The Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time August 26, 2018
Fr. Albert Sacred Heard, Broussard, LA
N.B. The ending of the recording is from the end of Mass when I address the scandal in the Church
“This saying is hard, who can accept it!” Which saying, exactly, is so hard to accept? The Jews in the Gospel are talking about the Eucharist, but there is another saying in our readings today that is probably just as hard, if not even harder for modern Catholics to accept. I’m talking about the opening lines for our second reading.
When we say that this bread and wine become the flesh and blood of Jesus, many Catholics nod along because they’ve heard it so many times. Many non-Catholics just roll their eyes and think “whatever.” But when I say this: “Wives should be submissive to their husbands as to the Lord…” well, I can practically hear the blood boiling in the many enlightened and educated folk of today’s world, both inside and outside the Catholic Church. What about you, I wonder? Have some of you already written me off, decided that I’m backwards and chauvinistic and have nothing worth hearing? I hope not.
In fact, I hope you’ll give me a chance because I’m going to try to do something you might not expect. I’m going to try to show you how both of these “hard sayings” are not only believable and good, but how they are connected to each other. And the starting point for all of this is this line from St. Paul: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.
This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.”
What is a mystery, exactly? How can a line about marriage from the book of Genesis apply to Jesus Christ and the Church? Just what is the “Church” in this case? A building? Obviously not. The short answer is that the Church is the entire body of baptized Christians that have lived, are alive now, and will ever live. Truly, in a perfect world, the “Church” would simply include all human beings. Jesus Christ wants to be united to all of humanity. He wants to be married to us. That’s why the Son of God literally took human flesh and became Jesus Christ.
But it wasn’t enough to belong to the same species. He wanted a real union. Man and woman get married and become one flesh… you know what that means. Fleshly union between man and woman is an amazing and powerful thing, but it is actually a temporary symbol. It goes away. And, what it represents is even more amazing. It represents the eternal, infinite love of God uniting us to himself.
Jesus Christ wants to be “one flesh” with us in a deeper spiritual way. A fleshly, but spiritual way. So, Catholicism has from the beginning talked about the Church as the Bride of Christ. In natural marriage, a man and woman give themselves to each other totally, including their bodies. Jesus Christ wants to give himself totally to us, including his body. Hence, we have the miraculous reality we call the Eucharist. That’s right, receiving communion is supposed to be just as deep and personal – actually even more so – as the fleshly union of a man and his wife.
So what does that have to do with a wife being submissive to her husband? Everything. It’s worth mentioning that this command to obey isn’t a fluke. It’s here in the letter to the Ephesians. It’s in Paul’s other letter to the Colossians, and it’s in one of Peter’s letters. Whatever this teaching means, it appears three times in the New Testament, so it can’t just be ignored. So, yeah, what does it mean?
First, look at the context. He only says this after he tells both husband and wife to be submissive to each other. So, it’s already not a one-way command. Second, look at the reason: there is a comparison to Christ and the Church.
Every married couple is a sacrament, a sign of Christ and the Church. The love of a married couple is supposed to remind all of us how much God united to us. Within this symbol, both the man and the woman have their own symbolic role. The man represents Christ, the wife the Church. It’s a simple biological, psychological, and spiritual fact that men and women are different. Because of their differences, they each represent God, they each show forth the image of God in different ways. Genesis makes it clear that man and woman are equal and that both of them show forth the image of God.
There are specific ways that man and woman each represent and make present the love God has for humanity, but we could really get bogged down in particulars. The main point comes back to the reason Paul is giving this commandment in the first place: out of reverence for Christ.
And what does Jesus Christ want more than anything? To give himself to us, body, blood, soul, and divinity. So, what do we submit to? We submit to Jesus saving us. We submit to receiving the Eucharist. We submit to living a life of holiness, which is the only road to happiness. When Paul tells a wife to submit to her husband, he is telling her to submit to his mission of dying for love of her.
Love wants what is best for the other person. Resentment and domination are not good for anyone, so love does not dominate, and it does not foster resentment. Likewise, being submissive to love is not about being dominated or left with resentment. Love wants a person, of their own free will and with respect for their autonomy, to freely choose to give up their freedom and submit to a life together.
Wives, submit to your husbands’ mission to make you holy, to love you, to die on the cross for your benefit. Yes, that sometimes mean accepting a decision you would not make if it were left entirely up to you, but remember, we are Catholics. Catholics should not see the world in terms of politics and power struggles. In Christianity, the highest honor is to be the greatest servant. In Christianity, the best life is a life of sacrifice. In Christianity, to submit to God is to discover the true meaning of freedom.
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. This may well be a hard saying. To accept it means accepting a specific definition of marriage and that there is something unique about the relationship between a man and woman. To accept it means to accept that men and woman have definite differences that cannot be changed no matter how much we want to change them. To accept it means to admit Jesus is right about losing your life in order to save it.
Like that other hard saying – “eat my flesh and drink my blood” – accepting this takes faith. Standing up for this truth, like standing up for the Eucharist, might mean that some disciples return “to their former way of life” – that some people leave the Church. We cannot, however, abandon the truth because it is unpopular. Scripture never tells us how many of these people 10, 20, or 50 years later run into an apostle or missionary and think “you know what, I left Jesus back then because I didn’t believe, but now I think he was right all along.” We don’t know how many of these disciple’s came back eventually. What we do know, however, is that Jesus Christ, through Scripture and Tradition, has given us the words of eternal life. You may not understand what the Church is saying here. You may not like it. But you do have to ask yourself “to whom shall we go?”
Even in the midst of corruption, the Church has the Eucharist. She has the words of eternal life, given to her by her Lord and founder.