Commandment

“observe the commandment of your father”  Proverbs 6:20

Commandment – “So, why should I listen to you?  What makes you think you know so much?”  Have you ever heard that kind of reply?  The answer to the question is not based on superior knowledge.  It is based on greater pain.  The deeper my pain in life, the more I realize my insufficiency and need.  That is the reason why I want to pass on an order to my children.  I want to protect them from the pain I have experienced.

Too often we attempt to communicate commands from the lofty heights of intellect.  Our pearls of wisdom are received as arrogant morality.  It is not the righteous man who breaks open a hardened heart.  It is the man who has suffered much.  Pain connects us.  That’s why my friend Anthony, a man God saved out of a life of drug dealing and prison, can puncture the hardest teenage shell.  His pain drives a knife into the soul of anyone who listens.

Mishwah, the word for “commandment”, is primarily used to speak of God’s commands and decrees.  But if you thought God was communicating with you (not to you) from moral superiority, think again.  God’s experience of pain is far deeper and far more devastating than we could ever hope to imagine.  God’s commandments are His attempts to protect us from that place where His Son traveled in order to redeem us.  That place so terrible, so unspeakably lonely, that God will do everything possible to keep us from traveling there.  It is not just the pain of Jesus’ passion.  It is the pain of separation – from the Father, from life with meaning, from bodily harmony, from reality.  God is trying to protect us from that.  And the best way is simply, “Son, observe my commandments.  Observe the agony that I went through to bring you this truth.  Be careful, please.”

Keeping God’s commandments is not odious.  It is the experience of life as it really is.  It is not always pleasant but it is always joyful because it is always aligned with the flow of the universe.  If the mishwah you are following does not make a space for you to fit perfectly in the fabric of the cosmos, you might want to take another look at the command you think God ordered.  After all, doesn’t He say, “My commandments are not grievous”? 

My pain brought me to my father’s commandment.  His pain touched the wound in me.  Suddenly I saw His love flowing to me in words of wisdom, forged in the agony of care.