Sermon Blog
Wilfulness, the Sin of Saul
January 19, 2025
The heroes of contemporary culture are men who trust their instincts, women who challenge traditional roles, children who aren’t afraid to correct adults. The Gospels have some of these kinds of heroes also—the men who tear open the roof of a house to lower their paralytic friend down to Jesus, the woman who pours costly oil on Jesus, the children who go to Jesus against the wishes of the disciples. Though from the outside we see the similarities, the virtues praised in today’s heroes are different from those praised in the biblical accounts. In “Willfulness, the Sin of Saul,” St. John Henry Newman helps us understand the difference and to see how even as Christians we fall into the same misconceptions as the age we live in.
We might say that the heroes of today and many biblical heroes weren’t afraid to offend common sensibilities. But an individual streak can either be a virtue or a vice, depending on what, or who, is being opposed and by the spirit that impels the individual. In the case of Saul, it was a vice, specifically willfulness. Newman says, “his temptation and his fall consisted in a certain perverseness of mind, founded on some obscure feelings of self-importance … a perverseness which shows itself in a reluctance absolutely to relinquish its own independence of action, in cases where dependence is a duty … though it is afraid altogether to oppose itself to the voice of God.”
This is not an outwardly defiant or rebellious nature. That is easier to overcome than willfulness. The angry and outspoken atheist appears farthest from redemption, but often is closer to conversion than the quiet, wilful soul. Consider the parable of the two sons whose father asks them to work in the vineyard. The first says no, but later changes his mind. The second says yes, but then never goes. Jesus asks which son did the will of the father, and the crowd answers, “the first.” This parable is about the self-righteousness Pharisees who reject Jesus and the sinners who gather around him. The Pharisees find it much harder to come to Jesus than the tax collectors because their stumbling block is pr
ide.
Willfulness is more about pride than it is about defying authority. When Saul chose to spare the Amalekites whom God told him to slaughter, Scripture seems to imply that Saul thought he knew better than God, for he “spared Agag, and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them; all that was despised and worthless they utterly destroyed” (1 Sam. 15:9). When he greets Samuel, Saul doesn’t claim to have rebelled, but to have fulfilled the commandment of the Lord. Newman points out that, “A perverse will easily collects together a system of notions to justify itself in its obliquity. The real state of the case was this, that he preferred his own way to that which God had determined.” Saul had actually convinced himself that he had obeyed God, so deep had willfulness seeped into his heart.
Newman understood that we all struggle with wilfulness as a result of the fall, and he did not excuse himself. In fact, he preached this sermon on December 2, 1832, after his controversy with Edward Hawkins, Provost of Oriel, about the role of Tutors at Oriel, and later examined himself on the pride he exhibited. Half a year later during a serious illness in Sicily he acknowledged his willfulness but that he “had not sinned against the light” by going against the truth.
Everywhere in our culture we are urged to be ourselves, to buck the system, to express our unique individuality, to break the glass ceiling, to stand up and stand out and stand apart. In obeying God, we will certainly do some of these things, and people around us may be offended. But there is no virtue in individual expression or in offending others, only in obedience to God. In the beatitudes, Jesus tells his listeners that they will be blessed if they are persecuted “for my sake.” And that is the crux of it: Is our will leading us to obedience to God?
Everything becomes clearer in this light. As we follow him, we begin to experience the freedom that comes from obedience, the honor that comes as we humbly submit as children of the Father, the heroism that comes in the midst of self-forgetfulness. For encouragement, we can look to our Savior, who models it perfectly for us in his prayer, “Not my will, but yours be done.”
