Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
Obedience and humility. These two virtues, pointed to in our readings today, are probably two of the least practiced or appreciated virtues in society today. In fact, there are probably people who consider either both or at least one of those virtues as not really that good.
But beyond traffic laws, the idea of obeying another bristles most Americans. We find excuses why we shouldn’t have to obey this or that person: she’s a Republican; he’s a Democrat; she doesn’t follow through on her commitments; did you see what he did when he didn’t think anyone was looking? The list goes on. It’s not a bad thing to want integrity of life in someone who has authority over us. But sometimes I think that we only would listen to Jesus or the Blessed Mother, because they’re sinless.
And let’s be honest, we wouldn’t even listen to them. We’d find some reason to write even Jesus or the Blessed Mother off when they tell us to do difficult things. And we’d probably use their sinlessness against them: “Yeah, they tell us to do X, but that’s easy for them to say, they’re sinless!”
Jesus was no stranger to the discontinuity between instruction and example. But He doesn’t tell the people to stop obeying the Pharisees and scribes in what they teach about they faith. Instead, Jesus tells them not to follow their example, even while they follow what they teach. And, He tells them to center their lives around the one master, the Christ (and that’s Jesus).
But to follow what someone teaches, even if their life doesn’t measure up to that standard, takes real humility. Because humility admits that I don’t know everything, and that sometimes other people are going to legitimately ask me to do something that I don’t want to do, but that I should still do it anyway. Humility says that I don’t have to be in charge of every aspect of my life, that I can actually find happiness in submitting to another’s will, as long as it’s not against what God has revealed.
And part of Jesus’ message today is that the important thing is to follow God’s will for our lives, even when those who are telling us to follow it don’t do so perfectly, or maybe don’t even try. The most important thing is not the vehicle by which the message is conveyed; it’s the message. When the truth presents itself to us, our only good option is to follow it, even if the message of truth is not spread by someone fully living that truth him or herself.
Take last weekend’s Gospel: Jesus told us that the two great commandments are to love God with all of who we are, and love our neighbor as ourselves. And I preached on what that looks like. But, and this will come as no shock to at least some of you, I don’t always love God with all of who I am, and I don’t always love my neighbor. I do my best to live out the great commandments, but I often fail. Does that mean that you shouldn’t love God or your neighbor because I’m not doing it perfectly? If that were the case, no one would ever hear the Gospel, because everyone who has preached the Gospel, outside of Jesus and Mary, have struggled to keep it, including our first pope, St. Peter.
St. Paul reminds us that we hold the treasure of the Gospel in earthen vessels. And he says that the reason for this is, “that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us.” There is a method to knowing that everyone who preaches the Gospel does not fully live up to us, so that people aren’t convinced that it’s simply some special power that only an elite few have. No, the power of the Gospel comes not from the messenger, but from God, the author of the Gospel.
Does that mean that we don’t worry about living the Gospel to our fullest ability because God will show the power of the Gospel even if we are not living it? Certainly not. There is a greater witness when someone has the integrity of living what they preach. When someone lives contrary to that message, it lessens our desire to live according to the message, which is part of the definition of scandal. Imagine a marriage counselor telling a couple to work out their differences through dialogue, and then you find out that he beats his wife whenever she does something he doesn’t like. You’d be less likely to listen to him in the future. So we should do our best to live out the message that we preach to others about following Christ.
Still, we need not be overly worried when we do not live according to God’s will perfectly, and then decide not to preach what God teaches because we don’t always live up to it. Yes, we should try our best to cooperate with God’s grace each day to do His will, but we shouldn’t cease our witness to the Gospel because we ourselves are not perfect. The importance is that the truth is preached and that people have a chance to make it their own in their life, no matter who is preaching it. May we be humble enough to do our best to live obediently to God’s will each day, making God’s will the most important thing in our life, rather than our own will.
