There is a real problem with any attempt to reflect on the word “obedience.” That problem can be summed up by the observation that all of the books on “obedience” over at Barnes & Noble seem to be in the Dog section. We generally look at obedience as putting aside our own identity, turning off the thought process, turning our will over to someone else entirely. Great for dogs. Not for humans.
As Catholics, we also have a little history here, and we suspect that this idea of “obedience” can be a code word for turning off your brain and just accepting what you’re told. I know that when I was in the deacon formation program and the time came to make our formal commitment to supporting the teaching of the church, there was a reluctance even to give us the piece of paper we’d be signing our names to, so that we wouldn’t even have much chance to reflect on what it said. So there are people who still think that “obedience” is a word that means not asking too many questions. I still live in fear of getting a midnight phone call from Father Tim telling me I have to go do something horrible based on whatever that paper I signed said.
But it’s time to unpack all the baggage we have associated with that word “obedience.” Today we are redefining it — or at least, thinking about what it meant to Jesus. Because we can’t avoid it, as we turn towards the events of Jesus’s death and the story of the passion we’ll hear next Sunday, we are going to hear that Jesus was obedient even unto death, death on a cross, he learned obedience through what he suffered, Paul says today, he suffered a death that he could easily have avoided, but kept on turning towards. Was this obedience? And what can be good about it?
We’ll hear this story from many different perspectives over the next days and weeks. The answer in today’s gospel, seems to start ion a very unlikely place, with the Greeks. We have no idea who these Greeks were, except that they said they wanted to see Jesus, and we never even find out if they actually did, but just the fact that they are Greeks seems to be the point. They are there to fulfill what was said about the Messiah from the book of Isaiah onward through salvation history, that the Messiah will gather all peoples into one, and here they are, the first few, stand-ins for the rest of us down through the generations. Just their presence seems to remind Jesus of why he is there, what his real identity is, where his life was headed if it was to have any point at all. Suddenly, it is as if Jesus saw everything with a clarity that reminded him that his life was not his life if it did not involve constant opening, constant inclusion, constant movement toward that end of uniting all people, and that only his death could be the common ground that united them.
A mysterious and complicated thing to believe. But Jesus’s obedience today does not look so much like blind submission to the will of another, putting aside what he knows is right to do something that makes no sense. His obedience comes from a recognition of who he is, what he is on earth for, what has to be done. It is a question, yes, of doing something that no one would choose to do, he sheds tears, he is afraid, he asks himself if he is right or wrong to follow this path, but he does it not because he is told to do it, he does it because awful and seemingly self-destructive as it is he knows it is the only thing that makes sense, that nothing else would complete his story.
Obedience is not taking on what someone else wants for us. Obedience can be the opposite process: taking away all the things that someone else wants us to do, clearing away all our distractions and habits, until there is only us, and we get a hint of God’s deepest name for us, the life that only we can lead, the people that only we can serve.
The enemy of obedience is not always stubbornness or willfullness, but all the false identities we use to mask what is truly us. If we are honest with ourselves, we know that no matter how independent we think we are in some respects, we can become the creature of other people’s expectations. We do things a certain way because they make us successful, we have roles that we are attached to because they make us feel necessary and important and maybe we are, and maybe it is all worthwhile, and yet, there may be something even greater that we can’t hear, the real identity we have, the way God sees us, a task or a step that will be just as difficult, as heroic, as right as what Jesus knew just a few days before his death.
Obedience isn’t taking on a role that someone else has made up for us but stripping away all the old roles. That is why true obedience is painful — old habits die hard, and old identities die harder. But they all have to die if we are to live. Obedience to who we are is the only real liberation.
We hear in the first reading why God established a second covenant. Why a second one? This one, God said, this one will be written on your heart. Obedience is that frightening process of opening up your heart and seeing what God has written there.