I have preached in the past that one can sum up the entire Bible in two words: “love” and “obey.” The first word is “love,” and it’s a pretty tall order. The First and the Second great commandments are to love God with everything we have and to love each other the way we want to be loved. While that is simple to say, it is very difficult to put into practice with any consistency.
The other word in that pair is “obey.” That might actually be the harder command. And the Scriptures today give us a hint about the difficulty of being obedient, but they reveal the glory that can come from true obedience. Let’s take a moment and talk about what it means to be obedient and the implications of that word on our behavior and our attitude.
To be obedient in the sense that we are talking about is to choose to do what somebody else told you to do without a lot of preliminary dialogue. Instead of needing convincing, we just agree to the plan, and we get working on it without griping. There is such a thing as forced obedience, but that is more commonly described as slavery. In that condition, we do what somebody else chooses because he makes us do it.
Today we are going to focus on voluntary obedience. We use our wills, that is our volition, to choose to accept some external being’s direction over what we do and when we do it. We put our wills under the will of somebody else. When we choose to obey somebody, we embrace the surrendering of our control over our choices. St. Thomas Aquinas describes love as “willing the good of the other.” Obedience is almost “willing the will of the other.” Love and obedience are intrinsically connected. Both are acts of generosity, for in both cases we give away control. When we choose obedience, we are not simply making the best of a bad situation; we are declaring it a good situation and we want to play our part.
The reason why this is so important is because the pride of disobedience is the root sin of the human condition. The original sin committed by Adam and Eve was to disobey God’s instructions. The tone that Ezekiel brings forth in the reading today is about Israel feeling that the Lord’s commands are unfair. On some level, Adam and Eve were persuaded by the Devil to feel that the Lord’s restriction was unfair.
Disobedience starts with pride. It is pride that tells us that we should decide what is fair and what is unfair. The Christian understanding is that God alone is the judge. The arbitration of what is fair and unfair is ultimately left to God alone. Our assessment of the fairness or the unfairness of anything has to always fit within the acknowledgment that we can trust our heavenly father and his assessment of the fairness of the situation.
But we do want to do that, do we? We want to evaluate our father’s instructions. Perhaps they need to be updated for the current time. Perhaps our Father doesn’t really know what’s going on. Perhaps he doesn’t have our best interests in mind.
The question Jesus puts to the chief priests and elders is really a test of their openness to the father’s will. If they obediently respond to the preaching of Jesus Christ, they will no longer be chief priests and elders but simple Christians. Their pride gets in the way. The preaching of Jesus does not fit in their personal conception of God. Instead of obeying the message, they set about to destroy the messenger.
St. Paul shares with the Philippians the fruit of the obedience of Jesus Christ. Jesus is God, but he did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Equality with God was exactly what the Tempter offered to Adam and Eve in the form of the fruit in the garden. Equality with God is exactly what you and I do when we decide that this particular sinful action isn’t a sin in this particular case. And we do the same thing when we update the timeless teaching of the Church to fit the current state of our thinking. To God alone is reserved the judgment over sin. But our pride can get in the way.
Jesus emptied himself. He took the form of a slave coming in human likeness, and he was found human in appearance. Rather than grasp equality with God, Jesus humbly took on the limited knowledge and limited strength of humanity when he took on human vesture. He humbled himself, St. Paul says. He humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the Cross.
True God and True Man, Jesus obeyed his heavenly father’s plan and suffered the most horrible form of execution the Romans could think of. But God had a plan, and it was a good plan, and Jesus trusted the plan. Man meant the Cross for evil, but God brought forth good.
It is because of the Cross, because of Jesus Christ sacrificing himself on the Cross in obedience to his Father, that God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name. St. Paul says it is because of the Cross that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend. It is because of the Cross that every tongue must confess Jesus Christ is Lord. The Cross is a symbol of humble obedience. When we take up our Cross and follow Jesus, we are following in his footsteps of humility and obedience.
The key to humility is obedience. As someone said, humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking less about yourself. Humility is the polar opposite of pride. We have in our faith a wonderful model of humility in Mary, the mother of Jesus. When she was told incredible things by an archangel, she said, “okay.” She pondered the great things that did happen to her, but she never fought them. At the foot of the Cross on Good Friday, she said “okay” through her tears as her son died in front of her.
In Jesus Christ, and in Our Lady, we have two models of humility and obedience. One knew that he was greatly exalted, and yet he freely chose to suffer debasing torture and execution because it was the will of his father. One knew that she was lowly, yet she freely chose to be the instrument through which God became man, through which the Word was made flesh.
Most of us are not going to be called to plumb the depths of humility and obedience that Jesus and Mary did. But we will be given opportunities to surrender our pride and embrace obedience as a means of growing in humility. In those moments when the course of our lives is running in a direction that offends our pride, let us turn to Jesus and to Mary and ask for the strength to say, “okay.” Let us walk away from the prideful rejection of our heavenly father as the Lord of our lives. Let us be truly his sons and daughters by saying “yes” to the details of his plan. And, over the years of our lives, let our multiple “yes’s” stack up and be proof of our own obedience and humility.
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