Today’s Chapter: Doing the Will of the Father
Chapter 7: Of Humility (vv.31-33)
The second degree of humility is, that a man love not his own will, nor delight in fulfilling his own desires; but carry out in his deeds that saying of the Lord: “I came not to do mine own will, but the will of Him Who sent me.” And again Scripture saith: “Self-will hath punishment, but necessity wins the crown.”
As we have already noted, the Degrees of Humility are not rigidly divided one from another. While the ladder provides a useful way of remembering and organising the many aspects of this virtue—and in particular the many Scriptural citations which illustrate them—nonetheless all of the degrees go together. We see this in particular in today’s 2nd Degree, which in many ways already seems to have been treated in the 1st Degree. There, as part of the continual remembrance of the fear of God, we were told that we are forbidden to do our own will, and reminded of the Lord’s Prayer, in which we say Fiat voluntas tua.
Nonetheless, there is something new about the 2nd Degree, and it is found in the Scriptural citation at the heart of the verse. The 1st Degree already taught us to turn away from our own will and not go after our desires, but now we are given a positive command, and one rooted in the very words of Our Lord Himself, describing the obedience which brought Him down from Heaven. He came, He says, to do the will of the One Who sent Him. These words of Our Lord to the crowds at Capernaum in the Bread of Life Discourse (John Chapter 6) are an expression of what, according to Saint Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews, He said upon entering the world: ‘Behold, I come, O God, to do Thy will.’ (Heb 10:9)
The womb of Mary was the place where the Word Made Flesh first said these words in the summit of His newly-created human soul. That human soul had a human will of its own, yet one which was united hypostatically—in the union of one Person—to the Eternal Word, the Son. As God, the Son possesses a divine will—indeed the very same divine will as the Father, for all such operations in the Trinity are inseparable. And by virtue of the unity of His Person, His human will always chose perfectly in accord with His divine will, which was also the Father’s will.
The implications of this are truly liberating for our understanding of obedience. Obedience can often seem a burden to modern culture, for it imposes constraints on the free will by which contemporary man seeks to define himself. Not to do one’s own will or desires seems to be unnatural and even self-destructive. But when we look at this degree in the Christological perspective offered by Saint Benedict’s citation of John 6, we realise that doing the will of another—the divine will of the Father which He shared with the Word—was in fact what Our Lord’s human soul most desired. Thanks to the Hypostatic Union, His human will always aligned itself to the divine will: had it not been so, it would have implied an intolerable split within His Person. For Our Lord, the real constraint would have been not to be able to fulfill the Father’s will. Thus, even as a child, He could tell His Mother in the Temple, ‘Did you not know that I must be in the things that are of My Father?’ (Lk 2:49)
And what about us? Sons in the Son by virtue of our Baptism, we are called to put on Christ, to be transformed into Him. While we do not have the grace of the Hypostatic Union, nonetheless the supernatural life we received in Baptism means that for us too the most ‘natural’ and liberating thing is to do the will of God. The more our human will is brought in line with the divine will of the Son and of His Father, the more truly ourselves we become.
As it was in and through Mary that the Hypostatic Union occurred, that the Word Made Flesh formed a body for Himself with which to do the Father’s will in a human nature, so it is in and through her that we must be formed in His likeness. Let us ask her to form Christ in us by the work of the Holy Spirit, so that our human wills may find true fulfillment and true happiness in doing always the will of the Blessed Trinity.
