Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Course
The readings today revolve so much around the Divine gift of marriage that we cannot ignore that teaching of Jesus. Marriage is a divine gift to bring together in an enduring bond what the devil and sin tried to separate not long after the creation of humans. The prayer book said some years ago that marriage is the only divine institution that endured after the original sin of Adam and Eve. Jesus not only endorsed the lifetime union of man and woman but said any human institution that tried to erase the marriage bond is acting against God’s will. So the Church has taught from the beginning that a valid Christian marriage cannot be broken up by human fiat. Yes, there are Church-sanctioned declarations that in some cases there were deficiencies in a union from the beginning, and that they were not truly sacramental, but that is different from sundering a valid bond that is ordered toward intimate unity between man and woman, and procreation and education of children to expand the family of God. Jesus Himself declared children worthy of our special love, a love like His for them. Husband, wife, children, the family God wants. We need more of them. We must pray for all married couples, because they have a difficult path to walk together toward ultimate union with God after this life.
But today I’d like to focus on the words of an unknown author to a Hebrew audience in our second reading. We know the author was inspired, and wrote not too many years after the resurrection of Jesus. We just don’t know who this genius preacher was, but we do know his message is critical for us today
It was fitting that Jesus, Son of God, be made lower than the angels. He surrendered all His glory and privileges as God to become human. St Athanasius famously said that Jesus became human so that humans could become divine. Jesus, Son of God by nature, gave up everything so that we could become adopted daughters and sons of the Father, siblings as it were to Jesus Christ Himself, and heirs to all of creation by the action of the Holy Spirit.
Moreover, Hebrews tells us that “it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through suffering.” God the Father willed, and Jesus His only-begotten Son concurred, that the human nature of Jesus should be “perfect through suffering.” Let’s consider what that might mean, especially for us.
If we meet someone who seeks out opportunities to suffer, we call that person a masochist and should recommend counseling. The suffering I’m talking about is the suffering we all have to endure. Some of us have physical suffering because of the weakness of our immune system, or genetics, or from difficult upbringing or personal habits. For instance I hear that the current epidemic is particularly hard on people who are significantly obese.
Some of us have emotional suffering because of our heredity or personal history. I know men and women who were abused growing up. They find it difficult to form trusting relationships, even with a beloved spouse, because they feel safest with their emotional defensive shields fully deployed. That’s hard on the spouse. So suffering does not have to be physical, and for some it is constant.
Beyond personal challenges, there are shared sufferings from natural disasters, from incompetent, even evil political systems and leaders, and from human-caused disasters. Jesus lived among those difficulties, and often made them His own. He drove out demons from the possessed; He healed all kinds of physical disabilities and illnesses. Scripture doesn’t record all His wonderful takings on of our burdens, but I bet He even helped put out neighborhood fires and built some barns.
Because Jesus, Son of the Father, was the Being through Whom we exist and are kept in existence, He knows what humans need in order to achieve their highest happiness, their complete fulfillment. That’s what it means to become perfect. What we need, as He exemplified, is to suffer pain in and with and for the whole human race. To become perfect is to become complete. Jesus could not be THE ideal human being if He had not undergone all the normal pains of growing up and acting for others, as well as the suffering and death of His sacred three days. Neither can we be complete without living in Him and suffering with Him so that we may be glorified with Him and in Him.
Our psalm today celebrates that wonderful Truth, that Truth that is Jesus. We think of the words as the text of a wedding song: “You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be happy, and it shall be well with you. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table.” And it is. But it is also the song of the eternal wedding banquet in God’s kingdom, before the Blessed Trinity, with Jesus as the Bridegroom and the Church as the Bride. Think about it in that way and you see that our own unions, our own marriages, should be all-human reflections of the divine-human marriage of the Lamb and His Mystical body celebrated in heaven. Jesus and the Bride have literally billions of offspring over the thousands of years God has revealed Himself to us. The new Jerusalem, God’s kingdom in heaven, is eternally prosperous because we have inherited all of the graces and gifts of the Father and Son, inherited them because of our adoption through the action of the Spirit.
But the rub, the other shoe, the hard part is the suffering. We have to not only endure but embrace the call to give everything to our mission, to our divine election. Yes, it will hurt sometimes, and for many it will pain us continually. But as we go through and accept the graces God has for us, we find it more and more compatible with our true desire, our real longing. We are, as Augustine taught, human hearts that are made for union with God, and until, through suffering, we attain hearts totally attuned to Him, we will feel empty. Like Jesus, when we have suffered enough with Him, we will be complete and fit for His divine Company.
