“They pierced my hands and my feet…” (King James Bible, Psalm 22:16)

And so, with Our Lord’s feet nailed to the Cross, his earthly journey reached its end.  It can truly be said that every step of his life, from the time he first learnt to walk as a child refugee in Egypt, had been leading surely and purposefully to that Cross on which his feet were now at last nailed together.

But that was not the end of the road, for Our Lord’s perfect obedience to his Father’s will had kept his union with him unbroken and undisturbed, and therefore God reversed man’s condemnation of him by raising his pierced Body from the dead to share his own glory and joy.  As St Paul put it, Christ “…became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.  Therefore God has highly exalted him…” (RSV, Philippians 2:8,9, our emphasis).

What was true of the Lord is also necessarily true of his followers today.  The path of obedience is the path of life which leads to God, in whose presence “…there is fullness of joy…” (RSV, Psalm 16:11).  So the Lord has told us, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (NRSV, Matthew 7:21, our emphasis).

For obedience strikes at the thing which is most precious to us – our liberty.  We then surrender to God our right to determine our attitude and outlook and to live our lives as we please, rather than as pleases him.  That means abandoning our own independent will and judgement – what we think, what we want, what we propose to do – and adopting instead what God thinks and wants and wishes us to do.

It is then that we find our true liberty, what St Paul calls “…the glorious liberty of the children of God” (RSV, Roman 8:21) – free to act as one is meant to act, free to be as one is meant to be, free to respond to the inner promptings of the Spirit of God: in a word, free to imitate God and in so doing be his own true children (see Romans 8:14; Ephesians 5:1).

That is the path of obedience which every disciple of the Lord is required to follow.  That is the gate which is narrow and the way which is hard (Matthew 7:14) – narrow, because there is no room for deviation or compromise: hard, because an easy-going approach will never negotiate it.

The word obedience has a rather chilly ring, but that is because it is so often thought of as being the outward observance of rules laid down by authority.  Now it is noteworthy that although Holy Scripture rightly describes Our Lord as being obedient, he never uses that word to describe himself.  Instead, he put it another way: I always do what is pleasing to my Father (John 8:29).  The meaning is the same, the spirit is very different.  It is the difference between a formal submission to the rules, and a willing expression of one’s love.

The way St Paul describes an obedient life in the sight of God is “…to lead a life worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work…” (RSV, Colossians 1:10), that is, showing a positive and practical result in one’s daily life by contributing to the true welfare of God’s Church and of the wider world around.

Nevertheless, we have to recognise and accept that an unswerving obedience to God and to his word in a world that is generally hostile to him or denies his existence, will turn the world’s hostility and ridicule against us as well.  As Jesus told his disciples, “…you will be hated by all for my name’s sake” (RSV, Matthew 10:22).  And St Paul for one found that to be all too true.  “…all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus”, he wrote, “will be persecuted” (RSV, 2 Timothy 3:12, our emphasis).

We live, therefore, in a hostile environment and as followers of the Lord there is one option that is not open to us, namely, taking the easy line because the Lord never took that.  His standards, as made manifest in his life and teaching, are often diametrically opposed to those of the world, as may be seen for example in some of the moral issues which are publicly debated, and resolved in a non-Christian way.  Hence individual Christians will at times find themselves in situations where they must either incur opposition or ridicule by supporting Christ or weakly acquiesce in current secular standards.

For one cannot separate obedience to the Lord from bearing witness to him and the truth which he taught.  So before his Ascension he told his Apostles, “…you shall be my witnesses…” (RSV, Acts 1:8).  They were his first witnesses, but not his only ones.  Every single follower of the Lord from that day to this is bound to bear witness to him if he or she is to remain a faithful follower.

And those who bear such witness must expect the world’s hostility.  Indeed it is significant that the word martyr literally means a witness.  So we read that St Paul on his First Missionary Journey strengthened “the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (RSV, Acts 14:22).

So today, only if we are prepared to suffer for the Kingdom of God and for its King, can we be counted worthy of either.

Prayer

“Lord Jesus Christ,
you humbled yourself in taking the form of a servant,
and in obedience died on the cross for our salvation:
give us the mind to follow you
and to proclaim you as Lord and King
to the glory of God the Father” (1)
Amen.

Reference

1. © The Archbishops' Council of the Church of England (2004) Common Worship: Collects and Post Communions in Contemporary Language.  Post Communion prayer for Palm Sunday.  Available from:
http://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-worship/worship/texts/collects-and-post-communions/contemporary-language/lenteaster.aspx (Accessed 06 March 2013) (Internet).