Lip service or life service?

How often when it comes to our faith life, do we say we will do something but never get round to it? I don’t know about you but at certain times of the year - generally New Year and the beginning of Lent - I make resolutions which generally involve getting up a good hour earlier each day and spending more quality time with God. But when the morning comes I can all too often be found hitting the snooze button and snuggling up under the duvet rather than on my knees praying.

The Parable of the Two Sons speaks to this tendency in all of us. This parable is unique to Matthew’s gospel and was originally aimed at the chief priests and the Jewish elders who prided themselves on their very public adherence to strict and precise religious laws.

Jesus told this parable in the temple in Jerusalem, where he had only recently overturned the tables of the money lenders, accusing them and the leaders who sanctioned them of defiling the house of God. So he wasn’t there at the invitation of the Pharisees.

A few years previously these same Jewish leaders had been to see the seemingly eccentric prophet John the Baptist who had spoken against them for thinking that they were automatically privileged to be called sons of Abraham. Now the same leaders came to question Jesus and his authority to preach in the holy of holies, and in reply Jesus tells them a tale about a father who calls on his two sons to go out in the vineyard to go to work.

The first son is reluctant and rather truculently says he has better things to do, but after he has had time to reflect, changes his mind and goes out into the vineyard to do his father’s bidding.

The second son says all the right things – yes he will go and do this father’s work - but when he realizes the commitment involved in doing what his father’s will, chooses not to obey. And at the end of the parable, Jesus poses the question to the Pharisees ‘which of the two did the will of the father?’

When we look at the parable in its original context, it seems that the second son – who is full of promise and no action - represents the Pharisees and Scribes, the religious leaders of the day who made a show of their zeal for the law, but rejected the truth spoken by John the Baptist. While the first son who, at first resists, represents the prostitutes and the tax collectors - the sinners Jesus spent most of his time with – who had so been so openly and brashly rebellious towards God but who responded to John the Baptist’s call to repent. Jesus’s point being that the religious leaders who should most exemplify righteousness did not believe , while those thought to be unrighteous did believe and would enter God’s kingdom.

Obedience

This is first and foremost a parable about obedience; about living a life of not only hearing but also doing the will of God and thereby respecting Jesus’s authority. It is about living a life in which one give’s more than lip service to faith.

In this parable, Matthew clearly intends a tight linkage with Jesus’s powerful statement at the end of the Sermon on the Mount in which he warns, ‘Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven but only the one who does the will of the father who is in heaven.’

In other words, right words don’t ensure entry into the Kingdom; it is essential to do walk the talk – something the Pharisees spectacularly failed to do. It isn’t enough to just attend church, to know the words of the creed, to be able to pray skillfully, to place our coin in the offertory plate. . . . it is about offering our whole selves to God in response to his love, to others and to the world. It is about demonstrating active obedience to Jesus’s teaching throughout every aspect of our lives – even those hard teaching such as loving our enemy and turning the other cheek, which in the face of atrocities such as those committed in Manchester and London Bridge can seem almost impossible. But that is the whole point – no matter how hard it is, we must walk the talk.

Motives

This is also a parable about motivation because God cares less about what we do than why we obey him.

In the very first words of the parable, Jesus asks the leaders ‘But what do you think?’ in effort to get them to question their own thoughts and motives. And the first commandment given to us by Jesus was, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'. God cares not just about our actions but our character, for as he told Samuel, ‘people look at outward appearances but the Lord looks at the heart.’ The motivation of obedience matters.

All too often our obedience to God is like that of a child. Sometimes when young children want something, they will offer to do chores such as washing the car, cleaning up their bedrooms etc., only to come back later on to ask if they can then go to the cinema.

But aren’t we sometimes all like this – we do something for God, we worship him, we praise him because we will get something out of it; this may be something tangible like a new job, or healing, or may be just a sense of peace. But when we obey God for what we will get out of it, we are still making a childish bargain with him.

At other times we may be obedient because we are afraid. When I was a young woman I went briefly to a Baptist church in Wales, led by a fiery hell and brimstone preacher. He frightened the life out of me with his vision of the hell that awaited if I did not obey, but that kind of obedience is also immature.

God will never force our obedience. The very definition of free will means that we are free to let him down, to fail to follow through on our promises.

God doesn’t want us to obey him because we are afraid of him or because we want to get something from him – like a celestial vending machine. He wants us to obey him because we love him and out of the sheer joy of being obedient to our father.

What he doesn’t want is hypocrisy – the show of obedience in our Sunday best, telling him what we think he wants to hear, then failing to follow through.

But the truly good news is that God knows our faults. He knows that most of us have been like both sons at one time and another. Over the centuries he has said follow me, only for us to reply, ‘ In a minute Lord,’ ‘I need to figure some things out before I follow you Lord,’ or like the disciple in Luke, ‘I need to go and first bury my father’. But he is gracious and although we don’t deserve his mercy, he is willing to give us a second chance, like the first son in this parable.

He is willing to wait for us patiently until we grow up, until we come to him in maturity and say ‘your will be done.’ And when we turn and decide to obey he will run with open arms to as he did to the Prodigal son.

So this parable leaves us with this question: are we giving God our life service and not just lip service?

Kate Nicholas is author of Sea Changed which is available in Christian bookstores and Waterstones throughout the UK and online at eden.co.uk and Amazon worldwide.