“Husbands, …”

Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time – August 27, 2006 – Blessed Sacrament

The passage from the Epistle to the Ephesians that we heard as our second reading is not thought to be good news by some people today. It is the first part of what scholars call a “household code” in which several of the later Epistles provide norms for family life–relations between husband and wife, parents and children–and for the relation between masters and servants, or even slaves. Listening to them today, we find ourselves back in the hierarchically ordered, patriarchal family that prevailed not only in the ancient world of St. Paul’s time but long after also, and indeed still prevails in many parts of the world today.

This code includes the injunction that wives should be subject to their husbands, a rule that has so upset some lectors at Mass that they have refused to read it!

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Three forms of the Body of Christ

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time – August 19, 2012 – St. John’s

Each year we interrupt the sequential reading of a Gospel in order to listen to the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, wholly devoted to the theme of Christ as the Bread of Life. With today’s reading we reach the climax of Jesus’ words when “the Bread of Life” takes on a eucharistic meaning: his flesh is real food and his blood real drink, present under the appearances of bread and wine.

An ancient tradition in the Church referred to “the threefold Body of Christ.”

Pulled, but willingly

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time – August 9, 2009 – Blessed Sacrament

We continue today our annual meditation on the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, and on its chief theme, Christ as the bread of life. Last week we heard him make the bold claim: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” Jesus was calling the crowd that had followed him beyond the physical hunger he had once satisfied by multiplying the loaves and fishes to the inner hunger and thirst which he can satisfy by his word received in faith. “Coming to Jesus” and “believing in him” are here identified: as St. Augustine put it: “We do not race toward Christ by walking but by believing; we draw near to him not by the movement of our bodies, but by the decision of our hearts.”

Those hearts have to be hungry, however.

For what are you hungry?

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time – August 2, 2009 – Blessed Sacrament

Today is the second of the five Sundays on which each year we meditate on the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, which is entirely devoted to the theme of the bread of life. Last week we heard of Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand with a few loaves and fishes, the sign whose deeper meaning is explored in the rest of the chapter. The method common in this Gospel is followed as Jesus tries to draw the people on toward a truer and fuller understanding.

The contrast between them Jesus himself makes explicit in today’s reading