How Jesus submits to his Father.

John 5.30.

After Jesus cured some guy, the Judeans objected because he did it on sabbath, so Jesus went into a teaching about how he works because his Father works—and he’s also gonna judge the world at the End.

He ends this declaration with this statement, which I figured I’d discuss on its own because it has to do with how Jesus submits to his Father. Submission is a loaded concept for certain Christians—especially since some of ’em are interpreting the idea in ways which wind up going heretic. So it’s turned this statement into a loaded one.

Statement first though.

John 5.30 KWL

“I can’t do anything on my own.

I judge just as I hear,

and my judgment is fair

because I don’t seek my own will,

but the will of the One who sends me.”

Just to remind you: Separation of powers is an American thing. Our executives don’t judge, and our judges don’t carry out their rulings but have cops and marshals who do that. But that’s obviously not how ancient kings work. Kings were the supreme rulers of their land, and were by themselves the supreme court—if a king ruled, there’s no overruling him.

Our ideas of plaintiffs and defendants, who got to argue their case before the judge; of laws and precedents the king was supposed to follow: Those are important. If the king actually follows those things, you’ll get a fair trial. But despots don’t care about any of those things, and do as they please. Rogue Supreme Courts ignore the Constitution and precedents, ignore the people who argued in front of them, rule according to their agendas, and make up ridiculous arguments to defend their rulings. Ancient and medieval kings didn’t even bother to defend themselves; they figured they had every right to rule as they pleased. Fairness? Fairness doesn’t matter.

In comparison, Jesus says he’s not a despot. He doesn’t judge on his own. He judges as he hears, meaning he listens to the plaintiffs and defendants before him. He follows a Law which defines good and evil. He takes God’s will into consideration; not his own.

As any good Israeli king should. As Solomon did. And of course, as Romans didn’t—they might be bothered to have fair trials when it was a fellow Roman on trial, like Paul, but if you didn’t have citizenship they’d simply torture you, as they almost did Paul. Ac 22.24-27 Or they’d delay your trial ’cause they wanted a bribe, likewise as they did with Paul. Ac 24.25 Right here, Jesus is contrasting his fair and righteous rule with that of Romans—and corrupt judges, like the senators who later sentenced him to death.

Because being a fair judge is what God wants. God cares about truth. God doesn’t want people unjustly punished and penalized. God doesn’t want the guilty to go free, the evildoer to unrepentantly get away with it. Corrupt judges look the other way because they favor the rich and powerful, and maybe want their wealthy friends to take ’em on vacations and help ’em buy RVs. Jesus in contrast will always rule fairly. Always.

But let’s be honest: Jesus totally has an agenda. He’s totally biased. He admits it. Ignore all those Christians who claim Jesus and God are the only unbiased judges in the universe; of course the LORD is biased. Fortunately for us, grace means he’s biased in our favor, which is why Jesus says in this very same passage, “I promise you the one who hears my word, and trusts the One who sends me, has life in the age to come and doesn’t go into judgment.” Jn 5.24 KWL Those who follow Jesus don’t get a trial! They go straight into the age to come. That’s the team we wanna be on.

So what other bias does Jesus confess to? He says it right there in today’s verse: “I don’t seek my own will, but the will of the One who sends me.” He’s not a despot who does whatever he wants; he only wants to do as the Father wants. The Father is a righteous judge; therefore the Son’s gonna be a righteous judge.

If you’re anxious Jesus is gonna be furious at sin, much like angry preachers are… well okay, he certainly hates sin. Especially when people exploit the poor and needy, and figure it’s okay because they went through all the proper religious motions to wipe out all their bad karma. The LORD already said, through Isaiah, he’s not listening to such people. Is 1.15 He wants ’em to repent!

Therefore he’s gonna be a righteous judge—who may be exorbitantly lenient on those who follow him, but judges everyone else fairly, on merit. And while there are many Christians who insist only the people who follow Jesus are gonna enter the age to come, I’m pretty sure Jesus is gonna extend grace to a lot more people than they’re expecting. People who honestly didn’t know any better; people who died before hearing the gospel, so they’re not penalized for rejecting it; babies who died before they could hear it, of course. Jesus is far more gracious than angry preachers. Or me!—there’s lots of people I wouldn’t let in, but thankfully I’m not the judge.

Submitting to the Father.

First, I gotta remind people of what submission means in the scriptures. It does not mean capitulation to a dominant person. When a wife submits to her husband, it does not mean he’s the king and she’s the subject, he’s the master and she’s the servant, he’s the drill sergeant and she’s the cadet. Because if that were the dynamic, Paul’s statement “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God,” Ep 5.21 KJV addressed to everybody in the Ephesian church, makes no sense. If submission requires dominance, how can people on the same level submit to one another? What, we take turns bossing each other around?

Properly ὑποτάσσω/ypotásso, “one submits,” means “arrange under.” It can mean subordination, but it can just as much mean we accommodate another person. If a husband wants to watch a gory horror movie, but his wife is just repelled by all that violence and would rather watch anything else, he’s either gonna be a jerk and insist she sit through his choice, or he’s gonna submit to his wife and pick a movie they could both enjoy.

And that’s the sort of submission we see in the scriptures. Domineering Christians are gonna try to rejigger those verses, and claim they’re really about making people do as they’re told, but in context they’re about people taking others into consideration. Yes Jesus obeys his Father, but it’s more in a sense of he wants what the Father wants; he’s trying to unify their will. He has his own will, but he wants to follow the Father’s will. And part of the Lord’s Prayer is “Thy will be done”—we should take the Father’s will into consideration. Do we believe he wants what’s best for us, or don’t we?

But for domineering Christians, none of this is about loving children wanting to please a loving Father. It’s about an angry God who’s enraged by sin, demanding his kids toe the line or face his wrath. And more often, it’s about an angry Christian who’s enraged by the few sins which offend them personally, demanding that both pagans and Christians stop it, and obey their will. The Father’s not gonna judge them till the End, but the angry Christians are gonna judge ’em right now, and smite ’em till they’re satisfied.

For them, they skip over all the ideas about Jesus being a fair judge in this verse, and focus on the fact Jesus seeks the Father’s will, and not his own. Because they interpret submission as a domination thing, they imagine Jesus toeing the line, and not daring to step outside his Father’s will. Sometimes because they believe Jesus sacrificed his own will entirely; sometimes because they actually teach Jesus feared his Father, which is all kinds of f---ed up. Either way, Jesus wholly bent the knee to the Father, and is an example to us about how we oughta be. How we better be, if we know what’s good for us.

A subordinate person of the trinity?

In the early 400s, there was some confusion among Christians about Jesus’s nature. Heck, there’s still confusion about this: Is he God, or is he human? Wait, he’s both? How is he both?—is he a hybrid, a demigod, half man and half God, like a mule is half donkey and half horse? Does that make him a new thing, that’s neither God nor human? Or has his humanity overwhelmed his divinity?—or has his divinity overwhelmed his humanity?

Odd questions, and of course there are biblical answers to these questions, but your average Christian back then didn’t read. (Same as Christians today, except the difference is Christians today usually can read, but just don’t.) So they couldn’t look up proofs in the bible. But what they could do is what ancient philosophers usually did: Think up reasonable explanations for why they believed as they did. If they personally suspected Jesus was a demigod, they pitched some logical reasons why this must be so. And sometimes they also got hold of some out-of-context proof-texts, which is also still a popular practice.

So in October 451, Christian leaders throughout the Roman Empire gathered at Chalcedon, Bithynia, Asia Minor, to hash out who Jesus is once and for all. I’ll quote this part of their conclusion from Ligionier Ministries’ website.

“We believe in One God the Father All-sovereign, Maker of all things visible and invisible:

“And in One Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only-begotten, that is, from the essence of the Father; God from God, Light from Light, very God from very God; begotten, not made; co-essential with the Father; through whom all things were made [both in heaven and in earth]; who for us men and for our salvation came down from the heavens, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and lived as man; was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and rose the third day according to the Scriptures, and ascended into the heavens; and sitteth on the right hand of the Father, and again cometh with glory to judge the quick and the dead, of whose kingdom there shall be no end:

“And in the Spirit, holy, sovereign, and life-giving.

“But those who say, ‘Once He was not,’ and ‘Before He was begotten He was not,’ and that ‘He was made out of nothing,’ or who say that ‘the Son of God is of a different hypostasis or essence,’ or ‘mutable’ or ‘changeable’; these the catholic and apostolic church anathematizes.”

You might notice they borrowed a bit of the Nicene Creed, and added a bunch of details to the portion about who Jesus is. Becaue they wanted to make it clear who Jesus is; clear how the scriptures describe him, but also clear about what the scriptures don’t mean. Like “begotten, not made”—we use the word “begotten” because the bible does, but we don’t mean there’s any point inside or outside time where Jesus hadn’t yet been created. Begotten means he comes from the Father; not that he’s made by the Father.

And he’s not a lesser or subordinate god: He’s the God. “God from God, Light from Light, very God from very God.” There’s no going over Jesus’s head to his Father, ’cause the Father isn’t the Son’s boss; he’s his Father. Whom he honors same as we’re supposed to honor our fathers; whose will he wants to do because he loves his Father. And Jesus submits to his Father same as we Christians are meant to mutually submit to one another.

And of course domineering Christians do not understand this idea. They can’t fathom loving mutual submission in the trinity. It’s not how they run things, so they project their attitudes onto God and insist the trinity is a hierarchy. One with the Father ruling over the Son and Holy Spirit—since he begets the Son and sends the Spirit, isn’t it obvious he’s the boss of the trinity?—and just as the Father is over the Son, they insist pastors are over ordinary Christians, men are over women, and parents are over children. It’s how they justify their sexist beleifs and behavior: Claim God does it, and they’re just mimicking their Father.

But yep, they’ve stumbled into heresy. ’Cause Jesus isn’t a lesser person of the trinity, a lower person of the trinity, a subordinate person of the trinity. Jesus is the king of God’s kingdom. He’s in charge. His Father put him in charge—not because the Father is resigning from being God, nor because the Father is rejiggering the hierarchy in the trinity so the Son’s in charge instead. There is no hierarchy. Reading one into the trinity so you can boss other Christians around, is the worst reason to see it in there. It goes against grace, and certainly defies the love which God is.

And yet people are gonna try to extrapolate it from this particular bible verse. Boggles the mind.