“Therefore,
do not continue in ignorance, but try to understand what is the will of the
Lord.” (Ephesians 5:17)
Let’s
face it. We live in a world where pretty
much anything goes. We are taught to be
independent, which is not a bad thing, we are to think for ourselves, which
again is not a bad thing, but the consequences of these two things is that we
ignore the wisdom of the past, of our elders, and make the same mistakes over
and over again just to achieve what we think will make us happy. Again, anything goes. Kids don’t listen to their parents and slowly
we grow to forget the virtue of obedience.
Obedience is almost anathema in society because we somehow believe being
obedient is a sign of weakness. Yet
obedience is one of the constants throughout the life of Jesus and his mother
Mary. Through history, the great saints
achieved eternal glory through obedience.
In the life of the Church, priests, deacons, and religious promise
obedience to their superiors. We do this
because we want to be submissive to the will of God in our lives and allow Him
to take us where he needs us and not to where we want to be. Where He needs us is most often where we find
happiness and peace.
St.
Paul tells the Ephesians quite frankly in the second reading that we are living
evil days. If you read the news and
listen to doomsday prophets you would think that St. Paul is talking about 2015
and not the mid-first century. Now I must
confess that I don’t subscribe to the all those that say the days we were are
currently living are the most evil yet.
I like to look at the good happening in the world, but I do recognize
that yes there is plenty of evil as well.
But you can apply St. Paul’s observation to pretty much any point in
history since he wrote those words.
Today we see the degradation of the family, the persecution of
Christians, the ravages of poverty in places that are forgotten, and I can go
on but make no mistake that all of us can work to make this world a bit better
if only we listen to the will of God. We
cannot live in ignorance, Paul tells us, we have to stand out and be exemplary
Christians. And in this weekend when we
celebrate the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we look to her as the
model of what it means to be an exemplary Christian who helps us in our journey
by teaching us the virtue of obedience to God.
This
past Friday, the Church celebrated the feast of the martyr St. Maximilian Kolbe
(for the sake of brevity in this homily, do yourself a favor and google his
incredibly life and death). St. Max was
very devout to Mary Immaculate, our patroness, and writes beautifully on
obedience and how it shaped the lives of Jesus and Mary:
Obedience is the one
and the only way of wisdom and prudence for us to offer glory to God…Scripture
set obedience as the theme of [Christ’s] life, repeatedly declaring that he
came into the world to do his Father’s will.
Let us love our loving
Father with all our hearts. Let our obedience increase that love, above all
when it requires us to surrender our own will. Jesus Christ crucified is our
sublime guide toward growth in God’s love.
We will learn this
lesson more quickly through the Immaculate Virgin, whom God has made the
dispenser of his mercy. It is beyond all doubt that Mary’s will represents to
us the will of God himself. By dedicating ourselves to her we become in her
hands instruments of God’s mercy even as she was such an instrument in God’s
hands. We should let ourselves be guided and led by Mary and rest quiet and
secure in her hands. She will watch out for us, provide for us, answer our
needs of body and spirit; she will dissolve all our difficulties and worries.
Today we gather for Mass in obedience to the Lord’s
command. We are fed and strengthened by
the bread of life, the flesh of the Son of Man.
This Eucharist helps us to follow the will of God more perfectly, to
live the life of Christ more perfectly, and to live exemplary Christian lives
more perfectly. Yes, obedience is hard
(take it from a priest), but the rewards for being obedient to God are
eternal. We entrust ourselves to Mary
Immaculate who will “watch out for us” and who teaches us so perfectly the
virtue of total obedience to the will of God.
