I don’t usually
do this, but I’m going to ask for a show of hands on this one. How many of you
had today’s second reading at your wedding? In my experience, about 25% of
couples choose it (the majority go for “love is patient, love is kind” from 1
Corinthians for their 2nd reading, but this one from Eph 5
definitely comes in second in popularity; when I had to plan a fake wedding for
our liturgical celebration class in seminary, I picked “God is love” from 1
John… if you’re planning a wedding, maybe think about it). You’ve probably
noticed that I don’t normally preach on the reading from Paul at Sunday Mass (I
most often preach on the Gospel, sometimes on the Old Testament reading; I
preach Paul a lot more at daily Mass), but this reading is one of the rare
readings that I think you have to preach on if it’s proclaimed, because this
language of submission is just kind of, if I’m being honest, uncomfortable. It
discomforted me when I began praying with these readings a week ago to prepare
myself to preach, and I think I owe it to you wrestle with that out loud for a while
and not just leave it hanging. But before I get to that language, I want to
look at this reading more broadly.
What I think
probably motivates a lot of those couples who choose this for weddings to do
so, where I think Paul is really at his most brilliant here, is that he uses
marriage to talk about Christ’s love for the Church and he uses Christ’s love
for the Church to talk about marriage. The brilliance, the good news, goes in
both directions here. Paul is telling us that human relationships matter. That
marriage is part of how God shows the world what love looks like. Yes,
ultimately, the most perfect way God ever did that was on the cross on Calvary
Hill, and at Mass we witness that sacrifice truly as God re-presents to us Christ’s
sacrifice in the Eucharistic Prayer. But that’s not the same as it would have
been for us to actually see Jesus willingly let himself be crucified for love of
us. As humans we need concrete material expressions to show us what love looks
like. And marriage is one of the ways God gives us to let us glimpse that. And
that sounds like a lot to ask of married couples, and it is. That’s why I
always point out at weddings that the couple is surrounded, and thereby held:
family and friends in front of them, bridal party either side, me as the Church’s
witness behind and the crucifix and (normally tabernacle) behind me. We don’t
go to weddings (I hope) just for the cake. We go to pledge our support to help
this couple as they seek to live out Christ’s love. And we do that knowing
Christ is doing that. Marriage is certainly not the only human relationship
that can witness to God’s love. Religious orders do that, each in their own way,
and really all friendship is capable of doing that. I once preached a junior
high graduation Mass in which the first reading was about marriage, and I
commented that it seemed odd, but really it was appropriate, because, like marriage,
the friendships that had been fostered over nine years of grade school really
did disclose to me something of God’s love.
The other brilliant
move is to say that Christ’s love for us, for the Church is marriage-like.
Christ isn’t some distant, one-and-done, “I died for you, prepared a place for
you, see you when you get to heaven!” kind of savior. He continues to nourish
and cherish us, Paul says, as if we were his own body, as a spouse. And these
two insights are connected. Christ’s nourishing and cherishing of us, Christ’s
washing of us in the water and the word, that’s precisely what forms us to be
able to show the love with which we’re loved with the love with which we love.
Christ loves us into loving, and that’s active, and that’s not just some vague
feeling, but is realized in the nitty gritty day to day of our lives. It’s
realized in an embrace, it’s realized in putting the dishes away, it’s realized
in forgiveness, it’s realized in commitment, and (and this takes us back to
what’s uncomfortable in this text), it’s realized in submission.
Note that the start of this passage
tells everyone to be subordinate, one to another. It’s reciprocal. Paul then
repeats that advice is repeated specifically for wives, but that doesn’t mean
that he doesn’t think husbands should subordinate themselves to their wives
too. He’s just said that everyone is to subordinate themselves to one another. He
then adds an extra bit for husbands, that they’re to love in this
self-sacrificial manner. Now, earlier in
the letter (in a part we didn’t read together at Mass), Paul told all
Christians to live lives of love. He certainly expected wives to be loving too.
But he gives extra directives for husbands here, because they had the power.
They had more power to give up, so he told them to do it, to sacrifice it as an
act of love.
Part of self-sacrificial love is
recognizing our privilege and our power, which works in all kinds of ways, some
very subtle. Almost two thousand years
since that letter was written and gender is still a huge part of who has that
power and privilege to give up in love. But it’s not the only part. Seeking out
the lost, the excluded and the marginalized is essential to loving like Christ.
I think what first disquiets me about
this reading is that Paul emphasizes one thing for the wives and something else
for the husbands. But when we read it in the context of the whole letter (and
it’s only six chapters long, I’d invite you to do that in one sitting), we see
that this is only emphasis: Paul calls everyone, wives, husbands, and all the
unmarried, to mutual self-sacrificial love and mutual submission. What
disquiets me more is that we all have to do that. See that cross? We have to
love like that. What gives me hope, is that that’s precisely how Christ is
loving us.
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