How to Submit, and Like It

Fr. Samuel Keyes

I’ve chosen to use the short version of today’s Gospel. Nothing against the long version—it gives the full story and the Gospel passage most associated with Candlemas, with Simeon and the Nunc Dimittis, the prophetess Anna, the prophecy about the sword piercing Mary’s heart, and so on. What I like about the short version is not that it is short—in fact, maybe it is a little too short—but that it so well captures the main theme of today’s feast of the Holy Family. Mary and Joseph were obedient to the law of the Lord.

Obedience. That’s it right there—perhaps the least popular concept in the twenty-first-century West. Practical obedience is all over the place, but people don’t go around saying they are “obedient” to the latest social whims. They just suddenly realize that they’re woke and think it was their idea all along to do what the crowd is doing. Obedience is something for the dark ages, for feudal lords, for out-of-date religious traditions, for oppressive dictatorships.

Until, that is, you start having children, and you realize that if they don’t learn obedience, you will. But this sits awkwardly with the postmodern conscience, because the postmodern conscience doesn’t really believe in sin, much less original sin, so that instinct toward order and obedience can’t be rationally discussed, and we end up with the never-ending chain of irrational parent guilt, parent-shaming, and parent anxiety.

Until recently—which is to say until a couple hundred years ago—obedience was taken for granted. That isn’t to say that we were all very good at it, or that there were no conflicts about whom we ought to obey. But the concept that a well-ordered life involves a conscientious submission to some authority or other—to some kind of reality that we do not have any say about, that we do not choose—was something almost universally understood in human societies. This is part of what the Catholic tradition means when it says that the Fourth Commandment—honor your father and mother—is part of the natural law. In a sense, we should be capable of recognizing this without divine revelation. We are born into a world that we did not make, in a story that we did not choose, in a nature and bodies that we do not even fully understand. Human existence, in a strikingly large way, requires a certain kind of submissive obedience if it is to be coherent at all.

This is not the place to rehearse the reasons why Western civilization largely abandoned those assumptions in the Enlightenment—partly because it is a story that we still do not understand, even while it is the story that we inhabit. My first point today is simply to insist that the Christian tradition offers a counter-story, and that this counter-story about nature and obedience is not something that Christians made up, but something that took on new meaning in the light of the Incarnation.

The divine Son, the word of God, eternally begotten before all worlds, became obedient to Mary and Joseph. This is one of the more astounding insights from today’s feast. God the Son, by whom all things have their being and were created, submits himself to obey his human mother and foster father. However you look at it, this is strange. We might remember that Mary is conceived without sin, so she is in all things the perfect mother. But she is still human. She is still a creature. So it is a profound humility, even a humiliation, for God the Son to submit himself even to her authority.

Yet he does. Why? Because obedience is love.

I’m not saying that all obedience is love or all love is obedience; there are different kinds of each. But part of the mystery of the Trinity is that God himself contains a kind of perfect eternal obedience, in which the Son and the Spirit submit to the Father. In doing so, they are not less divine, less eternal, less perfect, less good. They are, each, fully God, yet there is an order within the Trinity, a hierarchy of their eternal triune life, in which difference and unity both have a home.

And so, without dwelling too long in those high mysteries, perhaps it is not such a stretch for God the Son to submit himself in obedience. Submission is, after all, an aspect of his eternal personal identity. Thus, in the unfolding of history, we see, here as in so many places, a revelation of truths that were old before the foundation of time. 

Adam and Eve were not obedient. They rejected that joy. Christ is obedient. He is obedient as the perfect man. And he can be obedient as the perfect man because he is already perfectly obedient as God. 

Obedience to God, and to one another, is not, as the world would have us believe, an assault on our freedom. It is what we were made for. We hear in Colossians today a rather unpopular verse (so unpopular that the lectionary allows it to be omitted entirely) about wives submitting to their husbands. We cannot fully understand what St. Paul means here without remembering that elsewhere he tells us that wives and husbands should “submit to one another” (Eph. 5:21). This is not some kind of blanket judgment about the role of the sexes, but something about sacramental marriage and its imaging of the relationship between Christ and his Church. There’s a real beauty to the dynamism between the wife’s submission and the husband’s self-sacrifice. We’ve lost this in most of the modern wedding vows, even in the Church. In the older forms, whereas the bride promised to “obey,” the husband alone promised to give himself entirely to his wife: “with this ring, I thee wed; with my body, I thee worship, and all my worldly goods I thee endow.” To flatten this into an agreement between two interchangeable partners rather misses the whole point of unity in difference.

In any case, the word that St. Paul uses for the wife’s “subjection” is the exact same word that Luke uses to describe Jesus’ submission to his parents and his parents’ submission to the Law. Whoever we are, surely it is arrogant to think we are too important to practice the kind of obedience that the incarnate Son of God practiced and the obedience that his holy family practiced. We will always be obedient to God in heaven, and this will be not a burden, but a joy. This final obedience also serves as a test, of sorts, for earthly obedience. No authority, whether it’s an elder, a commanding officer, or a pontiff, can claim an obedience higher than divine revelation or natural law. So proper obedience requires not irrational servitude, but prudence.

Who better than St. Joseph, head of the Holy Family and the patron of the universal Church, to teach us the right kind of obedience?

To thee, O blessed Joseph, we have recourse in our affliction, and having implored the help of thy thrice holy Spouse, we now, with hearts filled with confidence, earnestly beg thee also to take us under thy protection. By that charity wherewith thou wert united to the Immaculate Virgin Mother of God, and by that fatherly love with which thou didst cherish the Child Jesus, we beseech thee and we humbly pray that thou wilt look down with gracious eye upon that inheritance which Jesus Christ purchased by His blood, and wilt succor us in our need by thy power and strength.

Defend, O most watchful guardian of the Holy Family, the chosen off-spring of Jesus Christ. Keep from us, O most loving Father, all blight of error and corruption. Aid us from on high, most valiant defender, in this conflict with the powers of darkness. And even as of old thou didst rescue the Child Jesus from the peril of His life, so now defend God's Holy Church from the snares of the enemy and from all adversity. Shield us ever under thy patronage, that, following thine example and strengthened by thy help, we may live a holy life, die a happy death, and attain to everlasting bliss in Heaven. Amen.