Exodus 20:12-16: in context

These few verses are the second half of the Ten Commandments, the part that turns from our relationship with God to our relationships with each other. And it is worth noticing what they are actually about. Honor your father and mother. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Almost every one is a fence, and every fence is built around something that belongs to your neighbor.

Read them that way and they change character. Do not murder guards your neighbor's life. Do not commit adultery guards your neighbor's marriage. Do not steal guards your neighbor's property. Do not bear false witness guards your neighbor's reputation and their standing before others. And honor your father and mother, placed first and given the only promise attached to any commandment, that your days may be long, guards the most basic human bond of all, the one that holds a society together across generations. These are not primarily rules for polishing my own character. They are protections God has placed around other people, to keep them safe from me. Each one marks a boundary I am not to cross into someone else's life. And they are stated as a bare minimum, mostly in the form of you shall not, the floor beneath which no community can hold together.

That reframing is quietly convicting. It is easy to treat these as items on a personal morality checklist, things that make me a decent person. But they were given to protect my neighbor, their life and marriage and goods and good name and family. Which of these fences around the people near me have I let quietly fall down, telling myself it was only a private failing, when it was really their protection I was neglecting?