Courage in Lovingly Obeying God, Thursday after Epiphany, January 10, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Retreat on Courage in the Christian and Priestly Life
Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary, Emmitsburg, Maryland
Thursday after Epiphany
January 10, 2019
1 Jn 4:19-5:4, Ps 72, Lk 4:14-22

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel, we encounter one of the most dramatic scenes in the life of Jesus. It’s a scene that was used by St. John Paul to structure the entirety of his exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis on priestly formation. It’s a scene that the U.S. Bishops used for their document on preaching the Word of God today. It can apply to so many different contexts because in it we find in some sense a summary of the entire life and work of Jesus. But what I’d like to focus on today is what Jesus says after reading the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah about the work of the long-awaited Messiah (Is 61: “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” He was the fulfillment of Isaiah’s words, the one anointed by the Spirit who, as the subsequent chapters of Luke reveal, was announcing and delivering the Good News to the poor, freedom to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, release to the oppressed, and proclaiming a jubilee of mercy. He was the fulfillment of all of the Messianic hopes, he was the flourishing of the seeds planted throughout the Old Testament.
• But there is a sense in which Sacred Scripture is always supposed to be fulfilled in the hearing. As Christians, as little Christs, little anointed ones, not only are we called to announce the Gospel, care for those imprisoned, blind, oppressed, and sing of the Lord’s mercy, but we are called to incarnate God’s word, to become living, breathing exegetes and walking commentaries. St. Gregory the Great insisted in the early Church, viva lectio vita bonorum, that the life of the good is the living reading of Sacred Scripture, something we clearly see in the lives of the saints. Each of us is called to echo Mary’s prayer, “Let it be done to me according to your word.” Each of us is called not to be an idle listener, but a doer of the Word.” Jesus Christ came to found a family, as he said, whose mother, brothers, and sisters are those who “hear the word of God and observe it.” Hebrew, as you know, uses the same word for “hear” and for “obey.” We are always called to hear the word of God as a word to be done, as a word to be fulfilled in us who hear it.
• This is what St. John is describing in today’s first reading. “For the love of God is this, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome,” he insists, because they in fact make us love like God. All of the law and prophets, Jesus tells us elsewhere, hinge on the command to love God with all we are and have and to love our neighbor. That’s why St. John says today that if we do not love a brother we have seen we cannot love the God we have seen, because God commands us to love our brother. To fulfill the word, we will keep the commandments.
• And so today I would like to focus on the courage required to be obedient, to be true doers of the Word, to hear God’s voice so assiduously that we want to make it the pattern of our life. To be a Christian, to a follower of Jesus, is to be lovingly obedient, as he was, until death, death on the Cross. His whole life is a fulfillment of the prayer, “Thy will be done!,” and he calls each of us to follow him in fulfilling the will of God by doing all that God commands.
• We are living in an age in which freedom is interpreted to be the ability to choose and do whatever one wants rather than what one ought, in accordance with the truth about ourselves, others, the world and God, obedience is a particularly challenging virtue, resolution, promise or vow.
• The first sin of Adam and Eve was a sin of disobedience to God, one that began with the devil’s provoking a lack of trust in the one being obeyed. So Pope Benedict would write in Verbum Domini that the devil continues to insinuate among us the spirituality of disobedience so that we might echo in our own lives his primordial non serviam! “The word of God inevitably reveals the tragic possibility that human freedom can withdraw from this covenant dialogue with God for which we were created,” Pope Benedict writes. “The divine word also discloses the sin that lurks in the human heart. Quite frequently in both the Old and in the New Testament, we find sin described as a refusal to hear the word, as a breaking of the covenant and thus as being closed to God who calls us to communion with himself. Sacred Scripture shows how man’s sin is essentially disobedience and refusal to hear. The radical obedience of Jesus even to his death on the cross (cf. Phil 2:8) completely unmasks this sin. His obedience brings about the New Covenant between God and man, and grants us the possibility of reconciliation. … For this reason it is important that the faithful be taught to acknowledge that the root of sin lies in the refusal to hear the word of the Lord, and to accept in Jesus, the Word of God, the forgiveness which opens us to salvation.”
• In contrast to this spirituality of disobedience, Pope Benedict proposes the obedience of faith, which is a spirituality of hearing the word and accepting Jesus’ mercy. “‘The obedience of faith’ (Rom 16:26; cf. Rom 1:5; 2 Cor 10:5-6) must be our response to God who reveals. By faith one freely commits oneself entirely to God. … The proper human response to the God who speaks is faith. … Faith thus takes shape as an encounter with a person to whom we entrust our whole life.” The model for this type of obedience of faith is, Pope Benedict says, Our Lady. She is the one “in whom the interplay between the word of God and faith [is] brought to perfection, … who by her ‘yes’ to the word of the covenant and her mission, perfectly fulfills the divine vocation of humanity. … Her obedient faith shapes her life at every moment before God’s plan. A Virgin ever attentive to God’s word, she lives completely attuned to that word; she treasures in her heart the events of her Son, piecing them together as if in a single mosaic (cf. Lk 2:19,51).”
• There’s clearly a need for a deeper, lived spirituality of obedience that we see in Mary and in the saints. That’s a necessity among the people of God in general. But there’s a particular need to see it displayed in an exemplary way by us priests and future priest, the spiritual heirs of the ones to whom Jesus first said, “Follow me,” “Do this in memory of me,” “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do,” and “Go and do the same”; by the ones whom he first taught to pray to the Father, “Thy will be done,” three of whom he allowed to overhear his own plea to the Father, “Take this chalice from me, but not my will, but thine be done.”; by the ones whom he sought so to attune to his voice, mind and heart that he could send them out saying, “Whoever listens to you listens to me.”
• This is harder today but even more essential because the devil has been successful in getting many priests to distrust their bishops. The reforms of Dallas on sexual abuse made some priests fear that their bishops were not really fathers who cared for their good with love, but de facto agents of the District Attorney to turn them in, and at the same time, more interested in guarding their own reputation of zero tolerance on abuse than in establishing whether an accusation against one of their priests is true. It’s taken a toll. In this latest wave, when we have seen in the case of a former cardinal that the system sometimes can be broken and a bishop can rise through the ranks who is not only not a holy man, but a good man, it can make keeping the promise to respect and obey him humanly much harder. But that’s precisely why now we need to respond to God’s grace to give the witness of an obedience in which we manifest that we believe that when we’re listening to our bishop in everything short of asking us to do something sinful, we’re hearing the Lord.
• The Church calls future priests to this. In Pastores Dabo Vobis, John Paul II wrote, “Among the virtues most necessary for the priestly ministry must be named that disposition of soul by which priests are always ready to seek not their own will, but the will of him who sent them (cf. Jn. 4:34; 5 :30; 6:38).” It is in the spiritual life of the priest that obedience takes on certain special characteristics.”
  • “First of all, obedience is apostolic in the sense that it recognizes, loves and serves the Church in her hierarchical structure. Indeed, there can be no genuine priestly ministry except in communion with the supreme pontiff and the episcopal college, especially with one’s own diocesan bishop, who deserves that ‘filial respect and obedience’ promised during the rite of ordination. This ‘submission’ to those invested with ecclesial authority is in no way a kind of humiliation. It flows instead from the responsible freedom of the priest who accepts not only the demands of an organized and organic ecclesial life, but also that grace of discernment and responsibility in ecclesial decisions which was assured by Jesus to his apostles and their successors for the sake of faithfully safeguarding the mystery of the Church and serving the structure of the Christian community among its common path toward salvation. Authentic Christian obedience, when it is properly motivated and lived without servility, helps the priest to exercise in accordance with the Gospel the authority entrusted to him for his work with the People of God: an authority free from authoritarianism or demagoguery. Only the person who knows how to obey in Christian really able to require obedience from others in accordance with the Gospel.”
  • “Priestly obedience has also a community dimension: It is not the obedience of an individual who alone relates to authority, but rather an obedience which is deeply a part of the unity of the presbyterate, which as such is called to cooperate harmoniously with the bishop and, through him, with Peter’s successor. This aspect of the priest’s obedience demands a marked spirit of asceticism, both in the sense of a tendency not to become too bound up in one’s own preferences or points of view and in the sense of giving brother priests the opportunity to make good use of their talents, and abilities, setting aside all forms of jealousy, envy and rivalry. Priestly obedience should be one of solidarity, based on belonging to a single presbyterate. Within the presbyterate, this obedience is expressed in co-responsibility regarding directions to be taken and choices to be made.”
  • “Finally, priestly obedience has a particular pastoral character. It is lived in an atmosphere of constant readiness to allow oneself to be taken up, as it were ‘consumed,’ by the needs and demands of the flock. These last ought to be truly reasonable and at times they need to be evaluated and tested to see how genuine they are. But it is undeniable that the priest’s life is fully ‘taken up’ by the hunger for the Gospel and for faith, hope and love for God and his mystery, a hunger which is more or less consciously present in the People of God entrusted to him.”
• We need to have courage to give this type of obedience, but God will give us the help he knows we need to be distinguished by being exemplary in this way.
• The greatest manifestation of obedience in the history of the Church has been our fidelity to the Eucharist, to do this in Christ’s memory. This is where Christ’s word, “This is my body!,” “This is the chalice of my blood,” come to fulfillment, as a foretaste of the fulfillment of what Jesus said in Capernaum, that “the one who gnaws on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him on the last day.” May the Lord make us hear the Word of God not like most in the Synagogue that day in Nazareth, but as Mary did, so that we might come to the fulfillment of all God’s word in that place where we see forever that Jesus has the Words of Eternal Life.

The readings for today’s Mass were: