Name: Dat Nguyen
Email: dat.nguyen@prolinkservices.com
Date: Friday - 1/Sep/100 - 15:17:22 GMT
Response:
To all,
This section of the letter of Paul to the Ephesians, was a cause of many divides within the people of God. The famous verse says that "wife should be submissive to husband..." A lot of people was turned off by it. The priest who celebrates mass yesterday, father Timothy Friedrichsen Ph.D, STD, happen to be a professor of New Testament at the Catholic University. As such he is an authority of the Church and a guide to explain to us the content of the reading. I would like to share this, and hope that we can use it to understand the above passage. I am trying to recount his homily and his arguments here (any errors I made in paraphrasing him are mine):
First of all Paul is writing to a first century community which has no
understanding of psychology or personal relationship between husband and
wife. He based his writing on their prevalent conduct of the social norm of the time. Paul is not advocating a specific relationship. If we understand scripture literally, then if we read further, he said that master should be kind to their slaves... Does this mean that he advocated slavery? Absolutely not, it's just a social practice of a time past. To understand the message of Paul, the first reading and the Gospel provide the framwork for us. In the first reading, the Isreali, after wandering for so many years in the wilderness, arrived at the promised land, with many of its distractions and temptations. Joshua pointedly put the question to them: "who do you choose? who do you follow?" For himself, he said, he and his household will follow
God. The Gospel posed the same question to the disciples. The framework is that, facing an unknown situation, Paul invites us to reflect on where we stand in our relationship with God. A lot of time we don't know what we are going to do, but Paul, (Joshua and Jesus, before him) wants us to be sure of one thing: that we will follow the Lord, eventhough we don't know where He would lead us to, nor do we know what to do... Accepting that explanation, and not turned off by that, we can find that sacrifices that Paul suggested between wife and husband was profound, even for the time he lived in: their love for each others, uniting with Christ's sacrifice for his bride, can cleansed them and make them holy.
dat

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