Monday, 14 July 2008 01:00 | and posted in Faith
If you love me, you will obey what I command... whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me... If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching... He who does not love me will not obey my teaching..*
It took me a long time to get my head around these verses. Firstly, as soon as my parents used the phrase, "If you love me...," I was like, "Oh, oh, I'm not going to like this." So why would Jesus use this kind of bribery unless he was asking something I wasn't going to like?
Secondly, obey, command, commands, obeys, obey, obey... in all honesty, Jesus sounds like he's the head of the moral police here. These kinds of comments really didn't sell him very well; they don't inspire you to follow him, unless you like someone wagging their finger at you every time you do something wrong...
However, my issues lay with my earthly representations of what it meant to love and obey. I was reading in my experiences of authority into what Jesus was saying and subsequently distorting it.
So what was Jesus saying...?
Love is our starting point. It is our motivation and inspiration to obey. Without love our actions are empty of meaning and full of religious duty. With love they become creative and powerful tools that help re-shape and transform people and our world.
Love is always demonstrated in action, so Jesus' emphasis on his teaching and on his commands is a way of grounding what that love looks like in action... it's about loving your enemy as yourself, doing to others as you would have them do to you, being generous to the poor, standing up for the oppressed, refusing to judge, and forgiving those who do you wrong...
As we start loving Jesus things get dangerous... We start seeing him in the eyes of the homeless beggar we walk by as we exit the cinema, we start seeing him in the kid that's always picked on at school, we spot Jesus in the eyes of the poor, the oppressed and the marginalised. We start to love people we never thought we had it in us to love. We end up obeying without even thinking of it as such!
But there's another reason why I never liked these verses... the, you will obey me part. However, what if we treated this less like the command of a stern head teacher, moral policeman or court judge and more like a doctor?** What if Jesus is diagnosing our global illnesses and suggesting a better alternative? What if he is saying he holds the cure to the personal and societal disease called sin and that obeying him liberates us from sin's destructive consequences?
What if
we
believed
Jesus is offering us a better way to live?
FOOTNOTES:
* See John chapter 14, verses 15, 21, 23 and 24.
** Jesus even uses the imagery of a doctor at one point, saying, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick." See Luke 5:31.