One of the important reasons to pray to the Lord for the grace to obey Him whole-heartedly is because obedience like so many other things abhors a vacuum. In the absence of obedience to God who is worthy of our attention, our listening, our docility, our trust, and our efforts, humans start to dedicate these qualities to someone else. We hear in the first reading a group that is clamoring for a king. Before this, the Lord had led them, protected them, and provided them with honor and peace. Now, they had had enough of the Lord’s guidance, and sought to “be like all the nations…” (1 Samuel 8:20) with a king to do all these things.
Even so, in the fullness of time God came as the end of that line of kings, gently to win the hearts of His people once more. And the Gospels tell us that people, having realized the emptiness of that initial clamor to be like everyone else, now wanted to have their hearts nourished by one whose word was trustworthy. People come to listen to Jesus. So many come that this paralytic and those who carried him could not even get within sight of Jesus… at least coming the normal way through the door. Again, this attitude of attention, of listening, of true obedience to Jesus which starts in the heart, pervades the whole person, body and soul. The man is released from his sins at Jesus’ word, and then from his paralysis at Jesus’ word.
Let us not grow weary of listening to God and of obeying God. His Word alone is trustworthy and effective and healing. Let us listen to Him. Let us seek to listen to Him more and more as the people in the Gospel today. Let us be on our guard against abandoning obedience to our God for obedience to whatever ‘all the nations’ seem to have a taste for at the moment.