Obedience to Your Own Will Is Called Original Sin
First Sunday of Lent
There is a parish that will remain unnamed, with a pastor who will also remain unnamed. For years during my time in seminary, my fervent prayer was that my bishop would not send me to serve in that parish with that pastor. The parish did not attract me, and the thought of working with the pastor caused me no excitement. Each year during Lent, as we awaited the announcement of our assignments during Holy Week, I would first start to hope, and then to pray, that my assignment would not go against my wishes. I did not want to go. I did not want bend my will. I did not want to go against my own desires for the sake of obedience.
The Church gives us a series of readings for this First Sunday of Lent that focus on the reality of Christian obedience. St. Paul wants us to understand that Christ, through an act of obedience, restored to us all that was lost, all that was forfeited, by an act of disobedience committed by our first parents. What was the disobedient action? The ancient tradition of the Church tells us that our first parents sinned from pride. Our first parents wanted to live like God, to possess for themselves a knowledge of truth and falsity, of good and evil. The interior reality of pride results in an external act of disobedience, and so immortal life is lost, and right relationship with God is forfeited. Christ restores to us the gift of eternal life and right relationship with God through an act of obedience.
We struggle with the reality of Christian obedience in the Church today. And though there are many reasons that might explain our struggle with obedience, the cause that most strikes me is that we have moralized and domesticated our submission to the divine will. Here is what I mean: In an age marked by cultural upheaval and rebellion against God, our understanding of Christian obedience is reduced to matters of belief and regard for the truth. Am I obedient to the divine will? I am, because I believe in God’s truth and I care about God’s truth. There are many in the world who do not believe in God’s truth, and who certainly do not care about the truth. For decades, politicians and activists and even members of the Church have rejected parts of the moral law. I am not like them. I submit. I am obedient.
The are three problems with the reduction of Christian obedience to matters of truth and belief.
The first problem is that Christian obedience no longer functions as a corrective to our sinful pride, but almost always is a working of pride itself. How do we arrive at our convictions about God’s truth? How do we determine what to care about and what to reject as foreign to the moral law? We do not trust our institutions; there is too much corruption. We do not trust the Church; there is too much disagreement to merit our confidence. And so, we set out into the world to determine for ourselves what is true and what is false, what is good and what is evil. We use the language of conscience and appeals to reason to justify the fact that we, ourselves, determine what to care about and what must be believed. We determine for ourselves which policies are just or unjust, which encyclicals or papal pronouncements merit belief and which do not, which bishops or politicians or cultural leaders deserve our respect and which do not.
There is a chance that in certain situations these kinds of judgments are necessary. There really is corruption in the world, and genuine disagreement in the Church. But to determine for ourselves what is true or false, good or evil, is to exercise our pride. We risk the sin of our first parents. The reality of Christian obedience, reduced to matters of moral law in an age of profound distrust, no longer serves as a correction on our sinful pride. We make the choice to live like God, to live a life of obedience to our own will, and justify our choice on the grounds that we are believing God, and caring about his truth. The will we are serving, really, is our own.
The second problem with the moralization of obedience is that we lose sight of the drama of the Christian life. Obedience becomes domesticated, something that we can do from home, and usually without going much out of our way. But consider the story of salvation history. Abraham was told by God to leave his country and his kinsmen and his father’s house and to travel to the land that God would show him. And so, Abraham through obedience sets out into the unknown. He steps into the darkness. There is no talk of truth here. Generation after generation of prophets are called from the lives they would have chosen for themselves to a life of service on behalf of God and God’s people. Lives of service marked by suffering and pain. There is no talk of truth here either. Nor do Christ and Satan debate the moral law in our Gospel today. The obedience that Christ demonstrates in the Gospel today is a foreshadow of what will come in the Garden of Gethsemane, the most profound moment of obedience imaginable: a human will rendered over in service to the will of God. Christ claiming for himself a fate that he would rather pass to another, simply because the Father asks.
A Christian obedience that is limited to matters of truth and falsity, good and evil—the moral law—is an obedience that just might never challenge us or call us out of the lives that we have chosen for ourselves. Authentic Christian obedience is about vocation, it is about mission, it is about submitting our will—bending our will—to the will of the Father who asks something from us.
The third problem with our moralization of obedience is that we risk a loss of charity in the life of the Church and in the life of the world. We know that our faith is given to us not for ourselves but for the sake of others. The one who seeks to save his life must lose it. And Christian obedience is the way through which we come to know how we are called to lose our lives so that we might save them. The reality of Christian obedience grounds us and orients us in the labor of love and the work of charity.
St. Paul understands the relation between obedience and charity with perfect clarity:
In conclusion, just as through one transgression
condemnation came upon all,
so, through one righteous act,
acquittal and life came to all.
For just as through the disobedience of the one man
the many were made sinners,
so, through the obedience of the one,
the many will be made righteous.
The obedience of Christ matters neither for the sake of the Father nor for the sake of Christ himself. The obedience of Christ is for your sake, and for mine, so that what was lost to us through sin, forfeited through an act of disobedience, might be restored to us. Eternal life, right relationship with God—the obedience of Christ restores to us the promises of immortality.
The Christian is called to pattern his or her life on the life of Christ, to follow Christ in the way of obedience to the will of the Father, not for his or her own sake, but for the sake of others. So that through the obedience of the one—your obedience, and mine—the many might be made righteous.
Homily delivered February 26th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary