My dear brothers and sisters,
This Sunday we come to the end of our long reflection on the sixth chapter of the gospel according to John. This sixth chapter which we have been discussing is, as I have mentioned earlier, concerned with Jesus’ Bread of Life discourse. As we wind down this Sunday, however, the more alert among you would have noticed a troubling little detail. After speaking to us for four weeks about the Bread of Life, which is His flesh, and the need to eat it, all of a sudden, Our Lord seems to backtrack!
It is the spirit that gives life,
while the flesh is of no avail.
I must confess that, personally, I was a little flummoxed by this googly Our Lord throws us at this point. Help, however, was close at hand in the form of a trusty biblical commentary, and all became much clearer.
What Our Lord is doing when he says that “it is the spirit that gives life, while the flesh is of no avail.” Is to stress the difference between the flesh of this world and the flesh of His Body. This flesh is no ordinary flesh, it is a flesh that is imbued with the spirit that gives life. While the flesh of this world is of no avail, the Bread that has come down from heaven, offers us flesh that will give us eternal life!
With all this talk of flesh, it was little wonder that the extract from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians also caught my eye. Now this text is often read at weddings, but I think that it gains much, MUCH, more in the context of the discourse on the Bread of Life. Listen:
For no one hates his own flesh
but rather nourishes and cherishes it,
even as Christ does the church,
because we are members of his body.
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother
and be joined to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.
The nature of a Christian marriage, or perhaps the goal, should have become quite clear to all of you by now. Our marriages are constituted, and are intended to be, just like the marriage between Christ and His bride, the Church. Christ loves His bride so much, that He offers Her His own flesh, and blood, so that it may be sustained. He does so, because He does not “hate his own flesh but rather … cherishes it.” If our marriages are to be like Christ’s to His Church, then not only is there no space for divorce, but neither is there space for the acrimoniousness and viciousness that often accompanies divorces and separations. For while our bodies remain divided in a material - or natural - sense, in the spiritual - or supernatural - sense the two have “become one flesh”, and as Saint Paul has already taught us:
no one hates his own flesh
but rather nourishes and cherishes it
To hate your spouse – I will not use the word ex or former, because the Church just does not admit this possibility – is to hate your own body. Any psychologist sitting here today will, I am sure, support me in this assertion – to hate, or resent, someone who has been intimately associated with you, is to indeed hate your very self. And this could well apply to the hatred we bear towards our parents, and siblings, whether it be for real, or imagined, hurts.
The second portion of St. Paul’s words which I extracted a while ago, deepens our understanding of the relation of Christ to His Church and a Christian marriage.
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother
and be joined to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.
Christ’s love for His Church is put in very fleshy terms here; Christ loves His Church with the same kind of passion, desire, and indeed hope, that a man goes to his wife; or a person in love desires their beloved. Think of your own passion, and you will know the depth of the passion that Our Lord has for His bride, the Church.
But it is not just fleshy passion that St. Paul is referring to, because this verse is taken from the second chapter of Genesis and comes immediately after Adam hails Eve who has been freshly created from his rib. This joining of man to a woman, therefore, is prior to the Fall and, consequently, prior to lust. The desire of Christ for His bride, as a result, while most certainly a passionate one, is spiritually charged, one that is unmarked by disordered sensibilities.
Indeed, this verse from almost the very start of the Bible could well be a prophecy of the way Christ would come to save mankind.
For this reason, a man [in this case, Jesus, the second Adam] shall leave his father [in heaven] and his mother [Our Lady who beheld Him on His Cross] and be joined to his wife [the Church which was born from the side of Our Lord on the Cross CCC 766], and the two shall become one flesh.
It is with this idea that I would like to leave you, my dear brothers and sisters, that Christ unites Himself in the flesh with each and everyone of us, individually, and together. He gives us His body, so that by consuming it, His flesh becomes our flesh, so that we are never alone, but indeed, nourished and cherished by Him who is our beginning and our end.
May God bless you all.
(A version of this homily was first preached
to the faithful at the anticipated Sunday Mass in the parish of Our Lady of the
Rosary, Fatorda, on 24 Aug 2024-
Image reference: Berswordt Altar, 14th Century, Marienkirche, Dortmund, Germany via picryl.com. )
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