I thank God for situations of submitting. Different conditions arise in my life wherein I am called to submit my will. Some of these last life-long, or for most of my life—in job or family or church. I recently had to submit to my denomination to go in a different direction than I had planned. Thank you Jesus for these situations!
Authority is good to wield and heed. A centurion once said as much to Jesus with an earnest request to heal a dying servant. The soldier saw no need for the busy Teacher to come to the Gentile’s house. So, he said (to paraphrase), “I get it. I may be in authority over some, but I am also under authority of others. This is the way the world works. And I am talking to One similarly submitted and powerful. Just say the word.” The submitted One did.
And that is it. The reason to thank God in answering appropriate calls to obey, rather than to just grin and bear it, is because in doing so we are proclaiming, nay, imaging the experience of God. We see this in the Divine Persons of the Trinity in Their working in relation for our world. Their way of acting follows Their way of being.
This news shocks our egalitarian age. After generations of training, people breathe in and out the Platonic idea that order means inferiority. It infects gender relations, such that young women viscerally reject the Bible’s commands about asymmetry in relationship (Ephesians 5:22-33, 1Corinthians 11:3-16, 14:33-37, 1Timothy 2:8-12, 1Peter 3:1-7, Colossians 3:18-19). Instead of receiving them with joy, as an equal to welcome an authority or acknowledge leadership in a man, they feel the commands to be evil.
But the truth is, Christ is eternally begotten from the Father. We call it a “procession” in God’s triune nature. The Second Beloved One comes out of the First Promiser. The ontological asymmetry comes across to us in the Beloved Second One’s reception of the Father’s authority. We see this as we see Them create (Proverbs 8:12-31) or redeem (John 10:17-18).
As well-tanned Floridian teachers, Scott Swain and Michael Allen, put it in honed theological language:
The divine missions flow forth and manifest the temporal extension of the divine processions; the relations of origin within the triune life, then, shape the form of external works performed by the three persons together….The eternal Son’s receptivity in relation to his Father – expressed poignantly in the doctrine of eternal generation – provides the metaphysical and relational grounds for his free enactment of his proper activity in the divine economy, which is time and again characterized as obedience.
Of course, it is different for the Trinity than it is for us. The Promiser does not command the Beloved in the same way that one creature commands another, with their separate, and sometimes sinful, wills. The divine Persons possess one will in common, a perfect desiring of only good. Yet, proper to each Person, They hold that one will differently.
So, when Jesus says things—as He often does—like: “My Father is working until now, and I am working….Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing… I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 5:17-19, 30), He is not showing a second will alongside that of the Father. He is revealing the proper mode whereby the Beloved One shares the Father’s will.
As dark horse theologian Steven D. Boyer puts it, “to obey is as Godlike as to command.”
If this tastes strange, along with the analogy of our lives to follow it (1Corinthians 11:3, 12), it is because we have been raised on non-Trinitarian food, such that taxis (or order) strikes our palate as exotic. Yet, would we partake of heaven’s banquet, we must come to relish how “glad submission is intrinsic to the divine nature itself.”
Can these doctrinal truths refresh us?
Can we be nourished otherwise to answer our lives’ calls?