26 The Fourth Commandment: Family and Social Morality

instead of God’s. The world treasures power, God treasures goodness. Authority in the Biblical sense is not a power word but a goodness word. It means right, not might.

Having authority over someone always presupposes being under a higher authority and transmitting it faithfully, as the Church transmits the Gospel of Christ. She has no authority (i.e., no right) to invent or change what she has received from God; she is God’s mail carrier, not his editor or critic. Your authority is your right to be obeyed based on your obeying – like the Roman centurion who said to Christ when invoking his authority over his servant’s life-threatening illness: “Say but the word, and let my servant be healed. For I am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me: and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes” (Luke 7:7-8). Just as the centurion knew that his authority derived from his obedience to Caesar, he knew that Christ’s authority derived from his obedience to the Father. Christ had authority over demons and diseases because he could truly say: “I have come down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38).

3. The meaning of obedience This example also shows that obedience is not a mark of inferiority. No one ever obeyed the Father’s will more completely than Christ, yet Christ was divine, equal to the Father in all things.

Therefore, when the fourth Commandment commands children to obey their parents, and when the New Testament tells wives to obey their husbands (Ephesians 5:22; Colossians 3:18; Titus 2:5; 1 Peter 3:1), citizens to obey their rulers (Romans 13:1; 1 Peter 2:13-14), and servants to obey their masters (Colossians 3:22; Titus 2:9; 1 Peter 2:18), this does not imply a relationship between inferior and superior. Indeed, this -8-