Follow Jesus, or else

By John Pearring

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/071523.cfm
Genesis 49:29-32; 50:15-26a
Matthew 10:24-33

Follow Jesus, or else. The cause and effect described in Matthew 5:20-26 and 10:24-33 present the same outcome. 

Everyone who acknowledges me before others
I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father.
But whoever denies me before others,
I will deny before my heavenly Father.
(Mt 10:32-33)

Whoever obeys and teaches these commandments will be called greatest in the kingdom of heaven. I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
(Mt 5:19-20)

That’s our first interpretation. Follow Jesus, or else.

On second glance, reading the previous and following verses, we hear some encouragements. “Therefore, do not be afraid of them. Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known.”

On our third go around with these scriptures, we realize God has something lovely to tell us. “Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.”

Most of the time, we only live by our first takes. That’s the human experience. We have been programmed through every authority that formed and loved us to evade failure or suffer the consequences. Our relationship with God, the source of all love and authority, gets molded by how our minds and hearts see authority. We figure that spiritual activity mirrors human activity. We think God expects good, better, and best performance levels too. Our follow-through with God, we calculate, demands the same accountability as everything else we do. We are successful. Or, we are not. We are brave and heroic, intelligent and accomplished, and thereby rewarded; or our incompetence, miscalculations, and ignorance doom us.

Life—in all its expressions—supports performance & accountability, no matter how old we get or whether we are unlucky or oppressed. We develop habits of the well-dressed or the fool. Each thing has its consequences.

Is that so wrong? Are consequences not a measurable thing? Didn’t the training of “Do this, or else” ultimately form us into good citizens? 

At five years of age, most of us got candy, allowances, hugs, high fives, and ice cream when our performance met the subsequent accountability required. It’s how we stopped eating our boogers, learned to poop in a toilet, ate our vegetables, and successfully greeted everyone who entered our home with a firm handshake and an appropriate kiss on the cheek.

At ten, we got dressed in time for the school bus, did our homework before television, pulled weeds when asked the first time, apologized to our best friend for tripping him down the stairs, and wrote thought-out thank you letters on our birthday.

At fifteen, we turned down a beer and a cigarette on the same day, fixed our sister’s bike without being asked, said something nice to a frightened girl, waved at a policeman, and wore those stupid Argyle socks our mother bought us.

At twenty, we chose a political party that fit our concepts of compassion and patriotism, paid for our own newish set of tires, told the truth at a job interview, picked up the trash in a neighbor’s yard, willingly took a girl to a nice restaurant without payback, exercised for a whole week, and walked out on a morally challenging movie.

These positive behaviors, though, are just the highlights. Many high-road actions happened only that one time. Some we do regularly. Some seldom.

God, through all our formative authority figures, urged comportment, high morals and ethics, passion, maturity, manners, and fairness in our daily walk. However, the sum total of our performance and accountability doesn’t buy us salvation. God doesn’t weigh our walk upon a scale of “or else.” The “or else” is simply what happens when we don’t follow Jesus.

“Or else,” the consequence of side-tracking, rejecting, or ignoring truth exposes the effect of sin. Put your hand on a hot stove. Run into traffic. Jump off a roof with an umbrella. Cheat on your taxes. Hate your brother. Curse a friend. These are the “Or else.”

Heaven is a gift. We have to accept it, “Or else.”

Performance and accountability may seem like a waste of time. Even our religion confuses us. Confession is necessary, but God has already forgiven us. God loves us as we are and yet says he will mold us into perfection. The bar of propriety seems too high, yet the Holy Spirit remains with us. Holiness hovers over everything we do. 

Follow Jesus, or else.

We might wish we were innocent children again; when our Godly relationship seemed immediately connected to performance. Not all of us were perfect angels. Even though Jesus clearly states that we should desire to be like children again, the impracticality and embarrassing dependence required to be innocent and full of abject wonder like a child seems impossible.

We can’t go back to childish lifestyles, so what child-like characteristic works for adults to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven? How does “follow Jesus, or else” work out for adults. The answer is not marketable. I can’t sell it to you because I can’t bottle it. Yet, it’s straight from the two Matthew readings.

“Follow Jesus. Hear what he whispers. Then, acknowledge Jesus before others”

The characteristic to “follow” means to act like you did when you followed your mom, your dad, your big brother, and Mrs. Knight, your kindergarten teacher. Except now, you follow Jesus and do what he says. 

What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops.

The result? You walk in and into the Kingdom of Heaven. When you get hit by a bus, a cancer, an overdose, a broken heart, or any other fatal horror, you cross over into the next life like stepping out of a shower.

That’s pretty much the whole thing, with consequential mind-blowing stuff that comes to us as God does his amazing grace stuff.

Everyone who acknowledges me before others I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father.

Following Jesus helps big time when we have a bunch of friends who are also believers. Or maybe just one good friend. Pretty soon, though, Jesus will bring all kinds of his body of friends to our attention. We help each other to follow Jesus and do what he says. 

If we don’t go this childlike way, we can try a lifetime of righteous activity and maybe only figure it out when we fail miserably. God will work out what to do with us when we make life harder than it is.

The measures of this world are not the measures used by God. Over and over again, we hear it. Follow Jesus, and do what he says. Then tell others.