“This is a great mystery,” Paul says in the second reading, “a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the Church.” The mystery, of course, is what he could possibly mean trying to draw a parallel between marriage and the relationship God has with us, members of the church.
The first thing that has to be said is that if it is true, as our tradition claims, that the church is the bride of Christ, there must have been any number of late nights over the past 2,000 years when Jesus asked himself if he married the wrong woman. It’s not just that we fight and pick at one another so much inside the church, or that there are so many churches, divided from one another, and divided within themselves more and more, it seems, as time goes on, or that there are the power politics and secrecy that we all know more about now than we wish we did. It’s not all that. It’s that we are all so half-hearted – eager to consider ourselves members, around for the big moments, but all things considered not very committed to the relationship.
This is not a new trend. Today’s gospel is a remarkable reading, the story of a growing crowd of disciples who if you flip back a page or two before in John’s gospel have just seen the multiplication of the loaves, feeding the multitudes, the healing of sick people in front of their eyes, they’ve seen that — and all of a sudden they start to drift off, head home, because the show’s over, the spectacle is concluded, and the hard work of preaching and understanding and learning and changing has begun. Suddenly very few are up for that. They drift away to the margins, in one way or another, to watch.
I wonder if that is what Paul is driving at in that second reading on the marriage relationship. We don’t take his advice to the married very literally these days, or at least his advice to wives, and as far as I can tell, from the outside, we seem to be all better off for it. But when he says that a marriage is an image of God’s relationship with us, and ours with God, we have to ask ourselves if that could possibly be true.
If you’re married, even if your marriage is happy, and life around you has gone well, and maybe especially if it’s not, and it hasn’t, you know that your marriage involves work. It’s not as simple as always submitting one to the other, because we know that as a policy, that’s not a living relationship. Of course, it’s true that in marriage you submit and you give up some things that formerly seemed important, that’s what life with other people is like, but maybe just as often you end up challenging one another, asking questions, working together to get to someplace you both want to be. And you do it because the relationship won’t survive without work, and you’ve promised to try to make it survive. We all know that’s what marriage relationships are like, or what we want them to be like. Sure, there are times in relationships when our tendency is to check out, get distracted with other things, ignore problems let things ride. But gradually we figure out that those times come in cycles with the time to recommit, to make changes, to dig deeper, to start over.
If an active, involved, committed marriage relationship is like the relationship God wants with us, on the one hand that should make us amazed that there is such a God who loves us that much, but it should also scare us, because it would suggest we all have plenty of growing up to do in that relationship. Because like a human relationship that has fallen into disrepair, when it comes to our relationship with God, or even our relationship with the church, we all have a tendency to find someplace to be that takes us off the spot, removes us from responsibility.
We tend not to see ourselves in an adult relationship with God or with our faith, and that approach works fine as long as we can remain on the sidelines, until we gradually become consumers who are either satisfied or dissatisfied with what’s offered us. We decide that what confuses us or bothers us or bores us in our faith, in our church, must be someone else’s problem to fix. And so we find ourselves saying things like: a lot of things about the church bother me, so I just keep my distance; or I want my kids to learn the faith, but it’s not my job to; or that if things just would go back to the way things were, it’d all be fine. If we said things like that about a human relationship we were in we’d know immediately we weren’t taking responsibility for our end of the bargain. But when it comes to our faith, to our church, we hesitate to bring to it the passion and the intelligence and the commitment we all try, I think, to bring to our marriages.
Jesus in this gospel reading frankly seems discouraged. He worked miracles, invited people to come with him, and after a flash of excitement he’s suddenly down to a few. He wanted a church of people who can be in relationship with him, a relationship so close it is like husband and wife, so glorious that there’s no understanding it, but so hard that people are constantly getting tired of seeking it. If you’re waiting to know more about your faith or your church, if you want the church to be different, if you want to pray, if you want to understand this relationship with Jesus that we have been baptized into, it won’t happen without you. We’re all in another marriage that we often forget we’re in, and it’s time to get to work on the relationship.