*May 13, 2007**//*

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*Love and Obedience*

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*By Harry T. Cook*

*/John 14: 23-29/*

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“I love you, Mom,” we’d say after having done something we shouldn’t have done and hearing about it from her in no uncertain terms. “Well,” she would say, “If you love me so much, how about doing what I ask you to do and */not/* doing what I tell you not to do.” Seems reasonable, right? If you love someone like you should love one of your parents, you would want to behave as they taught you and would have you behave, right?

So John imagines Jesus saying to one of his close friends and followers that those who love him will keep his word. What was his “word”? In just the previous chapter of John’s gospel, it is said that Jesus gave his followers a new commandment that they should love one another – the word “love” there meaning outreaching care and concern for the other without thought of compensation.

Does this mean that the word Jesus said was his is “love”? Simply that and nothing more? – The author and or editors of this thing known as */According to John/* did not include in the text all those sayings attributed to Jesus by the earlier gospel editors known as Thomas, Mark, Matthew and Luke. Nowhere in */According to John/* do we see anything about turning the other cheek or walking a second mile. Maybe by the time whoever John was got around to compiling his version, he was content to boil down the ethical message to “love.”

So the formula becomes, “If you love me you will love others.” If you want to be known as a follower of Jesus, you will be known as one who loves, as one whose consistent stance is the non-acquisitive outreach of care and concern for each, for any and for all. – All my mother wanted was for us kids to show our love for her by doing what she said, not doing what she said not to do and behaving in the way she was trying to teach us. That did not make her anything more or less than a good parent. It did not make her a tyrant or a child abuser. In fact, it showed that she loved us by asking nothing but obedience in love. She did not require us to worship at her feet or to ply her with lavish gifts or even to tell her we loved her. She just wanted us to love her by behaving in loving ways.

That’s the core sense of what we hear in this passage from */According to John/*. The Christian religion is no more and no less than right behavior. – A friend of mine says that a religion’s worth and validity should be judged by one thing and one thing only: the behavior of its adherents. That’s, in essence, what my mother told us about our relationship with her. “Don’t tell me you love me and then go and do those things I’ve told you not to do.”

Mother also gave us lessons by precept and example about how to conduct ourselves in life. She was particularly attentive to what psychologists in a later generation would call “interpersonal relations.” Without ever mentioning Jesus or the so-called Golden Rule, mother strongly advised her children to treat people in the same way we would want to be treated. Her favorite phrase was, “That’s what keeps the pan greased.” I think she wanted two things:

1) for her children to be as secure in our world as we could be, and 2)

to have her children’s conduct reflect a proper upbringing. Neither desire was unreasonable. Both were in themselves signs of love.

All that took place more than 50 years ago: before the onset of what would come to be known as the civil rights movement, before the Muslim world made itself known to America, before the world became so small that an incident in a far country would appear instantaneously in full color on television screens across the globe.

If mother were living today and knew what we know, she would probably have her children extend that do-unto-others behavior to the Muslim and to all whom we would call “foreigners.” I think she would come to the conclusion that human beings are human beings, and that each owes to the other the respect of individual dignity. I think she would not put up with hatred for hatred’s sake; she would not put up with fencing off people by race or religion. I think she would say to her children and children’s children: “Look, these people are basically just like you. Live with them. Try to understand them. Have them come in for a cup of tea, and I’ll make a cake.”

That’s what my mother did when peace and understanding were required in the family, in the neighborhood, among friends that had taken to feuding. She made a cake – usually a Lady Baltimore cake with jelly between the layers –and figured that serving up generous portions of it to people on the muscle would take the fight out of them. I saw it work a good many times. And she wasn’t asking them to love her */or/* her cake. Just to eat the thing in peace, and maybe, out of that, to find the simple grace to forgive each other. Her cake had that kind of effect on people.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.