Within the Ante-Communion rite in the Book of Common Prayer, the Decalogue is said in dialogue between the Presider and Assembly. After each of the first nine is read, the assembly responds, ‘Lord, have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law’. In the first half of this petition, those gathered to pray recognize their consistent failure to embody the law. The law, here, must be understood in light of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, not as narrow statutes, but as synechdoches for deeper moral concerns — the point is the spirit, not the letter. The second half of this petition expresses the intention that the petitioner be transformed within, to become the sort of person who can act consistently with the spirit of the law (which is, of course, love). Finally, the tenth petition – ‘Thou shalt not covet’ – gets at the greedy root of all the neighbor-harming, God-defying, loveless behaviors the law proscribes. To this, the Assembly responds, ‘Write all these thy laws in our hearts we beseech thee’.
Several prophecies inform this final petition, the culmination of the several ‘incline our hearts’ petitions. Primarily, it alludes to Jeremiah 31:33, ‘But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people’ (a prophecy later quoted in Hebrews 8:10). It also alludes to Ezekiel 11:19, ‘And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh’, and Ezekiel 36:26, ‘A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh’.
This is a truly radical eschatological vision. It means nothing less than the total transformation of the world. For the law to be written on our hearts is the abolition of the law. It is the abolition of morality as a prescriptive force, as a coercive instrument. Augustine terms this state non posse peccare, when people are unable to will ill, not by the suppression of their wills but by the full expression of them, the full flowering of human nature as it is meant to be. This memorable phrase doesn’t quite go far enough, as it still frames the longed-for state in relation to its negation. The world that is passing away is characterized by struggle against sin; in the world to come, sin will be no more, a meaningless concept.
This is what John saw, or rather didn’t see in his Apocalypse: ‘I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof’ (Rev. 21:22). The culmination of John’s religious vision is the abolition of religion, because all that religion aims to effect – to redress of the alienation of humanity from God, of person from person, and the human person with her inmost self – will have come about, not partially and imperfectly through preaching and ritual, but completely and fully, in spirit and in truth. ‘Write all these thy laws in our hearts’ ties together the opening of Mattins, the hard heart of the sentences, and the Ventie, with the eschatological vision of the post-communion prayers, Gloria, and Blessing, the peace beyond all understanding that possesses the heart, so that God will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28). The response articulates humanity’s longing for the same future of which the eucharist bids us ‘taste and see’ as a foretaste of the fullness of communion with God.
D. N. Keane (PhD St And) is the Managing Editor of The Anglican Way and teaches English at Georgia Southern University.