Joshua 24: 1-2a, 15-17, 18b (RM) or 1-2a, 14-18 (RCL); Psalm 34; Ephesians 5: 1-2, 21-35 (RM) or Eph 6: 10-20 (RCL); John 6: 53, 60-69 (RM) or 56-69 (RCL.)

One little micro-act that I was rather proud of, in the eight years I was a professor at an RC diocesan seminary, took place the day that the Lectionary reading for Mass was Ephesians 5: 21-32. I was scheduled to serve as lector, and the seminary rector was the presider. I went to the rector beforehand and explained that I could not proclaim this reading on grounds of conscience. And I explained why.

The rector, who of course was my boss, looked startled and said, “But I’ll explain this reading in my homily.” I said I still could not proclaim the reading.

In the end, a seminarian read “Wives should be obedient to their husbands…” and the rector did not say a word about it in his homily. Just as well. He had no clue what the problem was.

(If you use the Revised Common Lectionary you’ll have a different reading from Ephesians this week. Just keep in mind that all that ostensibly militaristic language, “…take up the whole armour of God …” was not a green light for aggression, but an encouragement to stand firm under persecution.)

So let’s put on the armour of God and deal with Ephesians 5.

To be somewhat fair to the seminary rector, you can’t preach on this text with any credibility in Western societies today. Pointing out that the “household codes” that urged lesser-ranking persons to subordinate themselves to their superiors came from ancient Greek thought doesn’t explain why this turns up in our Sunday Lectionary. Extending the analogy to Christ and the church – that it really means the church must be subordinate to Christ as its head – makes the underlying motive transparent. It spills over into clericalism and patriarchal entitlement. It builds a pyramid with power and control perched firmly at the top.

Here is what several contemporary theologians have to say:

Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza points out that the Greek word is “women,” not “wives,” because freeborn women were only required to submit to their own husband and not to any master, unlike women servants or slaves. Hmmm.

Scripture scholar E. Elizabeth Johnson shows that the author of Ephesians took a metaphor used in Hosea and flipped it around backwards. In Hosea the reality of a broken marriage and unfaithful spouse was applied metaphorically to the persistent faithfulness of God when the people went astray. But in Ephesians Christ’s relationship to the church is used to enforce social submission in the lived reality of marriage—how men should relate to their wives and wives to their husbands.

Johnson writes,

“The logic of the analogy collapses because husbands do not die for their wives as Christ died for the church, and Christ did not love his own body as husbands are urged to do, but rather gave himself up for the church. Men are given an alarmingly self-serving motivation to love their wives (5:28), even though the author says clearly that Christ’s love for the church is self-giving rather than self-loving.”

Christ as head of the church and the husband as head of his wife is disrupted in the very same sentence: ‘He who loves his wife loves himself.’

Spanish theologian and activist Teresa Forcades calls Pope John Paul’s use of this imagery the “trap of complementarity.” There is no mutual submission here. She points out further that

“this construct does not take into account the real bodies and actual desires of many people that do not conform to binary heterosexuality. Furthermore, it reinscribes the stereotype of femininity as ‘being there’ for the need of the man…”

Let me suggest something else. For weeks now our Gospel reading has shown Jesus speaking of himself as the manna in the desert, as the bread of life, as the source of life beyond life, cosmic life, eternal life. Jesus uses metaphor: “Flesh and blood” means the whole person. We are invited to take the presence of Christ into ourselves so that all he is may be ours – his life, his love, his strength, his divine nature.

In reading sacred texts, in letting our lives be shaped by Christ’s love, seeking wisdom, or sharing in a sacramental understanding of all of creation, we live in Christ, not as domineering Head, but as Centre, as the self-giving core of life. Like his disciples in John 6, and like the Hebrew people that Joshua addressed in the land of Moab, we have a choice. Imagine that!

© Susan K. Roll

This Reflection has been revised from that of August 22, 2021