wrongdoing. And thus the command. God love you. This has been Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Shin. For more information about this series, contact St. Joseph Communications at 1-800-526-2151. On the side of the U.S. call 818-331-3549. And please join us again next time for Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Shin on EWTN Global Catholic Radio.