Homily on Obsequiousness

I offer this Mass for the health and holiness of one, Javier Vazquez, a hallmate of mine during my time in Spain. Javier was notable for his extreme openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness. He was the kind of guy who went to the gym everyday for three hours but had no gains to show for it because he spent almost all his time talking to people there. Although he wasn’t a practicing Catholic, he would go to Mass at 7:30 in the morning just to hear me preach. He was just that eager to establish social bonds and ingratiate himself with others. However, this strength of his was also his tragic flaw. One day at dinner he mentioned that he had just spent nearly five hundred euros on two shirts, one an Armani and the other some super expensive brand name. Of course, we asked him why he would spend his money like that since he wasn’t from a wealthy family. He talked about how the saleswoman was very nice and that he wanted to make her happy. My hallmates and I laughed at this for a couple minutes until we came up with the potential justification that maybe the saleswoman struck him with awe by her beauty and was simply trying to gain her romantic interest. He replied that the saleswoman was just a kindly middle-aged matron which resulted in us laughing even more than before.

Now you might think that we were being jerks for mocking him for being exceedingly friendly to a salesperson, but we had simply highlighted the absurdity of his obsequiousness. If we think of friendliness as a virtue, and cantankerousness or disagreeableness as the vice that is the lack of friendliness, then obsequiousness would be the vice that is an excess of friendliness. In Javier’s case he sought to please a salesperson (to be nice to her) even though this sort of mercantile relationship is not oriented towards either of those objectives. A salesperson from the perspective of the moral realm is simply meant to help facilitate a mutually beneficial transaction. In fact a salesperson expects indifference and even hostility from others since the objective of a salesperson is to sell and their agreeable disposition is generally a tool to facilitate trade of a good or service. The point of a mercantile transaction was that good or service itself and Javier didn’t even have any use for the shirts he had just bought.

Now a characteristic of obsequiousness is that it distorts the order of charity. It is more important for you to be friends with some people than with others. For instance, your family members more than with non family members or with your fellow countrymen than with foreigners. In trying to curry favor with the saleswoman, my hallmate ended up spending the money he needed in order to visit his father during a holiday break. He sacrificed a higher good for a lower one without being aware of it. In order to be nice or kind to some stranger he ended up impairing his ability to be a good son to his father.

While obsequiousness, that desire to please others, may not give the appearance of being a terribly serious sin, it certainly can lead to grave sin as we see in today’s Gospel. The daughter of Herodias not only danced before the court with the skill and spirit to please everyone, but her response to Herod’s offer was to please her mother. What mattered to her more than anything was the esteem of her mother. While it is certainly good to help one’s mother, the daughter’s obsequiousness led her to murder a man just to please her mother. To further ingratiate herself she added the detail of the head being served on a platter. After all she was so considerate and thoughtful that she didn’t want her mother to have to touch St. John’s nasty hair.

This kind of servility displayed by Herod’s daughter is also a distortion of the order of charity. Our love of God is meant to order all our relationships. A good friendship with others means first and foremost that friends help one another grow in holiness and virtues, like justice, honesty or diligence. The dancing daughter was not helping anyone do anything like that. She was good at pleasing the guests, Herod, and her mother. She was quite popular, but she was evil because God was irrelevant to how she related to others. On the other hand John the Baptist was trying his best to be a true friend to Herod. John was in jail because he criticized Herod for marrying his brother’s wife, because doing that was bad for Herod’s soul. Herod was intrigued by the prophet’s message about repentance and the coming of the Messiah. John’s relationship with Herod was totally guided by God’s will for Herod. Herod kind of sort of understood this, but he still found it more important to be thought of as honorable by his guests. As a result of his priorities, Herod became a murderer.

One of my high school friends thought that the third commandment, keep holy the Sabbath day, was an act of narcissism by God, requiring all human beings to worship Him instead of letting human beings worship or love whatever or whoever they wished to choose. It struck me as a vaguely compelling argument to which I didn’t really have a response. However, over time it has become evident that when men do not have God as the ordering principle in their lives around which everything revolves and finds its meaning, your social relationships end up destroying you and others. That desire to please and find favor with others led Javier to lose a lot of time and money. That same desire led Herod and his daughter to become murderers.

Many of you have aspirations to gain recognition with your peers or the opposite sex either in person or via social media. Others may long to get the kind of recognition that is conferred through good grades or participating in sports or other extra curricular activities. Others may be more focused on pleasing parents, employers or teachers. None of those are in and of themselves bad, but do know that if God is not the source and summit of your life all those sorts of relationships will result in you hurting yourself and others. God as the source of truth and order in your own life also gives meaning and purpose to all those relationships in your life. Without that divine truth providing a structure and goal for those relationships and relationships, they remain merely human things and are destined to be corrupted.

In Christ,

Fr. Athanasius Soto, O.S.B.

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