Obedience School

Learning to obey our parents, spouses and the Church

01/15/2018

1 Samuel 15:16-23 Samuel said to Saul: "Stop! Let me tell you what the LORD said to me last night." Saul replied, "Speak!"  Samuel then said: "Though little in your own esteem, are you not leader of the tribes of Israel? The LORD anointed you king of Israel and sent you on a mission, saying, 'Go and put the sinful Amalekites under a ban of destruction. Fight against them until you have exterminated them.' Why then have you disobeyed the LORD? You have pounced on the spoil, thus displeasing the LORD." Saul answered Samuel: "I did indeed obey the LORD and fulfill the mission on which the LORD sent me. I have brought back Agag, and I have destroyed Amalek under the ban. But from the spoil the men took sheep and oxen, the best of what had been banned, to sacrifice to the LORD their God in Gilgal." But Samuel said: "Does the LORD so delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obedience to the command of the LORD? Obedience is better than sacrifice, and submission than the fat of rams.

             The word “obedience” has undergone a rather profound transformation in modern America, or as we say today, “a total makeover.” Alongside the sexual revolution of the sixties, there was a concomitant “obedience revolution” where obedience went from being a virtue (a good thing) to almost being a vice (a bad thing). After all, we send dogs to obedience school, and not our children. I wonder sometimes, though, as we teach our children more and more freedom and self-expression and creativity, we don’t inadvertently leave less and less room for obedience. I’ve talked with several business leaders who lament the fact that millennials are increasingly hard to train and teach their trade. They lack the virtue of obedience.

                To be sure, freedom and self-expression and creativity are all good things and well worth nurturing. But here’s the price we pay for a loss of obedience: we fail to learn self-mastery. That is, in the inner society of each human person, the will does not obey the intellect (the dictates of prudence), rather it obeys the passions. St. Thomas Aquinas explained how we experience obedience in our own inner lives teaching, “Hence, Gregory [the Great] says that ‘obedience is rightly preferred to sacrifices, because by sacrifices another’s body is slain whereas by obedience we slay our own will’” (Summa Theologica, II-IIae, Q. 104, Art. 1). In other words, we all need to go to obedience school, otherwise, we will not be truly free, but rather slaves to our own wills; we will obey our passions instead of our prudence.

               The book of Samuel illustrates a tragic incident where someone confused sacrifice and obedience. God has instructed - better, commanded - King Saul not only to defeat the sinful Amalekites, but to destroy them, to annihilate them, to exterminate them off the face of the earth. But Saul behaves like many millennials do today and obeys his own will rather than the will of God. Saul rationalizes his disobedience saying he did defeat Amalek, but brought back some of their sheep and oxen for sacrifice. By the way, this passage is precisely what St. Thomas (and St. Gregory the Great) allude to in his teaching on obedience. The prophet Samuel, however, sees through Saul’s two-faced equivocation and replies: “Does the Lord so delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obedience to the command of the Lord? Obedience is better than sacrifice.” Why is obedience better than sacrifice? Well, because obedience slays our own wills whereas “in sacrifice another’s body is slain.” Obedience brings about self-mastery; and self-mastery leads to happiness. King Saul needed to go back to obedience school.

              Let me suggest three little exercises you can practice to develop the virtue of obedience, the muscle of self-mastery. First, be obedient to your parents. Do what they command you: take out the trash, do your homework, eat your vegetables, go to Mass, don’t stay out past midnight. Nothing good ever happens after midnight, with all due respect to Eric Clapton, who sang, “After midnight, we’re going to let it all hang out.” Second, be obedient to your spouse. And in the realm of spousal relationships, there should be a mutual subjection, a mutual obedience: sometimes the wife wins, and something the husband wins. That is, not all discussions should end with the man getting the final word, and those words being, “Yes dear.” Be obedient to each other out of love, be slaves to each other. And thirdly, be obedient to the Church. Sadly, we have lots of “cafeteria Catholics,” who are picking and choosing what they believe and how they behave (like Saul did). It’s increasingly hard to teach and train these millennials Catholics in the spiritual trade. Obedience is out and freedom, self-expression and creativity is in.

              But I believe the deeper danger lurking inside each of us is that while we feel free on the outside, we’re becoming slaves on the inside, slaves to our wills and our passions. We are experiencing the atrophy of the spiritual muscle of obedience and self-mastery. Maybe dogs are not the only ones who need to go to obedience school.

Praised be Jesus Christ!