Sermon – The Last Commandment May Be the Most Difficult

(I preached this sermon at Christ Lutheran Church in Harrisburg, on Sunday September 6, 2026. It was in response to Exodus 20:17. You can listen to the audio at this link.)

We have come to the last Sunday in our four week walk through the Ten Commandments.

Three weeks ago we started in chapter nineteen, and we learned that grace comes before law. God rescued the people first. God gave them the commandments second. Nineteen comes before twenty. Two weeks ago we looked at the first table of the law, our relationship with God. Last week we looked at the second table, our relationship with neighbor. Honor your parents. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not lie about your neighbor.

Today we get one verse. The shortest reading of the whole series. Listen to it again.

“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.”

One verse. And somehow it might be the most revealing commandment of all ten. It is the only one of the ten that gets repeated twice in the same breath. That repetition tells us something. A lot of the worst things people do start with the eyes landing on something that belongs to someone else.

Two examples come easily to mind. King David saw Bathsheba from his roof and took her, then arranged for her husband to be killed in battle to cover it up. King Ahab and Queen Jezebel wanted a vineyard that belonged to a man named Naboth, and when Naboth refused to sell the land his family had kept for generations, Jezebel had him falsely accused and executed so the king could take it.

Both stories are true and worth knowing, but I want to push on them a little, because something bothers me about using them here. David was a king. Ahab and Jezebel were a king and queen. When a king covets something, he can call for soldiers. When a queen covets a vineyard, she can hire liars to testify in court and have a man killed. That is not what happens when you or I covet something. We do not have soldiers. We do not have courts we can bend to our will. Most of us cannot just take what we want, and if we tried, there would be a knock at the door from the police, not a promotion.

Here is the danger in leaving it there. If the only examples we ever reach for are kings and queens, we start to believe this commandment is really about them and not about us. We start to think coveting is a problem for the rich and the powerful, the people who actually have the means to take what they want. But that is not who this commandment was given to. God did not gather the leadership and the wealthy at the base of that mountain and hand them a special set of rules for people with armies. God gathered the whole of Israel, free people and poor people and everyone in between, and said this one applies to you too.

So if it applies to people without soldiers and without courts to bend, what is it actually asking of us? I think the answer has to do with something we have said in this series before. Egypt is not just a place on a map. Egypt is what happens when someone with power decides they can take whatever they want and call it order. Pharaoh coveted free labor, so he enslaved a nation of people to get it. Egypt is the operating system underneath a certain kind of power. It runs on taking what is not yours and calling it destiny.

That operating system does not need a crown to run. It runs in nations. It runs in corporations that squeeze workers to add another line to a shareholder report. It runs in institutions that protect their own reputation over the people they are supposed to serve. It runs in billionaires who already have more money than several countries combined and still wants the last small business on the block. Empires come in a lot of shapes. What they have in common is a hunger for what belongs to somebody else, and the power to go get it.

None of that lets the rest of us off the hook. The operating system runs on a national scale and it runs on a personal one. So let’s talk about what coveting looks like without a crown, because it is very much still a problem here. It just does not usually end with a body in a field.

I wrote in my own reflection on this text earlier in the week that coveting is a strong desire for something that belongs to someone else. Martin Luther, in his Small Catechism, put it plainly when he explained these last two commandments. He said we should fear and love God enough that scheming to take what belongs to our neighbor becomes unthinkable, and helping our neighbor hold onto what is theirs becomes second nature. Coveting is oriented toward your neighbor’s things. Think about how the commandments have been building. Some of them are oriented toward God. Some are oriented toward your neighbor’s life, their marriage, their reputation. This last one turns toward your neighbor’s stuff. The only direction left uncovered is turning toward yourself, which tells you something. This commandment is not really about the ox or the donkey. It is about what happens inside a person when they look at somebody else’s life and decide they deserve it more.

You cannot always get what you want. Wanting what belongs to someone else is not a new problem. It might be the oldest problem we have.

Coveting has a cousin named envy. Envy is not just wanting what someone else has. Envy is wanting it badly enough that you start wishing harm on the person who has it, or looking for a way to make them lose it. There is a German word for something closely related, schadenfreude, which means taking pleasure in someone else’s suffering. 

It shows up when somebody we envy loses their job, or their marriage falls apart, and some small part of us feels satisfied instead of sad. That feeling comes from the same root as coveting. It tells us their loss makes room for what we wanted all along. And when envy gets desperate enough, it turns into theft. Wanting turns into resentment. Resentment turns into scheming. Scheming turns into taking.

Let’s bring this down to where we live. Watch the commercials during a football game for example.  Almost none of them are selling you a product based on what the product actually does. They are selling you the life of the person in the ad, the confidence, the sense that people are looking at you and seeing someone who has arrived. That is coveting too. Advertising works by showing you somebody else, real or invented, who already seems to have the feeling you want, and convincing you that buying the product is how you get what looks like theirs.

We get jealous of people with nice things too. There is an old phrase for this, keeping up with the Joneses, and it is not really about the neighbor’s stuff. It is about being seen the way the Joneses are seen. We covet what somebody owns. We covet the respectability that seems to come with it too, the sense of fitting in. That is why we often care what a stranger thinks of what we are wearing, someone we will never see again and who will never remember us. We are not trying to impress the people who already know us. We are coveting the good opinion of people who do not even know our names. I have heard it said that the rich and the poor are more alike than either one wants to admit, because both groups tend to get looked at through the lens of what they have or don’t have, instead of being seen as people made in the image of God. Coveting does that to us. It teaches us to measure a person’s worth by what they possess, and once you start doing that to other people, you start doing it to yourself.

That is where this commandment gets into the church, and I do not think we get to leave it out of the sanctuary. There are congregations that measure their own faithfulness by how many people show up on Sunday. But it goes beyond raw numbers. Some churches covet younger families. Others covet a certain kind of diversity. Still others covet more wealth in the offering plate, or more men or women filling the pews. When someone new walks through the door, the question underneath it all becomes whether they are a person to welcome or a box to check on the way to a goal the congregation set for itself. A bigger congregation, or a wealthier one, brings its own real challenges, and a church chasing either instead of caring for the people already in front of it can end up ignoring the very people God already gave it to serve.

There is one more layer to coveting worth naming, and it might be the most dangerous one. We do not just want the thing. We build a whole fantasy around having it. 

We imagine the life we would have if we owned that house, or if that other person loved us instead, and the fantasy starts to feel more real than the life we are actually living. What we rarely picture is the mess that would come with actually taking it. Somebody else’s marriage does not come without somebody else’s grief. Somebody else’s job does not come without somebody else losing their income. The fantasy hides the wreckage, both the wreckage that would land on the other person and the wreckage that would land on us.

That wreckage shows up on a bigger scale too. Right now our own country is making moves toward Greenland and floating the idea that Canada should simply become part of the United States. Not long ago the United States struck a deal with Venezuela that gives American companies majority control over that country’s oil reserves for the next twenty five years. I do not say that to make a partisan point this morning. I say it because it is coveting on a national scale, and it raises the same question that Naboth’s vineyard raised earlier, back when Ahab and Jezebel decided his land should belong to them. What happens to the people who live on that land after somebody more powerful decides they want what is under it?

Which brings us to stewardship, because that is the alternative this commandment is pointing us toward. None of what we have was ever fully ours to begin with. Your house, your savings, your body, your years, all of it is on loan. We are stewards of what has been placed in our care for a while. When we die, somebody else will steward it. Jesus said it plainly when the religious leaders tried to trap him with a question about taxes. Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God. Everything belongs to somebody bigger than us. Our job is to take care of it, not to hoard it and not to take somebody else’s.

This is old, old ground. Go back to the beginning of the story, to the garden in Genesis 3. God told the first humans they could eat from every tree in that garden except two. One tree of life, one tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent told the woman that if she ate from the forbidden tree, she would be like God. And she looked at that tree and decided that everything else in the garden, every other fruit, every other gift, was not enough. She and the man had already been made in the image and likeness of God. That was not enough. They wanted to be God themselves, and that was never theirs to have. That is the very first sin in the Bible, and it is a coveting story. Every war fought over land, every war fought over a person, traces back to that same root. 

Think about the old Greek story of the Trojan war. A king wanted another man’s wife, Helen of Troy, badly enough to burn a city down trying to get her. That single act of coveting started a war that cost a generation of lives and left an entire city in ruins. The other half of that same story is the Odyssey, which is back in theaters right now in a new film version. 

Odysseus survives the war, but it takes him ten more years to find his way home, and most of the men who sailed with him never make it back at all. His own kingdom falls apart while he is gone. The dead soldiers and the wasted years trace back to one king’s coveting. So does the kingdom he came home to find in ruins.

Here is something worth noticing about all ten of these commandments, coveting included. None of them come with a stated punishment attached. There is no verse anywhere in this list that says God will strike you down for breaking it. The commandments are simply silent on what happens next. But silence does not mean nothing happens. There are still natural consequences built into breaking them. If you violate your neighbor in some way, your neighbor or the people who love your neighbor are going to respond, and it will not be pleasant. 

If you chase after some other god, some other thing you have decided to worship instead of the living God, that god will eventually fail you. It will use you up and toss you aside, the way every idol eventually does. The consequence is not a punishment God hands down from far away. The consequence is built into the structure of what it means to be a person made in the image of God living among other people made in that same image. When you covet what belongs to your neighbor, you are declaring that your neighbor matters less than your own wanting. That declaration always comes back around.

I need to say one more hard thing before we get to the good news. This commandment, in its original form, treats a person’s spouse and a person’s slave in the same list as an ox and a donkey. Property. The commandment could have ended slavery outright. It did not. That silence has been used across centuries to justify real suffering, and we are not the first generation to notice that people have twisted Scripture, including these very commandments, into a tool for controlling other people instead of a gift meant to protect them. We have said this before in this series and we need to keep saying it. Posting the Ten Commandments on a courthouse wall or in a classroom does not automatically mean we are honoring what they were meant to do.

So where is the good news in all of this? A sermon that ends with a list of everything wrong with us is not a sermon. It is only an accusation.

Here is where Jesus becomes so important for wrestling with this commandment. Jesus keeps telling people throughout the Gospels that they cannot serve both God and money. He keeps telling them to love their neighbor, and to love their enemy too, wanting what is genuinely best for both instead of wanting what they have. He keeps showing a preference for the poor and the stranger, the people the rest of the world was busy overlooking or using. Jesus never once tells anyone to go get what belongs to somebody else. He tells them to give away what they already have, to serve instead of to take.

That is the whole shift this commandment is pointing us toward. Our neighbor was never meant to be the object of our coveting, not them and not what they own. Our neighbor is meant to be the object of our love and our service instead.

And here is the good news underneath all of that. God has already done the work. Jesus has already done the work. No matter how much we covet what does not belong to us, and we will, because this pull is old and stubborn in us, God covers us with love anyway. That is not an excuse to go out and covet more, as if grace were a permission slip to keep taking what is not ours. Grace does something different. It frees us to stop coveting and start serving our neighbor instead. It frees us to be in right relationship with our neighbor and with God, instead of constantly measuring and comparing. It frees us to see ourselves the way God already sees us, as a beloved child who has enough and is enough.

Martin Luther wrote about what it means to be a Christian free enough to serve, free enough that you do not work to earn your way into heaven, because heaven was never for sale in the first place. You work because your neighbor needs you, not because you are trying to get something out of them or out of God.

You are enough. You do not need more, as if something out there, in somebody else’s house or somebody else’s life, will finally complete you. You are whole. God’s love was never about what you have or what you have taken. It was always about the fact that you exist. The God who brought a whole nation out of Egypt is still leading people out of the operating system that tells them they need more to be enough. You already are.

Amen.