Not For Treats--May 3, 2024

Not For Treats--May 3, 2024

[Jesus said:] "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love." [John 15:9-10]

We are not Jesus' lap dogs, and God is not training us to respond to treats.

I want to be clear about that at the outset here, because it can certainly sound like Jesus is just doing a little bit of behavioral conditioning here, promising us affection if we'll do as we're told.  When you're training a dog, you offer rewards for compliance, even if there is no logical or obvious connection between the behavior and the treat.  There's no reason in nature, for example, that a dog would roll over on command, or play dead, or even obey the direction, "Sit!" other than that we train them with treats. Eventually, we condition the dog to associate a reward with the behavior we want to see from them, and they do the trick or respond as we wish.  And eventually, you end up with a dog that connects the treat with the proper trick in its brain, much like Pavlov got his canine experimental subjects to start salivating at the sound of a bell, even if there wasn't any food around. 

And like I say, sometimes we can make Jesus out to sound like he's just setting up the same kind of conditioning: "Obey, and you'll get my love," like he's dangling a treat in front of our noses hoping we'll learn to sit, beg, or roll over.  It's easy to hear Jesus' talk about "keeping his commandments" as just a set of unrelated religious behaviors he is bribing us to do, the way a dog doesn't really care about sitting or playing dead, but just wants the treat.  

To be honest, a lot of what passes for Christianity sounds like a piously polished version of dog training, where Jesus tells us what we have to do in order to win the affections of our divine master and secure spiritual rewards.  Whether it's going to heaven when we die, or promises of health and wealth now, or some ambiguous sense of "divine favor," it is so easy for us to hear (and then repeat) the message as some version of "Do these things in order to get these treats and affection from God," no matter how random the behaviors or actions might seem to be.  And once we've bought into that kind of transactional thinking between us and God, we lose sight of loving God--or being loved by God--and really just see God as a means to getting the reward.

But, of course, that isn't really what Jesus has in mind here.  Jesus isn't running a divine obedience school for disciples-as-dogs. Jesus isn't just conditioning us to respond to a stimulus or the promise of a treat, and he isn't bribing us with the promise of affection if only we will be good little boys and girls.  He is saturating us in his own love, so that love will be our own way of life.  He is immersing us in his own life, so that his presence will flow from us into the world around us.

That's the connection we so often miss between Jesus' "commandments" and his talk of "abiding"--they are both centered in love, and they are both grounded in his life.  Jesus' commandments to us are not random tricks like teaching a dog to beg, sit, or roll over; they are directions to embody the same love we have found in him!  That's the key difference.  If I try to get my dog to roll over on command, there is no expectation that I will do the same.  At no point am I teaching my dog, "Do what you see me doing, and let my way of life be your way of life."  But when Jesus directs us to keep his commandments, it is worth remembering that his commandments are never just random behaviors unconnected with Jesus himself--they are directions to follow Jesus' own way of life.  When he calls us to love one another, to love strangers, and to love enemies, it is because this is Jesus' own way of living in the world.  When he calls us to share our abundance, to welcome the outcast and excluded ones, to forgive those who have wronged us, and to lay down our lives for one another, these are exactly the same things we see Jesus himself doing.  So at no point is Jesus just conditioning us to do tricks for his entertainment; he is soaking us in his kind of life until it becomes our own.

Today, what if we were at long last done with the old assumption that the Christian faith is just about doing the right actions to earn favor or rewards from God, and instead saw our lives as being immersed in Jesus' own love?  What if we saw the connection between Jesus' commandments to us and his actions toward us in the first place?  And what if we saw our lives no longer in terms of getting prizes for good behavior but becoming more like the one who loves us?  What would we do with this day?  

Lord Jesus, immerse us still in your love so that our lives become saturated with your life, and so that our actions and words will take the shape of yours.