21st Sunday in Ordinary Time B
Readings: Joshua 24:1-2,15-17,18 Ephesians 5:21-32 John 6:60-69
As the Church completes its five weeks of reading John’s Bread of Life discourse, we are given a final challenge to choose to go to Jesus, who has “the words of eternal life.” We are invited to follow the words of the psalmist in today’s responsorial psalm: “Taste and see the goodness of the Lord” (Ps 34).
In the first reading Joshua has just completed the division of the land among Israel’s twelve tribes and now offers the leaders a choice between serving the Lord, who has delivered them from Egypt and given them the land of Canaan, and other gods-- either the ones their “fathers had served beyond the River (the Euphrates)” or “the gods of the Amorites” in whose land they were now living. For the ancient Israelites this represented a very real choice. To choose to serve the Lord meant committing to an ethical way of life as delineated in the commandments of the covenant and rejecting the polytheistic animism of their ancestors and the decadent fertility cult of the land of Canaan. Therefore, covenant with Yahweh was freely entered into by each household. Joshua speaks as the head of his family when he says, “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” The assembled people also choose to serve the Lord and give as their reason his gracious saving actions in bringing them out of slavery in Egypt, protecting them along their journey and leading them into the land.
The Epistle completes our reading of Ephesians with an exhortation to “Defer to one another out of reverence for Christ.” The examples given are taken from a traditional list of household duties that would be found in the philosophical writings of the day. Homes in the Greco-Roman world of the first century A.D. were structured in a hierarchical manner with the husband/father as head of the household and the wife, children and slaves under his authority. Ephesians transforms these family obligations by incorporating them into the mystery of Christ’s love for his bride, the Church, and its submission to Christ. This is best illustrated in the exhortation to husbands to love their wives. “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loves the Church. He gave himself up for her to make here holy, purifying her in the bath of water by the power of the word, to present to himself a glorious Church, holy and immaculate, without stain or wrinkle or anything of that sort. Husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. . .”
The Gospel is the conclusion of John’s Bread of Life discourse in which some of the disciples break away from Jesus’ company because of difficulty in accepting his pronouncement: “I myself am the living bread come down from heaven. If anyone eats this bread he shall live forever; the bread I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world.”
Throughout John’s Gospel Jesus’ pronouncements are consistently misunderstood by those who interpret his language without faith, or in a literal or “fleshly” manner. In this case many of the disciples understand Jesus’ language literally as if he were speaking of cannibalism and remark: “This sort of talk is hard to endure! How can anyone take it seriously?” Jesus challenges them to move from a literal/fleshly to a faith-filled/spiritual understanding of his language. “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words I spoke to you are spirit and life. Yet among you there are some who do not believe.”
When many of the disciples break away, Jesus turns to the Twelve and asks, “do you want to leave me too?” But Simon Peter, as spokesman for the Twelve and a believer, answers, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe; we are convinced that you are God’s holy one.” Like the Israelites in Joshua’s day and the disciples in John, we are offered a choice: to live lives of faith in gratitude for God’s loving deeds in our behalf or to live the “fleshly” lives of the gods of our time.
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