God enlivens our relationships with love – Eph 5:2a, 25-32

Ordinary Time, Yr B, Wk 21.  Notre Dame, Badin Hall.

I seem to have an odd track record of readings about marriage coming up at Masses I celebrate in very different contexts.  We’re here, about to begin a new school year at Notre Dame, and one comes up.  Just a few months ago, on June 6^th, I presided at 8^th grade graduation Mass at the parish where I was serving before I came here, and the first reading was another marriage reading.  It was from the book of Tobit, a depiction of parental pride at children growing up and marrying.  And it worked pretty well for 8^th grade graduation.  Certainly, there was a lot of parental pride, even though none of these kids had gotten married.  But, praying as I prepared myself to preach at that occasion, I started thinking about what marriage really is.  Marriage is a totally human relationship that is blessed to show the world something of what God’s love for us looks like.  And the kids we were graduating had entered into relationships like that; they’d entered into authentic, maturing friendships.  I’d marveled often as I saw their love, their mutual challenge, and their forgiveness when things went wrong, and genuinely seen God’s love.  And, at their graduation, I felt some pride, marveled in gratitude, thanked them, and encouraged them to keep on loving like that.

Maybe what was a reflection of gratitude in June, can be hope and summons in August; a call to not see friendship and relationship as a distraction from our real work here, or disconnected from our spiritual lives, but as a place to live in love, as a way of showing each other quite what we believe God’s love for us is.  And we can only do that if we take some time to marvel at this great gift: that God doesn’t leave us just as recipients of his love (which would be grand enough!), but loves us enough to make us love, dares to entrust to us the task of letting His love take on flesh anew in our world. 

He’s brought us to this point of potential (that we also manage to hold back from fully realizing) through what we heard called the cleansing bath of water with the word, through baptism that washed off what was inauthentic in us that holds us back from being the lovers in God’s image we were created to be, something even grander than the marvel of God leading His people across the river to freedom from Egypt.  That washing gets renewed when we open ourselves to the word in scripture, when we participate in the Eucharist, fed with Christ’s own body, given in love, have our sins forgiven in reconciliation.  And that washing gets put to use when we enter into the challenging and beautiful world of loving relationship.  Because there is so much that’s hard here.  So much work, stress, transition, letting go of things that seemed secure, that friends will have to support each other in ways that constitute genuine sacrifice, loving each other as Christ loved, which includes the willingness to give of your very self.

But, let’s go back to this text we heard.  Because if we want to keep being washed in the word, keep having the word of God form us for love, we have to attend to this particular text the Church has put before us tonight.  Because while we need to draw lessons from it for all of our relationships, we can’t evade the fact that it’s about marriage, and we can’t evade the fact that it’s directions for husbands.  Just before this section of the letter, there’s a direction for husbands and wives to subordinate themselves to each other.  That advice is repeated for wives, and then this extra bit is added for husbands, to love in this self-sacrificial manner.  Did Paul not expect wives to love too?  Yes, but he had more directives for husbands, because they had the power.  We might lament that this text doesn’t take the time to dismantle that or even just critique.  But, we need to see that the text does demand that those who have power and privilege use that for the good of others, use it like Christ who did not consider his divinity something to be grasped at, but let himself be killed for our sake, to show us how powerful love is, that not even death, death at our hands, could keep him from being with us.

And there’s a lesson in that for us.  That part of self-sacrificial love is recognizing our privilege and our power, which works in all kinds of ways at a place like this, some very subtle.  That seeking out the lost, the excluded and the marginalized is essential to loving like Christ.  Let me bring up one point that jumped out at me as I prayed at this text.  I wonder if any of you noticed the line, “nobody hates their own flesh.”  Sorry, but Paul didn’t know everyone’s experience when he wrote that.  Some people hate their own flesh, and that’s an all too real marginalization.  They hate that they have too much of it, or too little of it, or that it’s the wrong shape, or the wrong color, or dysfunctional, or cancerous. 

Paul didn’t know everyone’s experience.  But, he did know that Christ cherishes and nourishes all.  How can our friendships and relationships testify to that?  How can we testify to ourselves that we are cherished and nourished?  In this Eucharistic, Christ himself gives his broken body to testify that powerful flesh isn’t where he is to be found.  It’s in the broken, the fragile, in those it’s harder to be friends.  That’s where he meets us.