One cannot take in the ocean, but one can do something better: allow oneself to be taken in by it, submerging oneself anywhere in its expanse. This is what occurs with Christ's passion. The mind cannot wholly take it in, nor can its depth be seen, but we can submerge ourselves in some moments of its occurrence. In this meditation, we would like to enter in through the door of obedience.
Christ's obedience is the most salient aspect in the apostolic catechesis. "Christ became obedient unto death, even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8); "by one man's obedience many will be made righteous" (Romans 5:8-9). The Letter to the Hebrews says that Christ "learned to obey through suffering." The passion was the proof and measure of his obedience. Obedience appears as the key to the reading of the whole history of the passion, from where it takes its meaning and value.
To those who were scandalized that the Father could find satisfaction in the death on a cross of his Son Jesus, St. Bernard rightly responded: "It was not his death that satisfied him, but the spontaneous will of the one who was dying."
In Gethsemane Jesus says to the Father: "yet not what I will, but what Thou wilt" (Mark 14:36).
The development of Christology, [led] St. Maximus to affirm: the "I" is not humanity that speaks to the divinity; neither is it God who, in so far as incarnate, speaks to himself in so far as eternal. The "I" is the incarnate Word who speaks in the name of the free human will he has assumed; the "you" instead is the Trinitarian will that the Word has in common with the Father.
In Jesus the Word obeys the Father humanly! And yet the concept of obedience is not annulled nor does God, in this case, obey himself, because between the subject and the end of obedience is the whole breadth of a real humanity and a free human will.
God obeyed humanly! One then understands the universal power of salvation contained in Jesus' "fiat": it is the human act of a God; it is a divine-human, "teandrico" act. That "fiat" is truly, to use the expression of a psalm, "the rock of our salvation" (Psalm 95:1). It is because of this obedience that "all have been made just."
-From Fr. Cantalamesa's Second Lenten sermon, March 2006
Posted by Carlos J. Medina
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