Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. 18

by Boudreaux, Florentin, 1821-1894

The difficulty lies in obedience to our fellow-men whom God has placed over us and who share His authority, His sovereignty in our regard ; and to teach us this obedience to God, which is mediate and indirect, and therefore repugnant to our proud hearts, the Sacred Heart of Jesus would go before us in its observance ; and, as usual, His love for us knows no bounds, sets no limits to the extent of its obedience. In this, as in all the rest, He loses sight of Himself to think only of us, and to bestow on us a more copious redemption. Hence, He subjects Himself to His own creatures, and in so doing, He takes upon Himself a part which, by nature, can never be His. For, who is He? How can He obey? Obedience is the duty of inferiors ; but He is not, cannot be an inferior. By nature He is above all. It requires then a miracle of divine power, the union of two incompatible and essentially contradictory qualities to make it possible for Him to obey. But He works the wonder; He does not hesitate at the strangeness of the result. He will be God, and yet obedient ; Supreme Lord and Lawgiver, and yet subject not only to His own laws, but to the lowest and meanest of men ; and so subject as no earthly slave ever was or could be. Among men, obedience is proper and intelligible enough  — because it is supposed to be exercised by the young towards the old ; by the ignorant towards those who are wise; by the weak towards the strong; by the subject towards those in whose hands God has placed power.

Order is a law of nature. Men are not all equal in all respects, and hence it is just that some should be subject to others. If all had equal rights in all things, equal power, equal jurisdiction ; if all were masters and none were servants, all rulers and none to obey, all kings and no subjects, the whole world would stand still; nothing could be done. There would be a Babel of confused commands; a universal rebellion of children against parents, wives against husbands, scholars against masters. Men would cease to be social (beings. Society would be dissolved into individualism, and every man’s hand would be raised against his brother. Hence, obedience of man to his superior is indispensable to his own preservation as well as to the general good. But obedience in our Divine Lord to man, His creature, reverses the order. In Him, God obeys man; the Creator is subject to His own creature ; the King descends below the slave. The wise asks wisdom from the foolish; the powerful is powerless against the weak ; the Master learns from His own disciples. Infinite greatness, wisdom, power, is ruled and governed by what, in comparison with Him, is infinite littleness, ignorance and weakness. It is true that Joseph and Mary are most dear to Him, most magnificently adorned with grace and sanctity, exalted in gifts of mind and heart far above Principality and Power; yet they are infinitely inferior to Him. But Jesus obeys His parents, because in them He recognises the authority of His Eternal Father, “ of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named.” (Eph. iii.) To them He offers the holocaust of His will, and through them to God, His Father. And such is His earnestness to teach us obedience by His example, such the importance He attaches to this virtue, that nearly the whole of His life on earth is written in three words:  Erat subditus illis: He was subject to them.” (Luke ii.)