Whom will you
serve?
When Joshua
formally gathers the elders, leaders,
judges and officers of all the tribes
of Israel, he asks them for a formal commitment to serve the Lord. Citing God’s
faithfulness to the people of Israel throughout their hardship in the desert, they
all respond in unison, as if in a ritual ceremony, professing their formal
commitment to do just that: we serve
the Lord. They can promise, as the
psalmist does in Psalm 34, to bless the
Lord at all times, for he has protected
them along their entire journey,
and they have confidence that the Lord
has eyes for the just. It is a hard
path, a path they may not fully understand, but here, at least, the people of
Israel express their full commitment to God.
Similarly, Jesus
will ask for full commitment from his disciples in John’s Gospel, when, having shocked them with the notion that they
must eat his flesh and drink his blood in order to have eternal life, Jesus sees many
of his disciples return to their former way of life. These refuse to commit to Jesus’ way; they
have their own parameters of faith, of belief, and Jesus has challenged them in
ways they cannot understand, and therefore do not believe. The Twelve remain, however, having come to believe that Jesus has the words of eternal life, and is the Holy One of God. Though they probably do not understand
either, they believe, and express
their belief in terms of full commitment to Jesus and all he asks of them.
Paul will make the
terms of this commitment clear in his Letter to the Ephesians. Jesus, Paul says, asks for total commitment
in the way of service to other. Just as
Jesus himself subordinated himself to humanity, handing himself over for the church in order to sanctify her, so we are called to model our lives on
his, mutually subordinate to one another, committing ourselves to service of
one another. This is what love
does. Husbands who love and serve their wives are
subordinate to them, just as wives who love and serve their husbands are
subordinate to them. It is this
relationship of commitment, a conjugal relationship of Christ to the Church, to
which we must commit ourselves; it is this invitation to mutually subordinate
love that we must serve, that we might nourish
and cherish one another in Christ.
This post is based
on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordle.net
