21st Sunday 2024
Joshua 24:1-2,15-18; Ephesians 5:21-32; John 6:60-69
We have had a couple of fruitful weeks with the Letter to the Ephesians, with a fair amount to ponder. Today’s extract, though, is rather more contentious. “So is the husband the head of his wife, and as the Church submits to Christ, so should wives to their husbands in everything.”
Er….no. That is definitely a notion of its time, expressing the values and social conditions of its time, and not something to which we can subscribe today. Before we risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater, though, take note of what follows. “Husbands should love their wives just as Christ loved the Church, and sacrificed Himself for her to make her holy.”
The husband is to sacrifice himself for his wife: he is not to lord it over her. Today, we would want that to be expressed more in terms of mutuality and equality. Both parties in a marriage should have a Christlike love for the other: each should sacrifice him/herself for the other. That is how both the Second Vatican Council and the current Code of Canon Law speak of marriage, describing it as a covenant of equals, echoing the covenant between Christ and His Church. The scripture passage then goes on to speak of marriage, as did Our Lord Himself, as two becoming one body.
Present day society is quick, and rightly so, to reject the idea of male superiority, but it fails to take into account the positive aspects of this letter. Sex is trivialised so as to become an element in dating, or even in a casual encounter: consequently the concept of marriage as two in one body is lost. The downgrading of sex to a mere gratification of desire, something which occurs at the beginning of a relationship rather than as its culmination, inevitably weakens the uniqueness of marriage, and therefore its durability. If sexual intercourse is something which you can have with anybody at any time, it loses its unitive and sacred power.
As with the last few weeks, though, the focal point of the Liturgy of the Word is chapter six of St. John’s Gospel, which today wraps up the Bread of Life discourse. It does so in a startling manner, with a rejection of Jesus’ words, even by many of His followers, who part company with Him.
We have encountered Scribes, Pharisees, and others who refuse to accept Jesus, but here we are told specifically that it was “many of His disciples” who grumbled, and then went away. Furthermore, Jesus is prepared to lose even His core followers, the Twelve, if they are not prepared to take His teaching on board.
This shows how fundamentally important are Jesus’ words about living bread, about eating His flesh and drinking His blood. If people reject that, then they reject Him. There is no compromise on Our Lord’s part. He declines to elucidate His doctrine, to explain it more clearly, to appeal to His followers to stay.
It strikes me that there are two issues here. Firstly, there is the centrality of Our Lord’s eucharistic doctrine: those who do not accept it cannot be His disciples. Secondly, there is faith in the person of Jesus, brought out in Peter’s response.
Here, as so often, Peter represents the Church and speaks for the Church, as his successors have frequently been required to do, down through the ages. Remember that the Last Supper has not yet taken place: Peter, at this point, has no more understanding of Jesus’ words than do those who walk away. Yet he is prepared to put his trust in those words because he puts his trust in Jesus. If Jesus speaks those words, then they must be true, even if they are, for the present, incomprehensible.
“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the message of eternal life, and we know: we believe that you are the Holy One of God.” That is complete faith in Jesus, the faith of the Church, on whose behalf Peter speaks. May we always have that same faith in Jesus, the Holy One of God, and may He ever deepen our faith in, and our devotion to, His eucharistic presence as our food, and our pledge of eternal life.
