The Freedom to Flourish

On obedience and love | The Word in the Wild, Easter 6, Year B

First Letter of John 5:1-6

John 15:9-17

A flourishing “Obedient Plant.” Photo by David J. Stang.

When we hear our scriptures from John this Sunday, both the Epistle and the Gospel, there are two words that stand out for their constant repetition. The first is love, which to my count, gets eleven mentions, and the second is commandment, which is repeated eight times. To our contemporary minds we are likely to love the one and hate the other, but in John they are interlinked and closely related. I think the difference between the Biblical view and our contemporary one, comes in large part as a result of our understanding of freedom. In the ancient world, including that of John’s community, freedom was seen as an ability to live into certain positive capacities. That the “truth should set you free” is not so much a revealing of chains to be cast off as a reality to which we must align ourselves. Freedom was the ability to be fully human against the chains of our basest desires, and the idea what that human life meant had positive content.

In our own society, however, we have come to see freedom as primarily a negative reality. We have been trained to seek freedom from various forms of oppression and obligation rather than freedom for a particular vision of human flourishing. As a result, we cringe at the language of commandments and obedience. There is important work to do, then, to change our instinctual reaction to these words.

One way I find helpful is to think of how obedience to a commandment works to increase my capacity to do things in my life. For instance, I’ve trained for various endurance athletic events, and I’ve never done so without a training plan. I followed that plan like the law, obedient to the workouts and distances prescribed. As a result, I had the freedom to then complete the race.

I know some coaches who have clients who pay lots of money for them to guide their training. Some follow the plan and are able to be successful, but some clients return after the prescribed training cycle to admit they got busy and didn’t follow the program. As one would expect, these want to be athletes had poor performance on race day—they lacked the capacity to exercise that freedom.

In our Gospel, Jesus himself says that he is obedient to the commands of his Father. It is through such obedience that Jesus finds the capacity to live into the love the Father offers him. The purpose of these commandments and the response of obedience isn’t cowed subservience but fullness and flourishing. As David Ford writes in his excellent theological commentary on John’s Gospel: “These are inseparable from deep trust, mutual love, and delight. Such commandments are not alien impositions but a recipe for further fulfillment of love and joy. They are commandments that can be trusted as directed entirely toward one’s own good and flourishing and the flourishing of all creation” (emphasis his).

This issue of trust is key, and it is important to remember that our word faith, essentially means trust. The call of obedience to a command must be rooted in the deep trust of the one giving the command. Though there are good reasons to challenge our contemporary view of freedom as merely a lack of constraints, that understanding came through a long history of abuse by authorities. We became suspicious of constraints because we lost all trust in those who commanded us to conform to distorted visions of human life.

It is becoming all too clear, however, that freedom from constraint leaves us vulnerable to our basest desires and the tricks of marketing, we are not, in the end, any freer. What we need is not a raw freedom from all limits and commandments, but a freedom to flourish rooted in obedience to one who is trustworthy. Jesus is such a person, and as Jesus says, our obedience to his commandments is not for the sake of an exercise of power, but for the completion of our joy, a joy rooted in Jesus’ own obedience.

What is it that Jesus commands? “That you love one another as I have loved you.” Such love is rooted in self-giving; it is total and complete, and lived out fully it offers the path toward flourishing. As David Ford wrote, our obedience in the exercise of such love is directed entirely toward the good of our own lives and the good of all creation. Take a look through the newspaper and imagine if the actors in those stories were obedient to such a commandment. What would be different? What freedoms would be unleashed? What joys would be completed?

Our work is to be obedient to this call of love in our own lives. It is not an easy task, and it will require training, work, and exercise, but we will be joined in those things with the one who has already been obedient to this call, the one whose joy has already been made complete, and in whose love we can abide. It is through obedience to his way of love that we will find our final freedom and so our flourishing.