psalm 40 - ears open to obedience - 24th week monday 2016

“Sacrifice you wished not, but ears open to obedience you gave me. Burnt offerings you sought not; then said I, “Behold I come.”  The same verse from Psalm 40 would be quoted in the letter to the Hebrews but instead of ears open to obedience it substituted it with a body you have prepared for me.  Why?  Jesus needed a body, a human body in order to be obedient, in order to obey the Father.  To obey the Father Jesus has to become human in order that he can die for love of us. If he does not have a body, if he remains only divine, then he cannot suffer and die.  He has to obey the Father, he has to die to save us and so he was given, not ears, but a body.

Since I also work in the promotion of vocations to the priesthood, young men would always ask how we priests manage living without a wife, thinking perhaps that that is the most difficult thing in the priesthood.  But if you ask priests, the most difficult thing in the priesthood is to obey, to be obedient, to remain obedient.

It is not easy to surrender one’s opinion, one’s logic, one’s will to the opinion, to the logic or to the will of another.

I wrote the bishop to assign me to rural parish.  I was always assigned in the city.  I want a rural parish – in the fields with simple people.  And I ended the letter saying, Please bishop life is short.  And to make the long story short I ended up here in this big city just a few miles from the biggest city in the world. An irony.  God is playing with me.

It is difficult to obey, very difficult, that is why psalm 40 says that God is more pleased with obedience than sacrifices.

What saved us was not the cross of Jesus, what saved us was the obedience of Jesus, an obedience even to the cross.  Obedience is the ultimate sacrifice.