OBEDIENCE - Pentecost 18 OS 26

OBEDIENCE

Ezekiel 18.1–4, 25–end; Psalm 25.1–8; Philippians 2.1–13; Matthew 21.23–32

One of the themes of today’s readings is obedience. In the Epistle we are told of the humility of Christ who, though he was in the form of God, became obedient unto death on the cross. In the Gospel Christ tells a story, not about his own obedience, but about the obedience of his people to the will of the Father.

Now I think it is fair to say that we live in an era where people are more likely to admire creative acts of disobedience than they are to admire obedience. There are deep ideological foundations for this attitude that can be traced back to figures like Karl Marx and Frederick Nietzsche, who essentially saw Christianity as a religion of servility, with obedience implying an unhealthy suppression of the human will, either of the masses to the will of the powerful or of the strong to the will of the masses, depending on who you are listening to. In either case, obedience not a great virtue.

Obedience is, indeed, one of the core virtues of Christianity, but from a Christian perspective we would say that it is a mistake to equate obedience with servility. For we look to the life of Christ for our understanding of obedience, and we find that in his life obedience and courage and spiritual authority exist side by side. Take today’s Gospel, where we encounter Christ in the midst of an act of profound audacity. Having thrown the money-changers out of the temple, he is back there teaching, taking the “seat” of authority and wisdom usually occupied by the priests and elders. They are trying to get him out of there, but instead of submitting to them, he keeps outwitting them. (A habit we know from Luke’s Gospel he picked up as a child asking them questions that no one could answer!) If these priests were asked to describe the virtues of our Lord, obedience is probably not the first thing that would spring to mind.

This tells us something about the obedience of Jesus. Two things, in fact! The first is the obvious one. His obedience is to God the Father and God the Spirit, the ones with whom he shares his nature. When he lived as one of us, he spent most of that life sidestepping the guardians of public piety and pastoring to people considered outcasts and rebels. Neither servile to the powerful, nor picking fights with them. Simply trying to draw people high and low back into harmony with God. Even when it comes to the priests and elders, he offers them no superficial defiance. You might notice at the end of this parable, which I will get to in a moment, he speaks of the outcasts going in ahead of the elders, not instead of them. Christ is not being defiant in the way the first son in the parable says no to his dad for no reason. He is asking them to take an honest look at the state of their relationship with God. The Spirit in which he challenges them, is that same Spirit found in the prophet Ezekiel: “get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! … For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God. Turn, then, and live.”

His obedience is to the God whose nature he shares, and such obedience takes courage. The same goes for us. We can be clear that the more we empty ourselves and look to Christ to guide our values and lives, the more we are brought to times of decision and confrontation that require courage and clarity of purpose. Because our obedience is not simply deference to others, it is harmony with the will of God.

That is a bit trickier, isn’t it?

This brings me to the second point. In Christ we find a paradox. The extent of his obedience and the depth of his spiritual authority increase in proportion to each other. It would be a misinterpretation of that hymn to the Philippians to say that as Christ emptied himself, he put off his spiritual authority, and then got it back later. As he emptied himself, he exposed an unshakeable purpose and depth of Creative power that commanded the attention of his contemporaries as surely as it does ours. In the last days of his life, even the silence of Christ made the Governor nervous. He could see that here is a man that we can neither fault nor master, and none of our power games scare him. We don’t see servility in Christ. We see a firmness of intention that can only really come from an understanding of the will of the Father that is unshakeable and profound. Even in his death, there is a Divine Purpose that he longs to fulfill. He longs to breath divine life into the world. Thus, he acts in concert with the will of the Father.

This brings me to the parable. It is a humbling image – of God and of ourselves. We are imagining a property modest enough that the owner needs his children to labour with him. Both of them find it difficult to obey and do what needs to be done: one rebels to his Father’s face, the other behind his back. In Hebrew tradition the vineyard can be a metaphor for the people of Israel, but a literal vineyard also seems to have been a common dream of the people. The prophet Isaiah, for instance, while in exile is given a vision of a new creation, and the Lord promises you will one day live in houses you have built and eat the fruit of your own vineyards. People connected with the promise of the Eternal Kingdom, where the wolf will lie down with the lamb, by the image of the home and vineyard. That is the dream.

So now we return to the parable, where the father has this longed-for vineyard, and I wonder about the sons… I’m sure they loved their faither, but did they ever get the chance to share his dream for their on that vineyard? We know from various waves of migration in Australia that people will work very hard when it is for the life they have dreamt of, whereas often second generations have to do a bit of searching to find motivation to go beyond themselves anywhere near as much. (By the time you get to the eighth generation, we’re almost a lost cause…!) I suspect, for those sons to obey their father’s will from the outset, they needed not only to love him: they needed to share his dream. They needed to love what he loves.

This is something that it is important to recognise about ourselves. We will obey the will of God, to the extent we dare to desire what he offers us. In other words, when our duties are tied to our joys. To take a concrete example, if I think a person is a piece of work and that is all I can see in them, I’m going to find it hard to have mercy on them. If I am intimidated by the silence of God, I am going to find it difficult to maintain a discipline of prayer. I will flee from it. If I don’t thirst for the Eternal Kingdom, I going to struggle to let go, when the time comes, of what I love in this one. In order to obey God wholeheartedly, I have to unearth that desire for what God offers and what God asks of us.

We do that, we unearth that desire, through spiritual discipline. From the Liturgy to the moral injunctions of our Lord, the ‘obligations’ of practicing Christianity are there to unearth our own love of that which our Father loves. Which is nothing less than everything he has created. Some days we plod into the vineyard like the first son, carrying our sluggish wills, I’m sure there was much more satisfaction to be found—to be discovered—in that labour, than if he had sat around avoiding his father on the porch.

We should never shy away from the virtue of obedience, we should simply take care of whose will it is we are obeying, and be searching for the loving purpose inherent in every divine command.

 Mthr Kathryn Bellhouse