There was this anecdote
about a boy caught in fire. He was
upstairs and his father was downstairs.
The house was already full of smoke.
The father looking upstairs saw his son and told him: Common son,
jump. The son replied: I can’t see you
dad. Never mind if you don’t see me, I
see you, common, jump. So, full of trust
in his father, the boy jumped and he was saved from being barbecued. Obedience is the safest path even if at
times, we resist to obey.
Obedience forms an essential
part of the mystery of Redemption. Sin
is disobedience to God. It is just but
right therefore for Jesus Christ to attain our salvation through obedience. How did Christ obey? Obediens usque ad mortem. Mortem autem crucis. Obedience unto death. Death on the Cross. That is how our Lord Jesus Christ
obeyed. And we as followers of Christ,
are called upon to imitate Christ. We
are called upon to co-redeem with Him.
And the way to do this is to obey always and in everything God’s will.,
even if sometimes we don’t understand why we have to obey. Just like St. Peter who did not understand
why our Lord had asked that his feet be washed by Christ. “You shall never wash my feet.”(cf. John 13:
8). But when our Lord told him that if
he doesn’t allow him to wash his feet, he cannot take part in Him, we see a
sudden conversion in Peter. He now wants
to take a bath: “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head.”(John
13: 9)
The best sacrifice we can
offer God is our obedience. To be able
to say “Yes” to God, we have to learn to say “No” to many things. For example, a student who wants to offer to
God and her parents a “Summa cum Laude” says “No” to window shopping, non-stop TV
viewing, pleasure seeking, etc. An
employee who wants to offer her work to God as a form of prayer will say “No”
to gossip in the office, prolonged break time, lack of order in material
things, etc. We, Catholics, have a
higher good. Each one of us knows her
painful points which we mention in spiritual direction with a good priest or
with a friend who knows us well. And we
will be advised to say “No” to our pride, laziness, vanity, unbridled
sensuality, etc.
Pope Benedict, in his homily
in the Mass of the Lord’s Supper , April 6, 2012, asked us to direct our
attention to Jesus’ prayer in his agony in the garden: “Father, for you all things are
possible; remove this cup from me; yet not what I want, but what you want” (Mk
14:36). Let me reproduce the last
paragraph of his homily:
The natural will of the man Jesus recoils in fear before the enormity of
the matter. He asks to be spared. Yet as the Son, he places this human will
into the Father’s will: not I, but you. In this way he transformed the stance
of Adam, the primordial human sin, and thus heals humanity. The stance of Adam
was: not what you, O God, have desired; rather, I myself want to be a god. This
pride is the real essence of sin. We think we are free and truly ourselves only
if we follow our own will. God appears as the opposite of our freedom. We need
to be free of him – so we think – and only then will we be free. This is the
fundamental rebellion present throughout history and the fundamental lie which
perverts life. When human beings set themselves against God, they set
themselves against the truth of their own being and consequently do not become
free, but alienated from themselves. We are free only if we stand in the truth
of our being, if we are united to God. Then we become truly “like God” – not by
resisting God, eliminating him, or denying him. In his anguished prayer on the
Mount of Olives, Jesus resolved the false opposition between obedience and
freedom, and opened the path to freedom. Let us ask the Lord to draw us into
this “yes” to God’s will, and in this way to make us truly free.
If in
obeying God’s will then will make us truly free, does it matter if it hurts?.
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