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Today’s Scriptures point out the crucial virtue of obedience. Jesus the obedient Only Son of the Father, obedient to the end, described by the prophet Isiah: Behold, my servant whom I have chosen. At the Transfiguration the voice Heaven said: “This is my beloved son. Listen to him.” God says, if you love me, you will listen to me. And if you listen to me with your heart, you will obey me.
How do you feel when you’re talking about something important with a friend and you realize … they have not been listening? You’re talking on the phone and your get the feeling that your friend on the other end has been checking his Facebook page while you’re talking.
Listening is love. We all know how it feels to be really listened to, and we all know how it feels to be ignored. And when the person we are listening to is an authority, listening means obedience. God is our ultimate authority—he is never wrong, and never asks of us anything that would harm us—so listening to God means obeying Him absolutely. “This is my beloved son—listen to him.” That means, obey Him with dedicated trust..
We are constantly told, in our culture, that “choice” is important. “Keep your options open.” “You have many choices.” You want to sell any product, call it a “choice” product. But once we know that something is God’s will, we have only one choice, not many choices. Our one choice is to obey his commandment, to follow him carefully. Love is listening; love is obedience. Jesus said, “if you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
Jesus Christ speaks through the Church he founded 2000 years ago. Are we listening to Him? We are, but we could all do better. It is not easy to listen attentively every day to his voice in the Church, especially when Satan throws ten thousand conflicting voices at us through every conceivable form of social media. For example, God commands us to keep holy the Sabbath—to attend Liturgy every Sunday. But how many of us do that? God commands us to tithe (give 10% of our income back to Him), but how many of us make a serious attempt to do that? God commands us to be fruitful and multiply, to have children, and to plan our families naturally, without artificially sterilizing our marital relations. How many of us obey this clear and constant teaching of Jesus Christ?
It is hard to listen to God, and to God’s servants, be they popes, priests, or simply our own parents. But it is harder, in the long run, not to listen. To listen well, we need to pray. So I beg you to obey God in the first and most fundamental of all his commandments: keep holy the Sabbath. The Divine Liturgy every Sunday. Consistent participation in the most perfect prayer, the Divine Liturgy, will keep us from going completely off the rails. Let us pray to our Holy Mother, Blessed Mary, to keep us faithful to the Eucharist, and faithful to Christ her son.
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