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This Sunday evening at Little Flowers I will be continuing our series on our community vows & values. We have already explored our shared commitment to Simplicity, embrace a number of individual and community practices as a result. This week we will continue with my exploring the discipline of Submission. We will look at it over a couple of weeks, pursuing value that we will walk out together.
Our Vow of Submission is inspired by the monastic Vow of Obedience. Both of these words- submission and obedience- can draw responses from all spectrums, most of them less than positive. Whether it brings to mind abusive hierarchies or imbalanced gender requirements, most of us can identify with the cringe factor these words cause. However, beyond their misuses and abuses, this vow holds so much for us as we seek to be Christ’s Body to a watching world.
Through the familiarity of common usage, we can too often lose sight of what it means to follow Jesus as our Lord. It can become dangerously easy in our evangelical zeal to call people to declare Jesus as Lord in order to be saved, without truly articulating that beyond mere declaration is the absolute submission of our whole selves to the purposes of Christ. When it is addressed, we sometimes reduce it to basic moral living and spiritual disciplines like prayer and Bible reading. While these are all important, the life and teachings of Christ, built upon the foundation the story of God found in Scripture, clearly show us that we are called to lives far more demanding and sacrificial. Consider the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10). After Jesus affirms that eternal life can be had if we love God and love our neighbour as ourselves, he is asked, “Who is my neighbour?”. The parable comes in reply.
I recently realized how quickly I dismissed the priest and the Levite as the bad guy, identifying instead with the Samaritan. And yet, with more consideration I realized that the choices of the first two men were not so unreasonable. The road was clearly dangerous and these men had many people who depended on them. Consider a similar scenario in our own world- I live in an inner city community that poses many such threats. Obedience to Christ’s call of loving our neighbour is a costly one, potentially our very lives. It was the outcast, “heretic” Samaritan who risked it all for a person who might otherwise have reject him.
But Jesus does not directly answer the question “Who is my neighbour?”, but instead asks, “Which of the three men was a neighbour to the injured man?”. Clearly the only answer is the Samaritan, which the lawyer states. Jesus finally answers the “neighbour” question by saying “Go and do the same”. The lawyer does not ask what he must do to be obedient to God. Instead, his original question is about eternal life and his follow up question are aimed at discovering his minimal obligation for salvation. And this is where he misses the point.
Jesus turns the table with his answer. Jesus shows that obedience is not about fulfilling some external obligations, but rather the externals are a result of the internal transformation of our hearts. Obedience leads to being transformed from the inside out into the Body of Christ, not hoops we must jump through for our own benefit. Just as we are called to be loving, compassion and grace-filled neighbours, that which Christ calls us to obey comes as His expression of love, compassion and grace to us, seeking to restore us to His intention for all Creation.
God also calls us to be submitted to one another as His united Body. In my next post I will explore this community dynamic of submission.
