Friday of the 5th Week of Easter
Acts 15:22-31 | Psalm 56:8-12 | John 15:12-17
I shall not call you servants any more,
because a servant does not know
his master’s business.
I call you friends,
because I have made known to you
everything I have learnt from my Father.
(John 15:15)
The master-disciple dynamic is a staple of kung fu movies, ranging from the mind-numbing “wax on, wax off” inculcation of personal discipline, to the wise shifu who holds back an important move from his wayward disciple, so that the inevitable coup d’etat comes to a crippling end for the usurper.
The latter scenario tends to prevail across the world today. Many mentors hold back on vital information to protect their position viz. their charges, no doubt inspired by the above movies and others which depict a gory end to generous teachers. The feeling of “power through superior knowledge” is also exceedingly seductive. If I don’t tell you everything you need to know, so the conventional wisdom goes, I can ensure that you’ll never threaten my status.
It’s a rare tutor who willingly imparts the sum total of his knowledge to his students, bringing them to equal status with himself. As the only Son of God and the incarnation of divinity on earth, Jesus could have upheld the “bow down before my magnificence, unworthy mortals” dynamic, but He chose not to.
It was Jesus who imparted to His disciples the totality of God’s love, and to us through them, in a simplified and more attainable form.
It was Jesus who stooped to wash the feet of his own disciples, showing by example the relationship we should adopt with each other: not suffering servants to overbearing overlords but eucharistic (thanks-giving) equals.
And it was Jesus who plumbed the depths of agape, the total and unconditional love that God has for His creation, by acting on His own exhortations to love and giving up His life for all mankind.
✞ ✞ ✞ ✞ ✞
When I began my freelancing consulting almost 20 years ago, many people warned me about revealing too much about my methods, so as not to give away my competitive advantage. They’d often supplement their exhortations with horror stories about customers who repurposed staff training and other deliverables of consulting contracts to eventually put their creators out of business.
It was my oldest and best friend, an atheist with a heart more Christ-like than most, who urged me not to adopt such a selfish attitude. He had a rather interesting justification, too: “If you keep holding on to your position and purpose with a death-grip, how would you be able to let go and move on when the world changes?”
There’s even less reason to selfishly cling on to our knowledge of God. After all, living in the love of the Lord isn’t a zero-sum game; I increase my “love bounty” by sharing it with others, not hoarding it for myself. It’s similar in a sense to a concept in my daily work called open-source software, in which freely exposing the inner workings of my software benefits others by their increased knowledge, but it also benefits me by the knowledge I gain in turn from others’ willingness to open their source code, as well as additional “eyes” on my work to detect issues that I would not have discovered on my own, and otherwise make necessary improvements.
So if, dear reader, you see something incongruous or simply wrong in my daily sharings, please do point them out in the comments. We can all benefit from critical examination of our individual faith. Thanks much!
Lord, do not let us withhold the fruits of Your love from others. Remind us every day to share our knowledge of You and of our Father, so that others may come to know and love You too. Amen.