The Kingdom of God and the Sacrament of Marriage, 30th Tuesday (II), October 29, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for the Family
October 29, 2024
Eph 5:21-33, Ps 128, Lk 13:18-21

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• What is the kingdom of God like? Jesus asks because he wants us to be able to understand it. But it’s something that we can understand only by simile, only by analogy. Until it’s fully flourishing, we’re only going to be able to see certain of its reflections. Today Jesus wants to stress that the kingdom of God, first, begins really small. But then it grows. And it grows in such a way that so many, like the birds of the air flying from all over the planet, are able to find rest in its branches. It grows in such a way that it gives us rest, a home, where we can make a nest. We might not be able to “see” the nest and the birds when we plant the seed in the garden, but Jesus wants us to have that confidence and hope that even the littlest of beginning can result in that end. Likewise, he describes yeast. A tiny pinch of yeast from previously leavened bread, put into a new dough, elevates the whole loaf. In a sense, we know not how: it’s from the inside, acting to lift the dough up. In a similar way the kingdom starts with just a little pinch: one Christian on a street, one student in a dorm or university, one one employee in an office, one priest in a diocese or one sister in a convent or religious order, can have an enormous impact. We see that in the life of every saint. Even if they seem to be hidden, they’re not hidden at all. One teenage girl in a place like Nazareth could change salvation history by a simple, faithful, yes. A young girl with tuberculosis in a convent in northwestern France can change the whole history of the church simply by her prayers and by her obediently writing down what God was doing in her soul. A parish priest in New Haven, Connecticut, caring for his people, could found a legacy, the Knights of Columbus, that would stretch across the globe. So we have to know this about the kingdom, that little things can be extraordinarily consequential. All we do sometimes is plant that tiny little mustard seed or try to be that pinch of yeast. And then we trust that God will do the rest.
• Today in the first reading, we see one of the most important areas in which this kingdom is meant to grow, the soil in which the seed is planted, the dough in which the little pinch of yeast is given. It’s marriage and the family. We see how the kingdom can come just from that place. St. Paul’s words here in his Letter to the Ephesians have two contexts. The first context is the entirety of his letter. His Letter to the Ephesians, which we’ve been hearing for almost the two weeks, is about the kingdom and what Christ came to do. Christ came to reconcile all things in himself in the heavens and on earth. His entire mission was to bring us anew into harmony with the Father and in reconciled harmony with each other. This is the outgrowth of our being holy and immaculate in the Lord’s sight, as we heard two Thursdays ago. And it’s key for us to grasp that in the family, even just one little family, the kingdom can explode.
• Probably one of the most eloquent documents in Church history is Evangelii Nuntiandi, Saint Paul VI’s 1975 Apostolic Exhortation on evangelization. In one section of it, he was describing the evangelization of Africa. The way it happened was not just by White Fathers coming as missionaries from France. The most effective way it happened, he described, is when families would be “planted.” They’d take one family from one village and send the family to another. They wouldn’t open up a church in their home. At first they would just live. Pope Paul describes that eventually people started to ask, “Why are they like this? Why do they live in this way? What or who is it that inspires them? Why are they in our midst?” Such a witness, he wrote, is “already a silent proclamation of the Good News and a very powerful and effective one. Here we have an initial act of evangelization. … Other questions will arise, deeper and more demanding ones, questions evoked by this witness which involves presence, sharing, solidarity, and which is an essential element, and generally the first one, in evangelization.” One family, in other words, can have that type of extraordinary impact. Not every family is going to be like the family of Gregory Nazianzen in which both parents and several of the children are canonized. Not every family will be like the one formed by Louis and Zelie Martin, the parents of St. Therese. But the Christian family is one setting in which the kingdom of God is meant to expand. Many of us have grown up in homes that, despite the imperfections we brought to it and others brought to it, still had this mystery of the kingdom unveiled. The home is where our faith grew so that others today are able to nest in our faith, even on secular university campuses. Not everybody’s home is like that, but at the same time there is a mystery happening, even sometimes through the failures that can teach us perseverance, that can help us to grow in the capacity for forgiveness and reconciliation. That’s the first context within St. Paul’s letter: the family is an important locus of morality in which we act on what Christ is trying to do in us.
• The second context is what marriage and family were like when St. Paul was writing these words. The family was weak. Among the Jews, a husband could divorce his wife for any reason whatsoever; two lines written by the husband and it was done. It was worse for the Greeks. The Greek men had wives fundamentally just in order to bear legitimate children. There was a whole system of concubines beyond that to give them pleasure, to serve as their conversation partners, for everything else. Wives were hidden in the home and basically prevented from going out because there was a paranoia about legitimate children and husbands didn’t want their wife who was being totally emotionally neglected to look for other outlets. Among the Romans, it was worse still. The Romans made a sport out of serial divorce and remarriage. Seneca tells the story of one wife who had already been married 24 times marrying a husband who had already been married 21 times. Marriage could be started and ended almost immediately. There was often no real commitment to each other, no real love, constant breakdown, no real reconciliation or forgiveness. As soon as someone did something that bothered you, it could be over, as if we were dealing with a dating relationship. Even in the Christian context, we see what St. Paul wrote even nine years earlier, in the seventh chapter of his First Letter of the Corinthians. Christians in this context were marrying pagans. St. Paul wrote, essentially, “Marry if you must,” if you can’t control your passions, since marriage is better than sinning. He looked then at marriage as an either-or: You’re either going to be anxious about the affairs of the Lord or you’re going to be anxious about the affairs of your spouse. There’s no way essentially those two concerns could dovetail. So the choice was to prioritize the love of God or the love of a spouse. He encouraged people to love God and like him be chaste, but allowed that if they were burning up with concupiscence, they should marry, so that they could, in a sense, find a remedium concupiscentiae, a medicine for their uncontrollable desire. That was First Corinthians, in the context of Christians marrying pagans.
• Nine years later, St. Paul wrote this letter to the Ephesians. In Ephesus, Christians were marrying other Christians. We find in St. Paul a totally different attitude. He was able to see how, in this marriage between a Christian man and woman, God’s kingdom could indeed come and grow. He wrote this letter with this in mind, about how to live Christian marriage in a truly Christian way. It’s one of the most important passages ever written, especially today in which so many people are confused about marriage, not just because people of the same sex are forming civil bonds and calling it marriage, not just because of the confusion of anthropology, in which there are now several dozen supposed genders, something that is obviously going to have a massive impact on what marriage mean, but fundamentally because so many today, including Christians, have given into the same type of divorce culture, the cancer of pornography, and so many other things by which the devil is slithering in their home, trying to separate what God has joined. What St. Paul describes in this passage is so important, first, for that sacrament and everything in the kingdom that flows from it, but also for us to understand the most profound way with which Jesus interacts with us, so that we can understand what the Church is, and what our vocations are, even those who are chaste celibates for the sake of the kingdom.
• It begins with verse 21. “Be subordinate to each other out of reverence for Christ.” When Saint John Paul II wrote his Theology of the Body, this chapter was a hinge, which applies all the teachings of the theology of the body to the real circumstance of marriage. John Paul II says that everything flows from this mutual reverence for Christ. When husbands and wives look at each other, they’re supposed to see the image of God there. And when they do, when they see Christ in the other, so many things change. When a wife looks at her husband and sees Christ, St. Paul says, she is able to be subordinate. It is so much easier for us to be “under the order” (subordinate) or “under the mission” (submissive) of another if one see Christ in the other, if we are relating to Christ. We would not try to boss him around or tell him what to do! When we revere Christ, there’s a response that would be appropriate! And that’s what he’s calling women to do. He’s not saying that if a husband is an abusive loser, one has to pretend as if he’s Jesus Christ and just obey whatever he says, even when he’s asking one to do things that are sinful. We know in certain contexts this passage has been manipulated sociologically in this way, to keep women as second class citizens. And so many have opposed to this passage as if it’s giving a green light to abuse, but it’s totally contrary to such abuse. For the kingdom to really grow in a woman’s heart, she needs to look at marriage with truly Christian eyes, and to see marriage from within that lens. But there’s a mutual reverence. When the husband looks at the wife, St. Paul is calling him to look with the eyes of Christ and see likewise her in Christ’s image and therefore to lay down his life for his wife. “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the Church and laid down his life to make her holy by water with the word.” In other words, “Crucify yourself for your wife, don’t hold anything back, do everything you can to make her holy.” That’s why the wife needs to be reciprocally subordinate. If the wife doesn’t allow the husband to sacrifice in this way, the husband won’t achieve his vocation. There’s a complementarity here that Paul is pointing to, in which the wife is going to receive the gift of the husband — she’s going to give love by receiving it, as the husband receives love by giving it. This is the mystery of the complementarity of marriage. This call for husbands to die for their wives is something that a wife shouldn’t resist. That’s one of the most important ways to be subordinate. St. Paul likewise wants to stress in the love of a husband and a wife that the purpose is sanctification. Husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies.  In the culture of the time, this was revolutionary, to treat the wife the way that you treat yourself, not as a piece of property. This type of genuine Christian love makes the home the first locus regni, the first place of the kingdom. But all of this, St. Paul contextualizes, within the “great mystery.” He writes, “For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery and I am speaking in reference to Christ and the Church.” What this basically means is Christian marriage flows from the marriage between Christ and the Church, and not the other way around: that the reality from which the analogy is taken is Christ’s bond to his church, rather than the church’s being an analogy of human marriage. What comes first in God’s plan is this mystical marriage between Christ and His Bride. That is the model for a marriage in the kingdom, for a truly Christian marriage. Just as Christ reveres us in His Church, just like he lays down his life, and just like we in love receive that gift and are blessed in that receiving, so Christian marriage is meant to recapitulate and image that great mystery. Today, we pray for the families of the world. We pray for the families in the church. We pray for all those who are preparing for marriage, for all those marriages who are struggling, that they might open themselves up through all the difficulties of day to day existence to the graces that flow from the sacrament.
• I always say at the end of every marriage that I celebrate, “Why do Catholics get married in the context of the Mass?” Is it simply because it gives more solemnity? No. The reason why marriage takes place in the context of a Mass is because the marriage bed of the union between Christ and His Bride is the altar. That’s the reason why in the ancient Basilicas in Rome, they’re all covered with canopies or baldachins, which are meant to symbolize the Jewish chuppah, under which was first where the contract of marriage was made, and then a year or two later, when the couple would consummate the marriage, that chuppah would be brought over the marriage bed and they would consummate their marriage under the canopy that symbolized the overshadowing of God’s blessing. The reason why the altars were covered with canopies is because that was supposed to show everyone that the altar is a marriage bed in which the bride of Christ takes within herself the body and blood of the Bridegroom and becomes one flesh with the capacity to bear fruit acts of love. Catholic marriages take place within the context of a Mass because if couples want their marriage to be what God wants it to be, this beginning of the kingdom of God so that everything good grows, they need to come as often as possible to this marriage bed, where they will receive within the love of God for them, so that in that spousal love, they might love each other as Christ has loved them first. And that’s likewise true for even for those who are not yet married or for celibates, as brides and friends of the bridegroom. We come here to this same place to receive within Christ’s cruciform spousal love, so that we can be the happiest people on the planet. This is the great consummation of Christ’s spousal love that gives us a foretaste of the eternal wedding banquet. So today as we celebrate Mass with a heart full of reverence for the Lord, we ask him through his purifying love, to help us revere others, and revere the Sacrament of Marriage in such a way that it might become what God created to be: that mustard seed, that leaven, in a world that Christ has married.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download