Twenty-first Sunday (Year B) (Joshua 24:1-2, 15-18; Ephesians 5:21-32; John 6:60-69)
The
Gospel passage today, People of God, refers to the Eucharist and continues last
Sunday’s reading; Jesus is addressing certain Jews who, quite understandably
with their background, found the words of eating the flesh and drinking the
blood of the Son of Man as repulsive and unacceptable. However, in our Mass today, the continuation
of that previous Gospel reading has been put in close proximity to St. Paul’s
teaching that, in Christian marriage, the wife must respect and obey her
husband who, in his turn, must love and cherish his wife. Let us therefore take up Jesus’ words with
dissenting disciples and allow them to illuminate St. Paul’s teaching on the
true nature and purpose of Christian marriage and our appreciation of it.
Does this offend you? What then if you should see the Son of Man
ascend where He was before? It is the
Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words I speak to you are spirit, and they
are life.
St. Paul has become a “bête noir” for modern
feminists who regard his teaching as being degrading for women; but then, what
sort of women do those feminists have in mind, women of the world or Christian
women? The devil’s sin is pride, and the
easiest and most acceptable way of leading human beings astray is for him to
give them a shot or two of pride into the arm, so to speak. We Christians, therefore, need to be very careful
whom we allow to influence us; and, at times, we have to examine the motives of
those who put themselves forward as leaders because we cannot allow ourselves
to be guided by the thinking of people whose stated aims are inevitably and
essentially worldly: gilded over with so-called acceptable pride; polished and
presented for easy assimilation and popularity; promoted by, and serving as safety-valve for, deep-seated
emotional tendencies to self-assertion.
Let us then look at Paul’s teaching:
Wives, submit to your own husbands, as
to the Lord: as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own
husbands in everything. (Eph 5:22, 24)
The feminists say, of course: what woman could
accept that?
Husbands, love your wives, just as
Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, nourish and cherish
(them), just as the Lord does the Church.
The boys, macho-men, likewise respond
immediately with: what man would want that?
Women will, of course, accuse many men of
violence; and men, likewise, will complain of most women’s uncontrolled
emotionalism. However the prime target against
which the feminists’ inveigh is what they see as the humiliation of woman in
Christian marriage, while the boys target the suffocating bondage and
responsibility with which they imagine Christian family life would stifle them.
If those views were the only possible
interpretations of St. Paul’s teaching it would be very difficult indeed to
understand how it has come about that Christianity has raised the status and
dignity of women more than any other religious faith. How could a religion preaching the so-called
humiliation of woman in marriage have lifted up the status, and confirmed the
dignity, of women to such an extent? On
the other hand, if the bondage of responsibilities and chastity were so objectionable
and unsatisfying for men -- as the boys say -- how could it be that Christian
family life has shown itself to be the stable bed-rock of Western, indeed world-wide,
democratic society?
As you can see, so much depends on how you
look at things. That is why we heard in
the first reading Joshua, the leader of the Israelites after Moses, saying to
the assembled people, “Make up your minds”:
Now therefore, fear the LORD, serve Him
in sincerity and in truth, and put away the gods which your fathers served on
the other side of the River and in Egypt.
And if it seems evil to you to serve the LORD, choose for yourselves
this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that
were on the other side of the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land
you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD." So the people answered and said: "Far be
it from us that we should forsake the LORD to serve other gods.
Many of our troubles today are largely the due
to people who, like the Israelites of old, publicly say they don’t want to
forsake the Lord, but who, in their hearts, neither hold Him in fear, nor are willing
to discipline their ambitions or their bodies so as to serve Him in sincerity
and truth.
Jesus, in the Gospel reading, knew some such
people who found His teaching hard because they were unwilling to commit
themselves entirely to Him:
When Jesus knew in Himself that His
disciples complained about this, He said to them, "Does this offend
you? What then if you should see the Son
of Man ascend where He was before? It
is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak
to you are spirit, and they are life.
What if you see the Son of Man ascending to
heaven? Can’t you understand where I am
leading you? You will see me ascend as
your leader to the place where I am preparing a place for all who will follow
me. I am not preparing you to be My
disciples for a mere seventy or eighty years’ life in this sinful set-up; I
have been sent to help you become, in Me, children of God, My heavenly Father. I am, indeed, sent to make you -- by the
Spirit I will send to you -- His children able to live for ever in an eternal
home prepared for you in His Kingdom; but for that you have to be willing to
trust me.
Just as there are many rooms in the Father’s
Kingdom where Jesus is preparing to receive His faithful disciples, so too,
here on earth, there are many ways of learning discipleship and some, indeed,
are better than others, as both Mary and Martha learnt; but all acceptable ways
involve loving God and one’s neighbour, serving, imitating, Jesus, and obeying
His Spirit in the Church.
Whatever way we choose, the whole of our life
as Christians is a time of preparation for our heavenly home, a preparation whereby
we are gradually purged and cleansed of our sins and formed in the likeness of
Jesus by His Holy Spirit. It is not a
time for the pre-eminent pursuit of worldly vanity and pleasure, nor is it a
worldly process we can monitor and appraise to our own satisfaction – even Mary
had not been able to observe the full extent of her Son’s manly spiritual development
before His heavenly Father. The progress
of life on earth for a disciple of Jesus is a Spiritual work, a work carried
out by the Holy Spirit; and it is a faith work, a work that can only be done
for those who live by faith in Jesus Christ and in that way open themselves up
to His Holy Spirit and allow Him to work, even secretly, in them.
And so marriage, the Christian relationship
between man and woman, is a most important relationship for the training of
God’s children; it cannot be a relationship which is private to the two
concerned, that is, a free-love association.
Marriage is the union of man and woman offered to Jesus, to be lived
according to His teaching and for His purposes; and the words of St. Paul today
are of supreme importance and indeed striking beauty in this respect. The wife is to honour and obey her husband so
that, becoming a Christian mother she can not only teach but also gently lead
her children to, and accustom them in, authentic obedience to their father. Were the father alone in requiring obedience
from his children, he would almost inevitably be thought to be demanding it,
and consequently considered as domineering.
The husband is to love his wife so that he can indeed lead and guide his
children in tender love and consideration for their mother; for if she were
alone in seeking such love she would easily be thought of as neurotic. Christian children have to learn obedience
and disciplined love in the home and there is no more beautiful way than
following mother in honouring and obeying father, and joining with father in
expressing love and gratitude to mum. Thus
the father can, and indeed must, rightly insist that his children love their mother; the wife can and should ensure that
her children honour and respect
their father by obedience.
Christian marriage is a privileged
preparation ground: it continues and potentially glorifies God’s work of
creation, it serves and promotes the salvation of the spouses by forming them
for His heavenly family. Every Christian
blessing comes to us through the Cross; consequently, in the whole of Christian
life there is the Cross, but as we see in Jesus, the Cross is ultimately
something which a Christian -- as a sincere and true disciple of Jesus -- can
learn to embrace, with the Lord, for love of the Father; it is something intended
and able to lift us up from the earth to heaven. Just to put it briefly in answer to the
feminists and to the lads, Christian marriage is meant to help a Christian man
and woman grow in humility on the one hand, and in true, self-less, love on the
other hand, both of which demand responsible and enduring commitment, together
with willing and patient sacrifice. To
enable them both to do this, the Christian bond of marriage bestows a share in
divine love, a gift of grace which enables those who want to receive it
strength to live in a way which is more than human; and that is precisely why
the feminists and the lads cannot understand Christian marriage and Christian
love, because it is for those destined for heaven, not for those intent on, and
hoping to be satisfied, with the vanity of human pride or the satiety of
worldly pleasures.
In all this however, argument is of limited
value, for as Jesus said:
Therefore I have said to you that no one
can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father.
That does not mean that the Father denies
anyone the opportunity or the ability to come to Jesus, but simply that He will
not force it upon anyone; while those who do come to discipleship, must realize
that it is a gift of God, not their own work.
As in His days in Palestine, Jesus’ message
faithfully proclaimed by Mother Church today, still displeases many:
From that time many of His disciples
went back and walked with Him no more.
However, contrary to the impression given by
over-anxious disciples at times, Jesus does not depend on human backing, He
does not find it necessary to count “bums on seats”, as the saying goes, in
order to be able to trust His Father, and so:
Jesus
said to the twelve, "Do you also want to leave?"
In reply Peter said what all true believers
since then have repeated wholeheartedly:
Master,
to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.
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