3rd Sunday of Easter, C May 4, 2025
Fr. Alexander Albert St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville
Though I never quite rejected my Catholic faith, there was a time that I didn’t live it, a time of selfishness and sin and distraction where no one looking in from the outside would have considered me a practicing Catholic. Then I had a conversion experience. Literally overnight, my life went from selfish pointlessness to a dedicated, daily effort to live my faith wholeheartedly. I suddenly enjoyed praying. I wanted to go to Mass, even during the week. I craved more knowledge about the Catholic faith. I liked fasting. What’s more, I very quickly found a group of friends who also wanted to live our Catholic faith. It was a good time.
And yet, that didn’t last on its own. Prayer sometimes took work. Avoiding sin was difficult, yes, but the real challenge wasn’t what not to do, it was figuring out what to do. So many options, so many paths, so many uncertainties even when your overall plan is “do good.” Eventually, I was able to embrace my call to the priesthood and enter seminary. Obviously, that worked pretty well in the long run, but there was something more immediate: obedience.
You see, by the time I entered seminary, I had been living a real Catholic lifestyle for 2 years. What I discovered in that time was that nothing I could do would ever be enough – kind of like the Apostles fishing all night and catching nothing. When I got to seminary, the wildly flexible, self-guided lifestyle of college changed into a very structured, controlled-by-others way of life. I loved it. Why? Because I was so dang tired of trying to figure out life on my own. It was super refreshing to have someone else tell me what to do next.
This is one of the gifts of obedience. Ultimately, all human beings want what is good. The problem is that we human beings struggle to know what is good. Then we struggle to do what is good even when we know. Obedience, when done correctly, helps with both of those problems. It’s why there are such things as professional trainers. It’s why we have coaches and teachers. Everyone eventually recognizes that, in some part of their life, they need someone else to tell them what to do and to push them to do it. Self-motivation is good – it’s essential, really – but it is not enough. You cannot get yourself to heaven. You cannot make yourself a saint. You cannot save the souls of others.
Obedience is not an obstacle. It’s not a problem. It’s a requirement. Jesus demonstrates that to Simon Peter twice with fish. Twice the professional fisherman worked all night, caught nothing, and then caught record-breaking amounts of fish in mere seconds when he obeyed Jesus. And, if we’re wise, we’ll learn to stop resenting obedience and start being grateful for it. Properly understood, obedience brings peace and clarity and endurance and, paradoxically, freedom.
Take another look at our first reading. The Apostles leave the Sanhedrin “rejoicing that they had been found worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name.” They had been flogged. They were beaten with whips and they left rejoicing! Do you have that much freedom? Are you so free that you can rejoice after being publicly beaten?
How could the apostles find such joy in the midst of such pain? Because they knew, really knew they were doing the best possible thing. No anxiety, no uncertainty, no question of whether it would pay off in the long run. It was a simple, straightforward truth: we suffered for Jesus because we obeyed him.
That holy obedience is the same thing that gave them the freedom to defy the worldly power of the Sanhedrin. There are a lot of powerful people and institutions in the world that, if they really wanted to, could take everything away from me. If one of those more powerful people – like the government – decided to threaten me and command me to do something, it would not be easy to tell them no. “Do this or we’ll lock you up, beat you, take your stuff away, or kill you.” What gives someone the freedom to resist that kind of power?
“We must obey God rather than men.” The courage and resilience of the Apostles doesn’t come from mere defiance or pride. It comes from obedience to God, whose power is greater than the worldly power of Sanhedrin. And it’s not like it was a vague sort of obedience. This was mere months after Jesus in his resurrected body used his physical voice to command the apostles to preach to all nations. They had explicit instructions to preach the gospel and they obeyed that command even when it meant disobeying earthly leaders and being whipped as a result.
The point of all this should be pretty clear: if we’re going to be authentic Christians, if we’re going to be genuine Catholics, we must obey God. I think everyone would agree to that part, so here’s the kicker: obeying God also means obeying the people he put in place. The apostles who defy the Sanhedrin are the same apostles who command other Christians to act in certain ways. Just a few verses before this scene, a couple is struck dead for trying to deceive Peter. A few verses after this scene, the apostles use their authority to appoint deacons, whom they command to serve the church in various ways.
Unlike the apostles, you and I do not have the risen Jesus standing in front of us speaking in a physical voice to tell us what to do. What we have is the authority of the Church, which is the authority we see earlier in the gospels when Jesus tells his apostles, “whoever listens to you listens to me. Whoever rejects you rejects me” (Lk 10:16). It’s why, for me earlier in life, obedience at seminary was the same as obedience to God, because at that time in my life, they were my legitimate superiors. It’s why you and I should obey the Church’s precepts in the catechism, as well as the instructions and rules for the sacraments and the liturgy. No one should obey a command to sin, but everyone should obey the authorities established by God for their state in life.
To the world, obedience is seen as a burden, a restriction, a violation of freedom. To those wise enough to recognize that we cannot be saved on our own, obedience is a gift. It is too easy to be led astray by unreliable emotion. It is too easy to deceive ourselves into thinking that we’re serving God when we’re really serving ourselves. It is too easy to be blinded by the limitations of our families, culture, and upbringing. Peter, James, John, Thomas, and Nathaniel were lifelong fisherman who knew there were no fish near them, yet they caught 153 fish when they obeyed. These Jews were trained from birth to follow the Sanhedrin, yet they were filled with supernatural joy when they obeyed Jesus instead.
Rather than restricting our free will, holy obedience is the power that elevates our free will. Without it, we’ll always fall back on choosing ourselves. With it we are finally set free to choose God. Jesus tells Peter, “when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” The funny thing is that, actually, it is where Peter wants to go. Before the crucifixion, Peter said he wanted to die for Jesus. Yet, even after the resurrection, Jesus and Peter both know Peter can’t make that choice on his own. But because he really does love Jesus, he will one day obey the call to follow Jesus in the ultimate sacrifice. Though unwilling by his own power, holy obedience to the will of God will accomplish it, making him a martyr, a saint, an eternal friend of God.
We want that too, even though we don’t usually want to do what it takes. Thanks be to God there’s always something or someone to obey, a gift to set us free from our selfishness long enough to let us love God.