Today’s Gospel of the Transfiguration ends with these words: “A cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, ‘This is my beloved Son; listen to him.’ And suddenly looking around they no longer saw any one with them but Jesus only.” It is the same with the second, third and fourth steps of humility, the steps that describe obedience according to the mind of St. Benedict. In this obedience which we have vowed or are preparing to vow, we look around but no longer see any one with us but Jesus, for St. Benedict’s vision of obedience is completely Christological no matter from what direction we view it. Christ is before us, behind us, above us, within us, encircling us. We listen to him by both obeying him and obeying with him. We obey him in the Abbot, in one another, in the providential situations that come our way. We obey him by immediately dropping whatever we are doing to follow each of his calls just as his first community of disciples did. Jesus called “and immediately they left their nets and followed him.” Likewise we obey with Christ, calling out with him in the second step, “I have come not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me”, imitating him in the third step by becoming obedient even to death, quietly embracing suffering with him in the fourth step. There is no getting away from Jesus in our life of obedience, he who, in the words of St. Bernard, loved obedience so much that he would rather die than disobey.
Therefore let us not look to efficiency or mere human cooperation let alone conformity or people-pleasing when it comes to understanding Benedictine obedience. Such obedience, religious obedience, was not created by human beings. It was inspired by the Holy Spirit in such a way that it was recognized and blessed by the Church as a gift from God, a charism, given to some as their way in the Church. This divine gift of obedience is the most efficacious and powerful thing we have in our intercession for the Church and the world, more powerful than prayer, generous service, fasting and all other sacrifices, because it allows us to enter the obedience of Christ which brought about the salvation of the world on the Cross.
I have never found more powerful words about this than those of Hans Urs von Balthasar although I can only take a few of these words from the entire context: “Let us take the clearest case, because it is the highest as well, the attitude of the servant of God: ‘That I may know how to sustain with a word him that is weary, the Lord has awakened a word…Morning by morning he wakens my ear to hear as those who are taught…but I was not rebellious, I turned not backward, I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I hid not my face from shame and spitting’…It is not only the hearing of a limited word of God, to a certain degree of acceptance, of understanding, of transmission; it is rather the entire existence as ear…In this nonresistance, in this obedience and only in it, what cannot be united thus comes definitively together: eternal love and temporal hate, eternal fidelity and temporal nonfidelity, God and the human being. In this nonresistance, in this obedience and only in it, the two paths cross: the path of God to the sinful human being and the path of the sinful human being to God…All the acts of obedience of the Old Covenant come together in the servant of God.”
Let us allow our entire existence to become all ear. Let us run in this path of listening, heeding, obeying in union with Christ. Let us rejoice that he has called us to be united deeply with him in a life of obedience, his salvific obedience, inspired in us by the Holy Spirit and blessed by the Church. Such obedience sets us free, free to be who we were meant to be.