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HOMILY From 21 Sunday in OT
23 Aug 09
Josh
24
Ps 33
Eph 5:21-32
Jn 6:61-70
St.
Agnes Church, Kansas City, KS
TO
WHOM WILL WE HAVE RECOURSE?
In
the Gospel today, the people are reacting
to Jesus’ saying that “unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood
you shall not have eternal life.” They
thought this was impossible; that Jesus was making outrageous
demands and claims. He was asking too much from them. They would
not give him the benefit of their doubt, and try to understand what
he was attempting to explain to them. So they turned away and left
him.
You
and I know that they were very mistaken.
Jesus knew exactly what he was saying, and what he was doing. After
all, he was no ordinary guy. His miracles were proof of that. The
people spontaneously wanted to have eternal life. They did not want
death to be the final answer. Here was Jesus promising them eternal
life, if they would “eat the bread come down from heaven,” which was
his own body and blood. If the people had given Jesus a chance, He
would have explained that the bread of the Eucharist would become
his body and blood. God rained down manna from heaven on Moses and
the people during their 40 year Exodus in the dessert. In the end
all these people died. But Jesus was promising a new manna, his own
body and blood, after eating which a person would never die. You
and I understand this as the meaning of the Eucharist. And it is
completely doable.
When the
people rejected Jesus and left him, what
was Jesus supposed to do? Change his plan so as to please them?
That is not the real world. God draws up
the plans. He knows what is best for us. We are to accept his
plans and try to understand them. We are to commit ourselves to
God, and place our full trust in him.
In the
first reading, Joshua, near the end of his life, called all the
people together and addressed them. He said: “Choose
which God you will serve. Will you serve
the gods of your ancestors, east of the Euphrates, or the gods of
the Amorites in whose land you are now? As for myself, I and my
family will serve only the Lord, Yahweh.” And the people promised
that they would only serve the Lord, Yahweh, because of the great
works that he had performed for their benefit, bringing them out of
slavery to Pharaoh and then protecting and providing for them
throughout the Exodus. Joshua said: “Then put away the foreign gods
that are among you and incline your heart to the Lord, the God of
Israel.” And the people said to Joshua, “The Lord our God we will
serve, and his voice we will obey.” So Joshua made a covenant with
the people that day, and made statues and ordinances for them at
Shechem.
Brothers
and sisters, you and I must also make a
choice. Which god will we serve? Will we
serve the god of our own wishes, our convenience, or the changing
whims of the secular world? Or will we serve Jesus, the Son of God,
who came among us to teach us the ways of God? And if Jesus makes
demands upon us that at first seem difficult and confusing, will we
dismiss him, or will we react as Peter did? “To whom shall we go,
Lord? You alone have the words of eternal life.”
In the
second reading, from the 5th
chapter of Ephesians, St. Paul explains to us how we are related to
God. And he does this in terms of a marriage between a husband and
a wife. Pope John Paul II has a wonderful commentary on this in his
Theology of the Body. St. Paul explains: Christ is related to his
Church as a husband is related to his bride. The Church is Jesus’
bride and you and I are members of that Church. As a good husband,
Jesus is willing to do anything for his beloved bride. He will love
her, protect her, and provide for her. If necessary, he will lay
down his life for her. That is what exactly Jesus did when he
suffered his Passion and Death on a cross.
Jesus’
love for his bride, the Church, becomes the model for all married
people, for all husbands and wives. In an
age when marriage has fallen upon very difficult times, when 50% of
marriages today collapse, we need to examine again the model for
marriage, and rediscover God’s plan for marriage and spousal love.
Jesus is irrevocably committed to his bride. There is nothing that
could force him to divorce his bride. He will never give up on
her. He is irrevocably committed to her. And if Jesus will never
give up on us, then we should never give up on one another. That is
why divorce is to be completely shunned. A commitment is to honored
and worked at. Working with our problems, instead of running from
them, is part of the deal.
St. Paul
teaches: “Be subject to one another out of
reverence for Christ.” This means that
both the husband and the wife are to be subject to one another,
according to their respective roles in marriage. As the Church is
subject to Jesus’ leadership, so also is the bride to be subject to
her husband’s leadership. Husbands are to love their wives as Jesus
loved his bride, the Church. How much did Jesus love his bride? To
the very end, and with every fiber of his being. He laid down his
life for her. It is very easy for a wife to love a husband who is
willing to lay down his life for her. Husbands should love their
wives as their own bodies.
It helps
to recall that the love a husband and wife discover between them
comes, not from themselves, but as a gift from God.
All love comes from God.
God is the source of all love; love is his very definition. This
means that a couple should look to God as the source of their love
for one another. They are to remain in God’s love for them, in
their marriage vows, and strive to share that love more deeply with
each other. They are to learn how to make
the total gift of themselves to one another.
Such a
love can cope with any difficulty.
St. Paul
teaches us: “Try to learn what is pleasing
to the Lord” (Ep 5:10). “Do not be foolish but understand what the
will of the Lord is” (Ep 5:17). This
applies directly to God’s plan for marriage and spousal love.
God’s
plan for spousal love is that spouses are to make the total gift of
themselves to each other. There are to be
no reservations, no conditions, nothing held back.
There is a world of difference between contraception and Natural
Family Planning. In fact, we call NFP “natural” precisely to
highlight the fact that, unlike contraception, NFP respects the
nature of human
love, that is, the truth of spousal communion.
“To begin
with, lovers undermine each other’s dignity as persons unless
they cherish the truth of love.
Second, the truth of love is revealed in love’s natural aspiration
to make a total gift of self. Third, it is only when lovers receive
their love as a gift from God that they are capable of this total
self-giving. Fourth and finally, to receive human love as God’s
gift is to respect the language of the body, in which God, the
Author of this language, expresses himself and speaks his generous
love.
“Unfortunately,
respecting the truth about love is precisely what contraception
fails to do: By suppressing the
procreative meaning of sexuality the spouses refuse to listen to the
language of the body, given by the Creator himself. As a
consequence, contraception diminishes and distorts the totality of
self-giving.
“Natural
Family Planning, by contrast, changes the expression of love (the
spouses abstain from sex during the woman’s fertile period), but not
its essential truth: that the conjugal act is a total gift of self
to the other person. For, rather than engineering sterility,
spouses who use NFP respect the natural cycle of fertility. They do
not suppress the procreative meaning of sexuality, but accept its
presence, adapting themselves to the alternating periods of dormancy
and fertility.
“The
anthropological difference between NFP and
contraception obviously entails a profound moral difference between
the methods as well. In the case of
contraception, the spouses fail to adapt their sexual behavior to
the truth of love, because they experience their sexuality as a
necessity that compels them with an irresistible urge. With NFP the
couple is able to change the sexual expression of their love because
the sexual desire does not dominate them, since it has been
integrated in the true love to the other person. In this way the
spouses keep sexual desire from occupying the entire space of their
relationship, and are thus liberated for the maturity that
flourishes within the communion of persons. In a word, NFP is a
response to the call to total gift of self, an education in chastity
that enables couples to shape their relationship in accord with the
truth of love in whatever situation of life they find themselves in”
(Carl Anderson and Fr. Josè Granados, CALLED TO LOVE, pp. 193-6).
Brothers
and sisters, the people in today’s Gospel could not accept God’s
plan for the Eucharist, that we should find our strength by eating
the Body and drinking the Blood of Jesus.
By their rejection, they deprived themselves of a priceless gift.
Today many people do not accept God’s plan for marriage and spousal
love. As a result there is a 50% divorce race, much pain, broken
hearts and fractured families. May we
pledge ourselves to follow Jesus. He has
repeatedly demonstrated his great love for us.
May we try to understand his wonderful plan for
marriage, spousal love and family. It is
the only way to real happiness, and integral human development.
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