Children are biblically mandated to obey their parents. It is envisaged as an unconditional requirement, except when such obedience conflicts with their absolute duty to obey God. Children are to obey their parents for no other reason than the fact they are parents. Parental authority does not depend on the merit, distinction, affluence and personality of parents. It depends on the very source of parenthood, which is God himself. The authority that parents have on them is, in other words, a reflection of God's authority on them.

It is appropriate, at this juncture, to take note of the emphasis -seemingly exaggerated emphasis- that is laid in the Bible on the spiritual merit of obedience. Disobedience to the will of God as found in Adam and Eve, for one thing, is the seen as the bane of human nature and destiny. In contrast, Jesus came to exemplify the perfection of redemptive obedience. Obedience is more pleasing to God than all the sacrifices and oblations put together. The attitude to obedience that prevails in a society or age is an accurate pointer to the health or sickness of that society.

One of the reasons why so much emphasis is laid on the value of obedience is because of its critical importance in respect of relationships. The biblical culture is quintessentially relational. Biblically, spirituality is envisaged in terms of relationships; our relationship with God first and, on account of that, the nature of our relationships with others. This is what the two cardinal Commandments point to (Lk. 10:27). It was to enable human beings, alienated through sin, to return to God that Jesus came into this world. The main invitation that he issued to the world was to enter into and sustain a relationship with him. "Abide in me, and I in you". It is symptomatic of the disease of our times that 'obedience' is seen largely in negative terms. The feminist resentment at the obedience that is enjoined on wives is symptomatic of the disease that pretends to be the cure.

The alternative to obedience is rebelliousness. Ironically, parents who make a virtue of disobedience are the most resentful of the rebelliousness of their children. Jesus' warning, "with what measure you measure, it will be measured to you" is of immense practical application to the context of family. The pain and poison of rebelliousness is not confined to parents. Children disable and cripple themselves through disobedience. Rebelliousness infects them with the virus of negativity, and they become incapable of responding positively to anything of value. Ironically, the negativity to what is good implies also a positive disposition towards what is evil. So it makes sense that rebellious children get more easily into the traps that others lay for them, whether it be in the form of irresponsible attitude, say, to studies or of addiction to alcohol or drugs, or of various criminal activities. Freedom in such a situation is almost always assumed to be the freedom to say "No". One loses the freedom to say "Yes" to what is good and of lasting value.

Given the growing rebelliousness of our times, the spiritual task is to highlight the heroism of obedience. It is this kind of heroism that we find in Jesus of Nazareth. Its trophies will endure and its glories shall never dim. In comparison the attractiveness of rebelliousness is superficial, temporary and deceptive. But it tends to be more seductive, given the dispositions of unredeemed human nature. The Kingdom of God is, among other things, a Kingdom of godly obedience; whereas the kingdom of Satan is a realm of rebelliousness. More accurately, in the Kingdom 'obedience' is an exercise in enlightened and informed freedom. In the kingdoms of man, obedience tends to be a function of unfreedom and so seems to forfeit its spiritual worth. The plausibility structure of the Kingdom legitimizes obedience. In contrast, the plausibility structure of the world validates and glorifies rebelliousness. Contrary to popular belief, true obedience is akin freedom, whereas disobedience is more akin to slavery. Far too many are enslaved by the spirit of our times, this age of rebelliousness, and are not free enough to obey! It is a basic biblical assumption that human freedom can be perfected only in obedience to God. Rebelliousness narrows the scope of human freedom and eventually abolishes it. That is because the purpose of freedom comes to be abused or misused in rebelliousness and such abuse creates the rationale for its annulment.

Obedience does not stand by itself, or function in a vacuum. It involves a triad of love, humility and trust. What secret of Jesus' perfect obedience to his Father in heaven was in his absolute love for and total truth in his Father. It should be expected therefore that in culture of lovelessness and arrogance, obedience will be seen as an anti-value. Applied to the family context, parents who wish their children to be obedient need to create a family culture based on love, mutual trust and humility. Disobedience is often an expression of mistrust. Or, mistrust provokes disobedience. Obedience is an idiom of humility, and arrogance announces itself as disobedience.

It is not adequately realized that obedience is imbued with the spirit of sacrifice. Paul's exhortation to the followers of Christ to offer themselves as a 'living sacrifice' involves a life of daily obedience to the will of God. Jesus' perfect obedience to the Father involved self-sacrifice. It is this spirit that is incorporated in the Holy Sacrament. The "broken body" of Christ symbolically combines obedience with sacrifice. As a matter of fact, no acceptable sacrifice is possible except through obedience. That is because sacrifice needs to be guided by the will of God, rather than the will of man. The reason why there are specific and inviolable instructions pertaining to sacrifice is to ensure that it is approached and undertaken in obedience. Since the time of Jesus, the only necessary sacrifice is the "living sacrifice" of our daily walk with Jesus in a spirit of obedience. Such obedience is the farthest from a mere mechanical compliance with a set of rules and prescriptions. It involves the awareness of being part of a total scheme of things over which God alone exercises authority. That being the case, we do not nurture our children in the spirit of obedience if we do not inculcate in them this larger awareness that goes beyond the mechanical functions of day-to-day life. What helps most in this process is the enrichment of the worship life of the family.

Obedience, besides, involves a healthy disposition to other people. The willingness to 'listen' is a pre-condition for obedience. In several languages, Indian an otherwise, listening is synonymous for obedience. To listen is t Often disobedience and the refusal to listen go together. That is to say, to listen is to obey. Listening involves the willingness to go beyond the barriers that usually separate human beings. Nor surprisingly, Jesus who came to give us the perfect model of obedience also dismantled the walls of division. An approach to life based on these walls of division, or the refusal to listen, is necessarily one of superficiality. It is the bounden duty of parents to train their children in the art of listening; and this has all sorts of far-reaching implications. The merit of Prophet Samuel as a boy was that he was willing to listen. His response to God was, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." (1 Sam. 3: 9). It is difficult to exaggerate the role that the 'gift to listen' plays in the formation of human personality. And it will be a fatal lapse on the part of parents to overlook the importance of cultivating and multiplying this talent in the growth and development of their children. James says of a double-minded person that he cannot receive anything from the Lord. This is even more true about a disobedient person.

An obedient disposition, especially the willingness to listen with an open mind that it implies, is basic to conversation and communication. It is exasperating in the extreme to have to communicate something to a person who can't and won't listen, even when being party to a conversation. You don't get anywhere with such a person, who either overlooks the basic issue or tries all through to hijack it in a characteristic fashion. The annoyance of this trait increases exponentially as relationships become deeper or more intimate, as in the family context. In a so-called 'near one' it disappoints and exasperates a great deal more than it does in the case of an outsider.Obedience is part of the dynamic of belonging. The rest of the body, for example, does not resent obeying the directions of the brain. A automobile must obey the will of its driver; for it safeguards the interest of both. It is the fact that the driver is within the vehicle -that is to say, he has identified himself explicitly with its interests- that redeems the obedience or submission of the vehicle to the driver's will. The equation will not remain the same if the vehicle were to be remote-controlled. In that case, even though the vehicle will still obey the will of its distance-driver, simply because it cannot be helped, there is no guarantee that obedience in this model is safe against exploitation and recklessness. Obedience that is spiritually valid is the obedience of belonging. Jesus' invitation, "Follow me" is, thus, situated within the pattern, "Abide in me, and I in you". This insistence on a total and bi-lateral relationship is all the guarantee that need for the wholeness of such obedience. Obedience and the sense of belonging reinforce each other. The deeper the sense of belonging, the greater the willingness to obey; and the more one obeys, the more one belongs.

Obedience has its place both in the routine aspects of life and in its extraordinary possibilities. Obedience operates in the structure of the miraculous. It needs to be especially noted that routine obedience is easier than its revolutionary counterpart, wherein obedience is situated in unfamiliar situations and unpredictable outcomes. Yet it is obedience of this order -obedience empowered by faith alone- that takes us to the threshold of miraculous possibilities. Consider, for example, the healing of Naaman the Syrian general. Prophet Elisha asked him, "Go, wash yourself seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will be restored and you will be cleansed." (2 Kings 5: 10). Predictably, the general got the message wrong. The Prophet was not trying to demonstrate the superiority of Jordan over Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus. To Naaman, they were superior to Jordan and that assumption is not questioned in this context. Elisha was making a spiritual point: that obedience was basic to Naaman's healing. All his life he was used to being obeyed, and he went about imposing his will on all people. This had become second nature to him as is evident from the text. He expected the Prophet to conform to his idea of how the healing should be worked: "I thought that he would surly come out to me and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, wave his hand over the spot and cure me of my leprosy". (v. 11). This was Naaman's basic problem. That was the leprosy within; and that is a fundamental and universal human problem. There is a Naaman hidden within every human being, spreading social and domestic leprosy everywhere. Very often, it is this spirit of disobedience arising out of the tendency to take everything and everyone on one's own terms that exiles us from miraculous possibilities. This will become all the more apparent if the structure of the miracles that Jesus performed is examined in the light of the potency of spiritual obedience.

Paul's exhortation to children that they obey their parents and his advice to fathers not to exasperate their children are mutually complementary. Fathers who exasperate their children disturb their sense of belonging and disable them from obeying. Children who disobey their parents provoke them to exasperate them all the more. Disobedience and exasperation are the two coins of unspiritual parent-child relationship. This weakens the roots of family as an institution of love, and needs to be addressed with all the gravity it deserves. But, then, this problem cannot be dealt with in isolation from the tensions and traumas that inhere in loveless husband-wife relationships, marred by disobedience and domination. Family is an organic institution and the ill health of one segment cannot but affect the wholeness of the other. The only viable and comprehensive solution to these multifarious problems is, therefore, for the family to be centred on the Lordship of Jesus Christ. A Christ-centred family will be blessed with healthy relationships. If this redemptive point of family coherence is missing, not even the most elaborate guidelines may safeguard the health and wholeness of a family.