"OBEDIENCE IS BETTER THAN SACRIFICE."

Homily for January 20^th, 2014: 1 Samuel 15:16-23.

          The first reading on Saturday told about Samuel anointing Saul as Israel’s first king. He did so privately. Only later did Samuel present Saul to the people as their king, so that they could pledge loyalty to him. The background of today’s reading is the Lord’s command to Saul to make war against the Amalekites, to punish them for attacking God’s people after they were delivered from slavery to the Egyptians. Saul was to see to it that his soldiers did not take the Amelikites’ domestic animals as spoils of war. They were all to be killed, which in the thought world of the Bible meant that they were given to God.

          Saul proves himself a weak leader. Disobeying the Lord’s command, he allows his men to spare the animals. When Samuel rebukes the king for disobedience, Saul defends himself by saying that the men have only taken the animals so that they could use them for sacrifice. That was a lie. The animals had been taken for the soldiers’ own use. A king stronger than Saul, and more faithful to the Lord, would have been able to enforce the Lord’s command. 

          The prophet Samuel castigates the king for his shabby and untruthful defense. You have disobeyed the Lord’s command, Samuel tells Saul. You say the animals were taken for sacrifice. But “obedience is better than sacrifice,” Samuel says, adding: “Because you have rejected the command of the Lord, he, too, has rejected you as ruler.” Translated into modern terms, Samuel was saying: obedience to God and to his moral law is more important than prayers.

          Some years ago one of the Godfather films ended with a dramatic scene vividly illustrating this lesson. The Godfather is standing, with other members of his family, at a font where a priest is baptizing the Godfather’s infant grandson, using the old Latin prayers. Repeatedly we hear the words per vitam aeternam – “for eternal life.” The camera cuts away to show people being killed all over the city on the orders of the man standing piously at the font saying his Amens to the prayers for eternal life.

          God is not mocked. All the prayers and rosaries and Masses in the world cannot expunge the guilt of deliberate disobedience to God’s laws.