Duty

Duty. For many in our culture, this is a cold, heartless word. Duty has no emotion. Duty mechanically goes about doing what needs to be done stoically. Consequently, doing your duty as a husband or wife seems to those captured by romanticism to be unloving. Love can’t be a duty because love must always be deeply emotional, and emotions can’t be commanded. One must be captured by love, overwhelmed by emotion. Love can’t be a willful discipline.

I believe understanding duty in this way is misguided. Duty reflects an allegiance that runs deeper than present emotions. It is being committed to people so that you do what is best for them no matter how you feel in the present.

Jesus loved us dutifully. On the night Jesus was betrayed, he told his disciples that his being glorified by the Father for their sakes would involve him going on a lonely journey (Jn 13:33). No one else could do this. This was Jesus’ personal responsibility, his duty. We know from Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane that he didn’t have the warm fuzzies about enduring the cross. Emotions may have been screaming at him to find every way to avoid the cross, but he had a deeper allegiance to his Father, his disciples, and the world than his present feelings of dread. He had a duty.

Jesus gave the same duty to his disciples when he told them, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (Jn 13:34). Loving one another is our duty. We are to have an allegiance to God’s people that runs deeper than our present emotions of irritation or impatience. While we are to work to get our emotions in line with our duty, we are to dutifully love whether we feel like it or not. We are to serve others’ genuine needs when it disrupts our comfort or even when they don’t understand (as the disciples didn’t always understand why Jesus was doing what he was doing).

Only as we do our duty in love will all men know that we are Christ’s disciples. They will not know that we are Christ’s disciples by how we demonstrate our intelligence or how many online arguments we engage in. The world will know that we are Jesus’ disciples when we fulfill our duty to love one another

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