BILLTESKA

In today’s pairing of Joshua’s stern words to the Israelites at Shechem and the Gospel about the defection of many – maybe most of the disciples because of the difficulty of the Mystery of His Flesh and Blood, I find support for the idea of continuing revelation. God reveals more and more to humans, and each new revelation is hard to take. It means that we have to give up some of our old ideas about God, as we enlarge our understanding. I think we can take this meaning from Joshua’s words about putting away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt. It is no small thing to forsake your ancestors’ understanding. Hard as it is to imagine, if God wants us to eat human flesh and blood, we must leave ancient practices behind and do it.

We must do it even with our own sacred texts, if we are to be faithful to their Spirit, as distinct from their letter. This can be difficult, but sometimes it can be a great comfort, as with toady’s passage from Ephesians. I believe that we are free to reject this teaching in its most literal sense. In fact, we are required to reject the conventional interpretation of what it means for the wife to be subject to the husband, if we are to be faithful to the Spirit of the whole New Testament. Here we must put away the gods that our ancestors served, and serve the Lord only.

If it is any help, the majority opinion is that Paul did not write Ephesians, and that it is the work of the next generation ~ of a disciple, perhaps, certainly of someone thoroughly familiar with Paul and his teaching. But this teaching on marriage is significantly different from the undisputed Pauline teaching in I Corinthians, where the Apostle assured wives that they are free to remarry if their husbands die. How could this be if their husband is her “head” and they are indissolubly “one flesh”, as Christ is with the Church? This difference is, in fact, one of the reasons for the majority opinion, that Ephesians is not by Paul.

Still, it is Holy Writ, and although it may comfort us that it does not have the authority of Paul, still the Church accepts the authority of whoever did write it. So what can we do with it? What use is it to us, who cannot and ought not to consider wives as subordinate to husbands, as the Church surely is to Christ? Well, for one thing, even the author seems a bit uncomfortable with this teaching. After all, he begins the whole passage by saying that all of us should be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ, and at the end, he says “it’s a Mystery”, a “great Mystery” even, as if to say that maybe we should be really careful with interpreting it. Finally, he adds that whatever it means it certainly means that a husband should love his wife as himself, and a wife should revere her husband (Revere is better than respect.)

In the final analysis, I think we may read equality in the passage. At least as much equality as the social structure of the time would permit. Women were not public figures. They had no social role outside the house. In that circumstance, women were the subjects of men. This circumstance is not our own. What is important for us is the fact that husbands are enjoined to regard their wives as their own flesh. Not as their property, but as themselves. For us, the passage is legitimately read as a teaching of mutual subjection, as found in the opening line. As concerns the outside world, the couple would be represented exclusively by the husband. For public purposes, the wife was his subject. That was the normal state of affairs in the Græco-Roman world. But as a Christian household, governed by the love of Christ, equality reigned. We do not live in that world, and so the aspect of the teaching that is specific to it we may regard as a “god of our ancestors”, which we are called upon to “put away”.

So, does this passage mean anything interesting for us now? Possibly. I think it may have to do with Ephesians’ metaphor of the body, especially in its juxtaposition today with the passage about Christ’s Flesh. Jesus has just said that the Bread we are to eat is His Flesh. (This is what turned off so many disciples.) But in the next breath, He says that it is the Spirit Who gives life; the flesh is useless. Clearly, He is using flesh in two senses. On the one hand it is useless, compared to the life-giving Spirit; on the other it is precisely My Flesh that gives eternal life!

I like to think of flesh in the useless sense as what we would call ego, and flesh in the life-giving sense as the shorthand for the Mystical Body, the sacramental relationship with Christ, in which we become one with Him as He is one with the Father ~ that is, a unity in which our personal identity is not dissolved or destroyed, but glorified in the intimate relationship to the Other. That is the unity between Christ and the Church. It is similar to the unity between wife and husband, which is also an intimate, sacramental unity. To say that the two become one flesh is not to say that there is one ego but one body, as the Church is one Body. And, like the Church, the Persons in a sacramental marriage (whether or not they are practicing Christians!) are a reflection of the Life of the Most Holy Trinity, the Kingdom of God, in which no Person is superior to another, in which the Persons remain distinct but inseparable in this life, in which there is a plurality of persons but one life, and the Name of that life is Love.