After reclaiming freedom from the bondage of our past and being able to commit or invest our time and energy to a fundamental choice, obedience now becomes a question of fidelity to these chosen commitments.
Obedience to the truth
“Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.” (1Peter 1: 22)
Jesus did not say that he was one of the ways, one of the truths and one of the modes of living; there is only one way, one truth and one life and that is Jesus. In this same way, there is only one human nature which stays unchanged over the course of centuries and millennia. For example, what was love two thousand years ago remains love today and will be love five thousand years from now if the human race still exists.
Human Nature is not like the fashion which is susceptible to changes over time, and because it is immutable, in Christ, God has spoken once and for all eternity everything that He wants to impart to us. This is also the reason why the Gospel is called the Word of Eternal Life for although it is the Word of God incarnated in a particular time two thousand years ago, and in a particular place in Israel, it continues to be true in all places today and until the end of time because the diversity of culture or civilization does not alter human nature.
“... Whoever does not gather with me, scatters.”(Lk. 11:23)
The main reason why God became a man is to teach us how to live the human life; therefore the way Jesus of Nazareth lived, what he said, what he did and how he behaved are paradigmatic, he is the gold standard, the role model for all human beings seeking self-fulfillment and happiness.
Since to imitate Jesus is the only way to live life in accordance with the human nature created by God, although it may seem unappealing but freedom is nothing else than the obligation to do good, that is, to choose Jesus’ way of living. We are free for as long as we remain on His path; we loose our freedom when we get off His path, and set off on our own. Obedience is understood as the full submission to the truth because it is the truth, and only the truth, that makes and keeps us free. There is no authentic human life outside the parameters of human nature that God created and which the Gospel establishes.
As the Word of eternal life, the Gospel delineates our human nature and, at the same time, teaches us how to live in accordance with it. Obedience to this Word is absolutely necessary in order for our life to be as meaningful to us as it is to others and to the world in general. It is evident that we are free by the very fact that we can reject this only way of Life; that is to say we are free up until the very moment we choose to reject it. When we freely choose to dismiss the Gospel as the Magna Carta of our human life, we suffer the consequences that arise from going against our human nature.
Let us take an example from our physiological nature. In particular, the drinking of wine which taken by itself is not intrinsically evil, as opposed to what many Christian Fundamentalists claim, even going as far as rewriting the Bible, thus creating a “dry” Gospel which states that what the apostles drank during the Last Supper was grape juice and not wine.
It has been shown that drinking in moderation, especially red wine, far from being harmful, is in fact beneficial to our health. How can we then define or quantify moderation? Moderation is best quantified as the amount of alcohol that our liver can safely process. Once this quantity is formalized, our drinking habit has to be adjusted accordingly; to drink beyond this amount is to challenge and disobey our physiological nature, thus ruining our health.
Once again I quote Erich Fromm from his book, “To Have or To Be”, “Unrestricted satisfaction of all desires is not conducive to well-being, nor is it the way to happiness or even to maximum pleasure”. Hence, to take pleasure outside the limit of reality is the same as denying it, a “contraditio em terminis”.
Jesus of Nazareth the model of obedience
Jesus came into this world through the obedience of Mary, and while growing up in Nazareth, he was obedient to his parents (Lk. 2:51). During his adulthood, at every moment, he did the will of his Father and not his own; it can be said that the will of the Father had become his food (Jn. 4:34) and so great was this communion, between the Father and the Son, that “...the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing...” (Jn. 5:19).
The Letter to the Hebrews (5:8) suggests that Jesus’ obedience was not innate, but the result of a learning process where suffering played a crucial role, culminating to the point of death on the cross (Phil. 2:8). In the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the learning process of obedience ran parallel with two other progressions: the awareness of his identiy as the Son of God, and the awareness of his mission as the Redeemer of humanity.
“The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands” (Jn. 3:35). Far from being forced, to obey his Father was for Jesus something connatural with his nature and identity. In essence this was something he had chosen, his fundamental choice motivated by the love he has for his Father, because he and the Father are one (Jn. 10:30).
Obedience is fidelity
Once there was a man who loved gold so much that it became a consuming obsession for him. Gold occupied his mind and his heart to the point that all that were not gold did not exist for him; whenever he went shopping he only had eyes for the window displays of jewelry shops, he saw nothing else, or no one else; he saw neither people, nor blue sky, nor heard the noise of the city, nor smelled the scent of flowers. One day when he could resist no longer, he broke into a jewelry store and began to fill his pockets with gold rings, gold bracelets and gold chains; he was getting ready to flee when he was apprehended. Confounded, the policeman asked him, “How did you ever think you were going to escape a store full of people?” To that he answered, “What people? I saw no one, I only saw the gold”.
Just as we owe obedience to our physiological nature, we also owe obedience to our supernatural nature, which is our vocation or our fundamental choice, like Jesus did. All our time and energy ought to be dedicated to the vocation that we choose, with the same determination as the gold lover in the story.
“No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (Lk. 9:62). Obedience is the faithness to all that God calls us to do and to become. Therefore once we commit our time and energy to the fundamental option of our choosing, it is the faithfullness to this commmitment which fuels the initial call and keeps our vocation strong. For instance, those who initially answer the call of love by choosing marriage, will find that it is the faithness to this commitment that will keep, uphold and nurture the love later on.
Lookout for the rules, so the rules will lookout for you
In life, we obey more often than we would like to admit; we obey our body when it is hungry and asking for food and when it is thirsty and asking for water; we adhere to these and many other directives relating to our basic bodily needs and we do them without even thinking, because we know that they exist for our own good.
In addition to the physiological needs, we also have social necessities. Being the social creatures that we are, we grow up interacting with others with whom we form groups. The existence and the permanency of these groups demand that there be rules which define their identities and their objectives. These rules are heeded by all the members, not only because the rules were made by them, but also because the group fulfills the social needs of each and every one of its members all the while seeking the common good.
Keep the rules and the rules will keep you - Everywhere we turn there are rules. In life, we are free to choose the game that we want to play; once we make that choice we must then abide by its rules. By heeding them, they will act as lookouts for us, giving us a sense of belonging and security.
The alternative would be not to choose, keeping all the options open, setting up camp on a crossroad, not investing nor committing time and energy to any project or to anyone like the foolish servant in the parable of the talents, who hid the talent that he received. It is true that by not choosing we remain free but one day, near the end of our lives, we will realize that we have never actually lived because we have wasted our time and energy in futilities by going against our human nature.
More than just surviving, being human means to implicate, to commit our time and energy to a project of social benefit. What is good for the community is good for us. When we are not useful to others we are useless even to ourselves; our life will only be meaningful to us if it is significant to others.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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