24 July 2018
Tuesday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Knowing God’s Will and Fulfilling It
Anyone who smugly declares that their relationship with Jesus assures them salvation might benefit from reflecting a bit more on Jesus’s words, “do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘we have Abraham as our father’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham” (Mt 3:9). Even the relationship of giving birth to the the Lord is not enough; instead “whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mt 12:50). Nowhere in the Bible do we hear Mary say anything about prerogatives that she would claim simply for having given birth to the Messiah. Rather, of herself she says, “behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). But it is not just Mary who says such things. Even her Son, who is the eternally begotten Son of the Father from before all ages, says, “I do nothing of myself… I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me” (Jn 5:30; 8:28). God himself, in Christ, reveals himself as one who, out of love, does the will of another.
Ignatius of Loyola often ended his letters with the wish and prayer that God might “grant us his abundant grace, so that we may know his most holy will and entirely fulfill it.” For Ignatius, that will is never abstract but concrete and fleshy, containing something that the Christian can do in the here and now. “Give us this day our daily bread.” Ignatius explains that we cannot truly know God’s will except in union with the Church, through which God’s own Spirit offers us a concrete guide and confirmation (Ep. 957, SpEx 365). Ignatius’s own life shows that God not only works through one’s properly ordered inclinations, but also through external confirmation and direction. Though Ignatius’s own lights would have led him down a rather different path in his attempts to do God’s will—he intended to settle in Jerusalem, for instance, and simply help people there—when he recognized God working through the Church’s legitimate authority, he left behind his own plans to follow where God was leading him through the Church. In his willingness not only to pay attention to God’s interior guidance, but also to let this be tempered and corrected by God through external authority, Ignatius was simply following the path of the Son, who lets the Father show him a path in the passion that the Son might not have chosen “on his own.” But the Son is never “on his own,” and neither is his companion Ignatius. Both seek in all things and out of love always to “know God’s most holy will and entirely fulfill it.”