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review a little bit of what we did last week. We talked about what it means to be a human being and what it means to be specifically a male or female human being. We talked about the distinction between being male and being sort of typically masculine and then we had some commentary on Genesis chapter 3 and that the conclusion that I came to was that Adam’s failure was that primarily responsibility not taking the responsibility that he should have. So today we’re going to read from Ephesians chapter 5 which is the one that makes everybody a little nervous. So chapter 5 verse 21. Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives be subject to your husbands as to the Lord for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church his body and is himself its Savior. As the church is subject to Christ so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands. Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her that he might sanctify her having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without punishment. Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself for no one hates his own flesh but nourishes and cherishes it as Christ does the church because we are members of his body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery I mean in reference to Christ and the church. However let each one of you love his wife as himself and let the wife see that she respects her husband. So that’s a particularly unpopular reading but it’s in the Bible we consider that inspired scripture so we got to figure out how to understand this properly in order to keep things working and I kind of want to read that passage through the lens of archetypes. I know archetypes might sound like a you know kind of academic word but you can think about archetypes as the basic building blocks of stories you know. If we didn’t have this innate sense of these archetypes we wouldn’t be able to tell each other stories. They wouldn’t be able to make any sense. So there’s just two primary archetypes I want to look at the archetype of the hero and the archetype of the mother and traditionally the archetype of the hero was represented as masculine and the archetype of the mother unsurprisingly was represented as feminine. Now inside of human beings it’s not like all men are heroes and all women are mothers. Those are just the archetypal representations. There’s no one-to-one correspondence so each of us has aspects of both inside of us. So you can think of think of tomcats right? If you’ve got kittens around what do you want to have with the tomcats? You don’t want to have the tomcats around right? Because they’ll kill the kittens. So there’s not really very much of that kind of caring, tender, gentle you know ability to deal with children in a tomcat right? It’s just not the way God made them. Meanwhile if you come over to human beings human beings human men are capable of raising somebody else’s children well. So that seems to me we don’t have that kind of strict kind of you know purely masculine purely feminine but both of us have just a little bit of both. We’ve got to have both on the in the got to have access to both basically if we’re going to be able to function as human beings. And so interesting thing about these archetypes is that both of them became incarnate at one point in history. We can look at Jesus Christ as the perfect man and so he was the perfect incarnation of the hero the one who went out from the Father went into the world where there was evil confronted the world willingly did battle with it and won. So that’s like the perfect archetype of the hero. But he’s also the perfect incarnation of tender masculinity right of somebody who was able to be very compassionate with sinners, compassionate with the sick, compassionate with the poor. So he had kind of had both but you can see how the hero maybe was a little more prominent for Jesus and then the you know the great work he did was on the cross. And then we’ve got Mary the perfect woman and so she’s the perfect incarnation of the mother. You can’t imagine there being a better mother basically immaculately conceived chosen by God to be his own mother. And she’s also the perfect incarnation of heroic femininity. And so I think of you know Gabriel shows up right and she knew right away that he wasn’t just an ordinary dude so obviously it was an angel and she wasn’t like scared of him. I mean she was confused but she was like holding her ground asking intelligent questions and then certainly at the foot of the cross staying there being with Jesus and that just took a lot of guts to be able to to stay there and to suffer with him. So we can see that in Jesus and in Mary we’ve got so the perfect man, the perfect woman, perfect incarnation of these two different archetypes if you want to look at it that way. Now Mary is also the model of the church right and that’s that’s a theology day and way back you could probably read more about this in that book that we gave out at Christmas time. Jesus and the Jewish roots of Mary that was I found that a great beat. Mary’s the perfect disciple right she was Jesus’s first disciple she was the first one to understand what he was all about and she also had perfect receptivity towards God’s grace right. Hail Mary full of grace she was able to take as much as God was giving her she never turned away from it and that’s what the church is supposed to be supposed to model itself after have that perfect receptivity to God’s grace. And so now we can come to I think an easier understanding of what Paul is saying here with that kind of model. Paul makes it very clear that there’s a an analogy between Christ and the church and between a husband and a wife and so that’s what our marriage is supposed to be modeled on. Now there’s just one problem is that nobody here is Jesus Christ right you don’t have that ability to be perfect in every decision you make you don’t have that ability to know everything that you absolutely positively need to know and so it’s impossible for us to model that image perfectly it’s just it’s just not like you’re not Jesus Christ you are not God made man you’re never going to be at that standard and so I think that’s why in this section that we read St. Paul talks about the idea of a mutual subjection right notice that was what he put first be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ it’s very interesting this word that he uses in some for subjection in Greek it comes from a military term which is to arrange troops in an orderly fashion under a leader basically so there’s another military image that he’s using and so you can think of kind of the Roman Empire at the time which had been dominating the Mediterranean the Roman Empire was famous for their citizen soldiers right they didn’t have a whole lot of slave soldiers they had citizen soldiers and these these armies were great they had conquered so much of the world there and you know it was it was a profession it was an honorable profession and yeah it was just basically like a good army to be a part of most of the time so it wasn’t a it’s not a word that would imply sort of slavery or sort of degrading servitude it’s a word that implies I kind of cooperating together to accomplish a mission rather than any kind of dominance or tyranny or that sort of thing so I think that’s very good thing to know about the words that st. Paul is using here that we don’t really have in English and then the second point is that Christ is the supreme commander if we’re going to be all of us going to be arranging ourselves under a leader and he’s the leader he’s the supreme commander so it’s not like we get to be petty tyrants and our own little kingdom and then I think the second thing about this is yeah all armies are all trying to do the same thing they’re all united and trying to accomplish the same mission okay so it’s not like your officer and you are necessarily at odds about the mission it’s all oriented towards the same mission here you’re working together as a team but you need a command structure in order to make sure that things can even work so you can think of you know like who’s more important is it the general or is it the soldier on the field well you kind of need both you need somebody to have an eye on the big picture and to help coordinate things and you also need something to go out there and fight you know this just there’s just no way and so we don’t think of the general as being tyrant although I mean that’s certainly possible right but in an ideal army we would see the general as somebody who’s just taking on that responsibility that he needs to and the soldier in the field taking on the responsibility he needs to and we don’t think of that as something that is against you know the dignity of the ground soldier the infantry we don’t think that he’s somehow less of a soldier because he’s not in command and so those are the two points there’s no slavery implied in what he’s talking about and there’s no loss of dignity implied what he’s talking about and so what that kind of comes down to just all of this is how we can understand what st. Paul is talking about here and so the question we have to ask ourselves we’re going to understand this passage is what does Christ do for the church and how do we imitate that in marriage so one thing I think of is how Christ took responsibility for the sins of humanity even though he wasn’t responsible for it right that he didn’t sin he didn’t cause anybody to sin but you really think he took the most hands-on approach that he could right it literally became incarnate he literally walked among us he lived as we did suffer died I mean that’s that’s a he wasn’t bound to do that he didn’t have to do that in fact there would be nothing against justice if God had said oh humanity’s sinful well too bad guys he was under no obligation whatsoever to come down and save us from our sins and so that’s why we’re like yeah the Lord is kind and merciful full of compassion slow to anger rich and kindness because he didn’t have to do anything for us but he did God did come down and save us and so it’s just an interesting point of Jesus taking responsibility for the church even though he was not bound to he was able to willingly take that up and so I think that can have a lot of application not just in marriage but maybe in life in general of people who take responsibility on that there’s theirs and then they are also able to help others bear their burden help others carry the responsibility that now we hear an awful lot about Christ sanctifying the church that he might sanctify her having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle so you know without Christ we wouldn’t have any access to holiness right he wouldn’t have the sacraments we wouldn’t be able to pray to the Father it would be impossible for us to become holy now what does that look like in family well certainly you’ve got a primary call as a Christian to make it to heaven yourself right to be a disciple to do good to avoid evil and all those things but once you’ve entered into a covenant marriage you also take on responsibility for another person and I think when we can live this out these passages in our world is to try and get your wives to and I think I think especially wives it seems to me that if you dr. Johnbury while I was at the University of St. Thomas he came to came to talk with was he’s a psychologist he specializes in family relations family dynamics he said something that kind of stuck with me he said the best thing that a father can do for his children is to love his wife so I don’t fully understand that but but this guy knew what he was talking about so basically the way the way I’m thinking about it right now is that if make it part of your responsibility to get your wife to heaven that’ll also bring the kids along naturally if you make that sort of a goal in your marriage like your kids will just kind of pick up on that right don’t your kids pick up on things like start repeating things you said doing things you’ve done they’re like little sponges and so if there’s just this sense of sort of this week and it’s not like it’s a one-sided responsibility right but this is a man’s group so if you do that then the kids will just kind of pick up on it and so you get both and then it’s another thing that Christ does for the church he he listens to our prayers right we pray in the name of Jesus we pray to Jesus asking for things um so it’s like what does that look like in marriage seems like communication between spouses is super important and that’s you know the more going through my ministry of families class the more I thought almost you know we were going through different pitfalls and struggles that families can deal with it was like almost every one of them seemed to go back to not being able to communicate with each other not being able to understand each other and so it’s like listen listen and hear and keep that those lines of communication open because otherwise you’re not gonna be one body the same the way that scripture makes it out to be now there’s a bit of a disjunction right as we said you’re you’re not Jesus you don’t have that kind of perfection in you so it’s obvious it’s not so with the church we pray to God and whether or not he answers prayers according to our ideas or answers them according to his ideas that’s a hundred percent God right he knows what’s going on we don’t need to tell him how to do his job that’s obviously not how your marriage is going to end up working because you’re not God and so the way it seems like because we’re human because we have limited knowledge of things and because we’ve got to try and pack it out together it’s going to be a lot more like a negotiation a lot more like trying to find middle ground find compromises and try your best to express things clearly because it’s just how it is here on earth yeah so does that make sense I think it makes sense but I’m not married so if I’m here blowing smoke you guys got to tell me so you think there’s anything I missed because I mean I think that’s a very rich image and we had a DMA meeting and mental yesterday so didn’t have quite as much time to prepare this one as I would have liked I thought you had the important points the communication you know reflecting upon one another as a couple is been a pretty important key to our success well looks like I nailed it then at the Savior’s command informed by divine teaching we dare to say our answers as we forgive those who trespass against us and leave us not into temptation but deliver us from evil the Lord be with you