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God problems 4: WHEN JESUS resists the tempter in the desert, he does so with words that put God at the centre of all his decisions. “Worship the Lord your God and serve only him,” Jesus says, when the tempter offers him power over all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour. This obedience to the will of the Father is to be one of the hallmarks of Jesus’s ministry. Later Christians, reflecting on his life and death, came to the realisation that this is one of the things that sets Jesus apart from the rest of us — that he is prepared to give up all rights over his own life, in obedience to the call of God (see Philippians 2.5-11). So when we face God’s calling to us this Lent, this is one of the things we need to consider. Are we prepared to give up our autonomy and become obedient, even to death, to the will of the Father? Obedience and self-abnegation can be a dangerous creed to preach. Karl Marx famously called religion “the opium of the people”, seeing it as a negative force that encourages passivity where people should be rebelling against their conditions. It is all too true that very often the ruling powers have preached “Christian” obedience to the powerless, and dynamic leaders have demanded unquestioning loyalty to themselves in the name of God. Surely we are right to be suspicious of this part of our calling? If being “children of God” means remaining in childish dependence all our lives, then surely we must reject this call to religious infantilism? But I suspect that what much Christian history bears witness to is how very hard this call to obedience actually is. Clearly, we have often used the word that the Gospel uses, but imported the meaning from somewhere else. After all, how did Jesus manage to get himself executed if he was an obedient and passive member of his society? The answer, of course, was that he wasn’t. He was obedient only to God, and that led him, over and over again, into conflict with all other authorities, both religious and civil. His arguments with the religious leaders of his day were particularly bitter, because they claimed to be speaking for God, and acting in obedience, too, to God’s call. This is the heart of the matter. How do we tell what God is asking us to do? How do we tell when others are genuinely speaking God’s message, and when they are not? We all know people who claim to have a direct line to God, and who are absolutely sure that they know what God wants, but most of us have to muddle along with far less clarity. So we are prone to giving our obedience to those who sound certain, and hoping that they’ve got it right. But when that has been so dangerous in the past, wouldn’t it be better just to give up on this talk of obedience, and exercise our individual consciences instead? But perhaps Jesus’s understanding of obedience is rather different from the one most of us work with? For example, it does not always seem to mean that he works with the serenity of certainty. The Gospels show him having to go off alone and listen to God very carefully. They show him begging for a change of path in Gethsemane; they show him dying in terrible distress on the cross. Obedience clearly does not mean that you never have to think and exercise your own will. Again, when Jesus chooses his disciples, he chooses an argumentative and strong-minded group of people. Very occasionally, he gives them direct orders, but, on the whole, he talks to them and spends time with them, and teases them and challenges them. We never hear him demanding unquestioning obedience from them. Jesus’s obedience to God is not used as a way of claiming power for himself. He could easily have used his authority to win himself power. People are mesmerised by his teaching and his miracles; they want to give him their love and loyalty. They want to give him the right to exercise power over them. But Jesus will not have it. He constantly redirects all obedience to God. It sounds as though we need to be suspicious of an obedience that is actually about giving power to another human being. We also need to be wary of those who claim to speak for God, unless they are constantly trying to step out of the way, so that we can direct our obedience not to them, but where it belongs. This does not make obedience easier. But it’s not meant to be easy. It is meant to be the fruit of a long, constant, growing knowledge and love of the God we are called to serve, remembering always that we are called together, so that our knowledge of God grows in tandem with our common life. Lent task READ John 9. Notice how the “Jews” try to challenge the certainty of the healed man. What structures demand your obedience? Do any of them make you uncomfortable? Are there things about your work or your Church or your family that demand the wrong kind of obedience? Talk to God and to other kinds of Christians about this, to see if something needs to change.
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