A Homily for the 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)
The Book of Deuteronomy, from which we hear from in today’s first reading, is one of those books in the Bible that most people know little about. Basically Deuteronomy is written as a type of last will and testament of Moses. In it, Moses tells the Israelites, as they look across the Jordan Rive at the Promise Land, what they will need to do to properly manage their inheritance. Of course Israel’s real inheritance is not so much the physical land itself, as it is its special relationship with God. In the chapter from which our first reading is taken, Moses warns the Israelites about the temptation to disobey God’s commandments, and turn toward merely human sources of “wisdom” – namely sorcerers, diviners and magicians. God promises that He will continue to speak to His people through the prophets He will raise up. As God Himself spoke His Word to the Israelites through Moses, God promises to speak to His people Himself through the prophets. A true prophet only says what God tells him to say, and only does what the Lord tells him to do. Over the centuries the Israelites came to see this promise, given to them through Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy, as referring to a specific prophet who would give them the final message of salvation.
Of course for we who believe, we know that this hoped for final prophet is Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God – the Word made flesh. In today’s Gospel reading we hear how the people were amazed at the preaching of Jesus “for He taught them as one having authority….” Of course Jesus’ authority came from the fact of His Divinity, yet for many people today the mere idea of a teaching from authority seems odd, if not absurd.
We seem to be living in an age when no real authorities are recognized. Everyone has an opinion, and we think that everyone’s opinion is equally good, equally valid. We wrap this idea up in terms of “freedom” – freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience – and say that we cannot “impose” our values and thoughts on others. From this mentality we get the “I am personally opposed to abortion, but…” politicians who what to divorce their baptismal commitment to follow Christ, from their public actions. For many in the modern world the very idea of obedience to an authority is laughable and quite outdated.
All of this comes from false understanding of freedom. It is an understanding of freedom as nothing more than license to do whatever I want to do. It is a content-less view of freedom, not rooted in any moral law based on human dignity, which ultimately becomes the law of the jungle where only the most powerful can be “free” and all the others are subjected to a totalitarianism of the powerful. Pope John Paul II warned the modern world about this false view of freedom in his encyclical, “The Gospel of Life.”
What is the genuine alternative to this “freedom as license” mentality that has so infected the modern world? How can we properly understand freedom? True freedom is properly understood only in terms of obedience.
Who was the freest human being to ever walk the earth? Was it not Jesus? Is not Jesus’ freedom the real source of His ability to speak with authority? We read repeatedly in the New Testament that Jesus only did the work His heavenly Father gave Him to do, and He only said what His heavenly Father gave Him to say. Jesus perfectly fulfills the description of a prophet that Moses gave in our first reading. St. Paul describes our salvation as coming because Jesus made up for the disobedience of Adam by His perfect obedience, even onto death, death on the Cross. It is because of Jesus’ obedience, even to death on the Cross, that we now have the freedom to live as the sons and daughters of God, to truly be what God created us to be. It is in this that we find real freedom, not the license to do what we want, but rather the freedom to become what God created us to be.
John Henry Cardinal Newman, the famous Anglican convert wrote extensively on this idea of the freedom of obedience. Newman lived in an age, like our own, that triumphed a radical individualism that denied God and rejected the authority of the Church. Newman came to see that there can be no access to the truth, and to real freedom, without a transformation of one’s life to Christ, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Newman saw that Jesus ordained that this transformation of our lives should occur within a community of believers, namely the Church. For Newman obedience to the Church is a concrete manifestation of our obedience to God, and as providing the necessary training in order to obey God. “In other words, we obey the Church, which we can see, in order to obey God, whom we cannot see” (A.A.J. DeVille, “John Henry Cardinal Newman on the Freedom of Obedience,” Homiletic & Pastoral Review, November 2005, p. 30).
Newman was not naïve, he was aware of scandals within the Church, as we are so aware of today, were the legitimate authority endowed to the Church had been harshly used. However for Newman, this was just an indication that St. Paul was correct in saying that our divine treasure is housed in “earthen vessels.”
Cardinal Newman knew that the only solution to the chaos of a world drunk on the false freedom of license is the freedom of obedience. Newman offers these words which still ring true for us today: “…to all those who are Perplexed in any way soever, who wish for light but cannot find it, one precept must be given – obey. It is obedience which brings a man into the right path; it is obedience which keeps him there and strengthens him in it. Under all circumstances, whatever be the cause of the distress – obey” (Sermon XVII, Parochial and Plain Sermons). “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts” (Psalm 95), rather obey and know true freedom.
