Obedience

“Teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Matthew 28.20 NRSV

It would be hard to find a word that attracts more opprobrium than the word obedience.  It has all the baggage of institutional power gone awry, in that being told what to do or how to act is seen as a diminution of personal autonomy and rights. Commanded obedience is archaic and repressive. By it, people maintain power, often illegitimately; by it, questions cannot be asked, nor accountability demanded. 

But with every critique, we face the danger of lumping everything into one demonizing category. When we do this, we cut the ground from under any reasonable corrective; akin to suggesting you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater; the baby is fine, it is the water that is the problem. In other words, the environment may be corrupt, not necessarily what is in it. 

Obedience, in the context of Matthew 28, is freely offered, never forced, but it is still obedience. The environment of this word is discipleship and the means of becoming a disciple. Jesus never bullied a person into following him by obeying his word, but once we have decided to be his disciple, he does require our obedience to his word, his commandments. This is as far from institutional bullying as you can get, but there is no getting away from the fact that it is, although volunteered, obedience.  

One of the differences is that Jesus calls us to do what is good for us, what we were made for, whereas others call us to do what is good for them, taking little account of what is best for us and others. 

By way of illustration, 1 Peter 1.13 speaks of disciplining ourselves, and 2 Peter 1.3-12 speaks of making every effort to support our faith with knowledge and knowledge with self-control. Peter continues encouraging us to be eager to confirm our call and election. How? By the obedience of an active faith. Jesus, in a similar vein, speaks about the person who endures is the person who builds their house on the rock, which he translates as hearing his word and doing it, by acting on it with faith and obedience. 

None of the above is an invitation to rely on, or wait for, feelings to motivate us. By the enculturation of subjectivity, we are in danger of losing an understanding of obedience, of doing the word, despite how we feel. Obeying Jesus’ commandments (and that is what they are) is a choice; it is externalized action, not primarily an internalized motivation (feeling). 

Where did the notion that obedience is tethered to subjectivity come from? One possible answer is due to the reaction of evangelicalism taking on an experiential view, a subjective view of faith, because of the questioning of biblical and objective authority by schools of higher criticism, schools that saw scripture as a construct of man’s search in man’s terms. This resulted in robbing the church and scripture of any sense of rational, objective authority. So, we acquiesced to a personalized, internalized understanding of faith, which in effect makes obedience look like a work of the flesh, because it appears to be self -sustained and merely rational. This is a revivalist position. 

But, as already argued, the scriptures don’t allow for an optional obedience; an obedience that is premised upon subjectivity and its inevitable corollary, cherry-picking what to obey. John doesn’t allow for any of this when he writes, “Whoever says, ‘I have come to know him’ but does not obey his commandments is a liar, and in such a person the truth does not exist; but whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has reached perfection.” 1 John 2.4-5

We are prone to equate love with our feelings, but John equates love with obedience to the commands of Christ. At times this means feelings aren’t even a consideration; they count for diddly-squat. Simply obeying is what loving God looks like. 

Objectivity gets away with a lot of self-justified sin. Individualized subjectivity rewrites what Jesus commanded so that serious matters like divorce and remarriage, holiness and purity, sexual and fiscal ethics become what is convenient, what we feel; they are transformed into matters that are, in essence, optional in those that follow Jesus. And yet, the apostle John says people who think and live like this are liars, in that the love of God is not in them. 

This describes swaths of Western Christianity.