Obedience training

Insight is a quality greatly to be desired, but there is a lot to be said for the notion that ignorance is bliss, a lot to be commended in keeping your eyes wide shut.

However much the university of life might contribute to your education, there are inevitably some times and experiences you just do not want to repeat; there are some things you would prefer not to know; and  there are certainly things your would prefer not to see. In most circumstances, it’s almost always better not to try to look under the surface, because beauty is skin deep and what’s under the cover ain’t that pretty. Life is like that: whatever it looks like if you half-close your eyes and squint, close up and personal it ain’t no oil painting. Linger longer and the most enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa widens to reveal nicotine stained graveyard teeth, tribute to the deficincies of Renaissance dentistry. Put your glasses on and you’ll see that the banana is bad half way down (if you’re lucky), there’s half a radioactive orange slug in your salad, horsehair in your burger, mouse droppings at the bottom of the cake tin when you pick up the last slice. So don’t look too closely, because that’s when the cracks appear. Who can blame us if we sometimes pay lip service to depth and skim along the surface, who can blame us if we don’t look too closely for fear of what we might see?

You might expect that in a church at least you would be safe from these unpleasant half-worm-in-the-apple shocks, but think again. About fifteen years ago, I was tottering around my then church and for some reason decided to look a bit more closely at one of those untidy pile of leaflets and booklets that congregate at the  back of every church in the known universe and chanced upon a real eye-opener of a pamphlet. The shocker in question was a tract designed to help penitents prepare for confession. I doubt I’d find one here, but where I was then was that sort of parish.

Anyway, if confession is your style, a leaflet to help is not a bad thing, because most of us, at any given time, are not carrying round obvious major sins and horrendous crimes on our conscience, and so such aids can even be helpful in suggesting ways in which we can give our natural self-defensiveness a nudge to one side.  Typically, they might, say,  list the ten commandments, the seven deadly sins, the beatitudes, that sort of thing. But not this one. Oh no. This Aid for Penitents read for all the world like it was written by the nun from your nightmares or perhaps a 16th century Puritan of the Lady Whiteadder sort, where the flesh must always be well mortified, the showers blue marble cold and the diet, turnip. Wicked child! Was that the nun or the Puritan? Wicked Child! 

Alongside an unhealthy concentration on, nay obsession with, how shall we put it, ‘matters of the flesh’ there seemed to be the clear aim there of marking all human experience as sinful, there seemed to be the desire to make you feel wrong just for getting out of bed in a morning. Though of course staying in bed was even worse. It was quite astonishing. It wasn’t quite ‘are you a wife who hasn’t wanted to be chained to the kitchen sink?’ SINNER! It wasn’t quite ‘are you a child who has been heard as well as seen?” SINNER! but it wasn’t far off. There were more rules to follow (and of course break) than you could shake a a thousand sticks at, some I’m sure the Pope had never dreamed of and he must have some pretty wild dreams. Oh, and quite clearly if you couldn’t keep the rules, then you’d put down yet another instalment on your one way ticket to the fiery furnace.  The only way to have even a sniff at being a Christian this document implied, was to be a card carrying member of the NRA, Opus Dei or the Countryside Alliance and preferably all three, to strap yourself daily into a so-tight-it-really-hurts whalebone corset and never, never allow yourself to be in the same room as someone of the opposite sex. Or indeed, you never know, the same sex, just to be absolutely certain. God doesn’t actually love you, our leaflet implied, he’s merely holding his nose and tolerating your existence in the vain but unlikely hope that you’ll start obeying his commands.

I’m not sure how those leaflets got there, they might have been languishing there since the church was built in the 1930s as things tend to do in churches, but, rediscovered in the 21st century they went straight in the bin.

And that is precisely where they belonged. Not because we’re all so OK and liberated now that we can dispense with such downer ideas as ‘sin’, but because there is something fundamentally wrong with a Christianity which is more concerned with obedience than with love. 

God is love, sin is something that comes between us and God. Sin is not lack of obedience, it is lack of love. 

It matters not one jot if you do all the right things; it matters not one tittle if you keep every rule and regulation; if our religious doings and sayings, our orthodoxy and orthopraxy are without love, they are worse than meaningless, worse than empty gestures, worse than sterile dogma: without love they play right into Satan’s hands.

There is no denying it that, historically, Christians have often found themselves drunk on obedience with terrifying results. Generations of Anglicans have been brought up on gory tales of bloody Mary and Cranmer’s hot-handed martyrdom; generations of English catholics have treasured tales of the gruesome butchery that ended the lives of the Elizabethan martyrs. And you know, the perpetrators of these abominable horrors were only being obedient to God’s will, defending the historic faith, only doing what was right, only obeying Holy orders. 

St James said, faith without works is dead: how much more so obedience without love. Christian obedience flows from love: not the other way round. 

To the religious mindset there is one glaring omission in Christianity,  a gaping hole at the heart of our faith, and that is the absence of rules. How the religious heart longs for a rulebook, and if Jesus didn’t give us one— and he certainly didn’t— we’ve not wasted any time in making good his omission. And when we have our rules, we can be obedient. Obedience brings certainty, and comfort and all sorts of other undeniably good things. Good boy! But that’s not what Christianity is about. Ours is not a faith of regulations, ours is not a faith of the book: ours is a faith in a person, the person of Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the good shepherd who leaves the ninety nine unimaginative, obedient sheep to search for the one who is lost; the good shepherd who stays to defend his sheep when he sees the wolf coming; the good shepherd who, tomorrow,  Good Friday, lays down his life for his sheep. And that good shepherd calls his sheep by name and they know his voice.

As followers of Jesus, what we are called to do is not adhere to rules and regulations but to listen for his voice. We must listen when the wolves run amok in the sheepfold, we must listen in the heat of our passions, listen in the cacophonous chaos of modern life, listen, especially, when life is good, when the suns shines and the grass is green and thick and juicy because that is when our attention strays and our guard is down: always listen for his voice. If we think we’re safe and got it sewn up keeping obedient to the rulebook, then we have stopped listening. Satan doesn’t play by the rules.

Listen. Listen. Listen to what the Good Shepherd says…

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.