The Obedience That Obliges God

On the Cross of the Will and the Birth of True Freedom

Obedience is not moral submission.

It is crucifixion.

But it is a crucifixion entered with Christ, not endured alone.

The Fathers never spoke of obedience as mere discipline or good behavior.

They spoke of it as a descent into death.

To obey is to allow one’s will to be laid upon the wood of the Cross

and to remain there long enough for God to act.

When our frantic striving grows still,

the mercy of God begins to move.

Archimandrite Zacharias speaks a word that is both fearful and luminous.

To the extent that our obedience becomes a true crucifixion,

it draws God toward us.

This is not a technique.

It is covenant.

God has bound Himself to resurrection.

Wherever a death is real,

He is already drawing near.

We fear obedience because something in us knows what it asks.

Not effort,

but surrender.

Not self-improvement,

but the laying down of self.

What we protect most fiercely in ourselves

is often the very thing that cannot be raised.

What we cling to

is what must pass through the grave.

This is why partial obedience yields only partial resurrection.

We surrender what is obvious and keep what feels essential.

We give up sins but not self.

We change behaviors while quietly guarding identity.

And so grace feels distant

not because God has withdrawn

but because something in us still stands between Him and our heart.

Zacharou names what resists this surrender: our freedom and our mind.

Not freedom as the dignity God gave us

but freedom as the need to control.

Not the mind as God created it

but the mind that insists on judging and managing everything.

We offer God our wounds and our failures

yet hesitate to release our way of seeing.

And yet this is precisely the place Christ longs to enter.

The mind that will not bow cannot yet be illumined.

The will that will not yield cannot yet be healed.

So God prepares a Cross for us.

He allows elders, family, circumstances, illness, obscurity, misunderstanding, and waiting.

Not because He delights in our suffering

but because He loves us too much to leave us imprisoned.

The will must meet another will.

The mind must encounter a wisdom not its own.

This is why the monk is given obedience.

And it is why every Christian in hidden ways is also given a Cross.

Not because we are weak

but because we are being taught how to become free.

We imagine freedom as the right to choose.

Christ reveals freedom as the power to give oneself.

The Son of God did not come down from the Cross to prove His divinity.

He remained there to reveal it.

His obedience unto death was not submission to cruelty

but fidelity to love.

When thoughts arise that we are being wasted

forgotten

unproductive

overlooked

or invisible

these are not merely discouraging thoughts.

They are often the final tremors of a will being gently dismantled.

Here obedience becomes pure

when there is nothing left to gain

nothing left to prove

nothing left to control.

Here God waits.

When a person becomes small

when they become empty

they no longer have anything to defend.

They can ask without fear

because they no longer compete with God.

They can trust

because they no longer hide.

They can receive

because they have stopped insisting.

This is what it means to oblige God.

Not to force His hand

but to remove every barrier to His coming.

God does not violate the will.

He waits for it to be given.

And when it is,

He comes not as an idea

not merely as comfort

but as Companion,

Refuge,

and Life.

What remains uncrucified remains wounded.

What is offered on the Cross is made whole.

This is the mystery of obedience.

Not that it destroys us

but that it leaves nothing in us

that love cannot raise.

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Reflection based upon The Wondrous and Paradoxical Ethos of Monasticism, pp 79-80, by

Archimandrite Zacharias Zacharou