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Commentary on Mark 10:1-12

Jesus is approached by some Pharisees and they ask him if it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife. We are told they asked him this question in order to put him to the test.  It is another example of their efforts to find Jesus on the wrong side of the Mosaic law.

As frequently happens, Jesus responds to their question with his own to them:

What did Moses command you?

They reply that Moses allowed a man to make out a writ of dismissal and so divorce his wife.  They are quoting from the Book of Deuteronomy which says:

Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her, so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house; she then leaves his house and goes off to become another man’s wife. Then suppose the second man dislikes her, writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house (or the second man who married her dies): her first husband, who sent her away, is not permitted to take her again to be his wife after she has been defiled, for that would be abhorrent to the Lord, and you shall not bring guilt on the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a possession. (Deut 24:1-4)

Jesus clearly is not happy with this teaching and says Moses allowed divorce to accommodate the moral weakness of the people (that is, primarily the men!).  He challenges this stand with words from the creation story in Genesis (1:27; 2:24):

…God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

After marriage, then, he says that there are not two separate people, but one body.  And from that Jesus concludes:

Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.

When they were back in the ‘house’ (that house again, the place where Jesus’ disciples are gathered about him—the Church), Jesus’ disciples expressed their misgivings about what they had just heard.  But Jesus went even further: a man who divorces his wife and marries another is guilty of adultery and a woman who divorces her husband and marries another is also guilty of adultery.  He does not recognise divorce. One gets the impression that this teaching of Jesus came as something of a shock to them.

In a sound and enduring marriage the words of Jesus are realised. One meets people who have been married for decades and are as deeply in love with each other, in fact more so, than on the day of their wedding. One has only to see bereaved spouses to realise the terrible void that is left when a partner of many years dies.  They feel as if a part of themselves had been torn from them.  It can take years for life to come back to some kind of normalcy.

However, in our own day divorce has become a very common phenomenon.  In some societies, the divorce rate is almost half of all marriages and in most societies all over the world it is increasing.  Marriages between Catholics are also seriously affected.  Obviously it is a very complex question and cannot be dealt with here.

There are two comments to be made about this Gospel passage. First, Jesus is attacking a situation where men, when they got tired of their spouse and found someone more interesting, simply wrote a piece of paper and unilaterally dumped the first wife, leaving her high and dry.  Jesus rightly deplores such a situation.  His final remark indicates something new for his time (and often not yet accepted in our own): equal rights and equal responsibilities for both partners. He is very clear that women are not commodities to be picked up and dropped off at will.

Second, divorce as we experience it in our society today often involves a genuine breakdown in the marriage relationship which neither partner wishes and which is a cause of deep pain and suffering to both sides.  It may be due to some element of immaturity at the time of marriage, or the partners growing apart as they develop as persons.  Whatever the reason, this situation is quite different from the one about which Jesus is speaking.  One feels that Jesus would be most sympathetic to the painful breakdowns of marriage which happen today and, as Christians, we too should try to empathise with people in such a situation.

Most people enter into marriage with good will and with the intention of having an enduring, lifelong relationship.  It is a hope sometimes not realised.  At the same time, we also have in our society today a pluralistic approach to the concept of marriage from merely seeing it as two people living together ‘as long as it feels good’ to those who believe in marriage as a permanent relationship ‘in good times and bad’—and everything else in between.

We need to remember that the Church accepts that marriages can break down and that, for various reasons, the couple may need to have their separation made legal by a divorce settlement in court.  What the Church forbids is remarriage within the Church absent a formal tribunal annulment declaration.  Many Catholics do remarry in a civil ceremony and we need to deal with such people with great sympathy and understanding if they express a sincere desire to remain active members of the Christian community.

The ideal that Jesus proposes remains, but a changing society may need a different approach to marriage where the emphasis is more on the relationship and less on the legal contract.  A truly pastoral Church will help people live the Gospel in such a changing sociological situation.  As always, the solution will lie in answering the question: In this situation, what is the loving thing to do as far as all are concerned?

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Commentary on Sirach 17:1-15

Today Sirach speaks of the relationship between the Creator and the human beings he has made. It is part of a poem in praise of the Lord for the creation of humankind. The author is following the order of Genesis and has already spoken of the creation of stars, plants and animals.

He combines in one the two accounts of the creation of humankind (Gen 1:26-27; 2:7) and interprets the image of God in humans under the headings of authority, strength, and dominion, thus developing a hierarchy of power: God, humans, living beings.

Humans were created by God from the earth, and will at the end return to earth. The First Man had been created a living thing from the earth and at the end is buried and returns to where he came from.

Human life on earth is temporary, but privileged:

He gave them a fixed number of days
but granted them authority over everything on the earth.
He endowed them with strength like his own
and made them in his own image.

God shared his ability to know and love and to have his vision of creation. Because of this, we were put in charge over all beasts and flying things and:

He [the Lord] put the fear of them in all living beings…

This is a generally true statement, but there are exceptions where the human is the one who fears.

God shaped humans giving them:

Discretion and tongue and eyes,
ears and a mind for thinking…
He filled them with knowledge and understanding
and showed them good and evil.
He put the fear of him into their hearts
to show them the majesty of his works.

The Israelites believed that the heart was the seat of reason rather than the seat of the emotions, as it is for us. The list of faculties for perception is similar to that common to the Stoic tradition. The ‘five faculties’ were sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste.

The human was also filled with knowledge and understanding and given a sense of good and evil. In this way, God’s light was planted in human thinking so that we could appreciate, as other creatures cannot, the magnificence of God’s creation.

God also taught us as well:

He bestowed knowledge upon them
and allotted to them the law of life.

This refers to the Law of Moses, which is included in the endowments that God “allotted” to mankind. The gifts of Creation and of Mount Sinai are here telescoped into one act of God.

And we were given another gift:

Their eyes saw his glorious majesty,
and their ears heard the glory of his voice.

This is a reference to the Israelites’ experience at Mount Sinai.

For us, of course, there is the further teaching that we have received through the Incarnate Son of God a new and “eternal covenant”:

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
(John 10:10)

Our response to all these gifts will be to:

…praise his holy name,
to proclaim the grandeur of his works.

A very important part of our prayer is to praise and thank the Lord for the beauty and gift of his creation.

At Mount Sinai also, God told his people to beware of all wrongdoing and:

…he gave commandment to each of them concerning the neighbor.

He did this through the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic Law. And they needed—as we do—to be aware that:

Their ways are always before him;
they will not be hidden from his eyes.

Let each one of us reflect that we too are part of this creation. We have been given these gifts to develop so that we can continue to grow ever more in the likeness of our God. That is the sole purpose of our existence and we forget it at our peril.

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Commentary on Mark 10:13-16

The Gospel begins with the line:

People were bringing children to [Jesus] in order that he might touch them…

It is so sad that this act of ‘touching’ has lost any connotation of innocence in our present day.  A compassionate and healing touch is something for which children, the sick and, at times all of us have a great need.

His disciples felt that Jesus, who may have been in the process of teaching, was being bothered by these mothers and tried to drive them away.  More than once we have seen the officiousness of the disciples who were taking to themselves an authority that not been given them.  They still had to learn the lesson that authority serves rather than controls and manipulates. It is a lesson that those in authority in our Church today need also to remember.  And it reflects to some extent the low place that children had in adult society, to be neither seen nor heard.

Mark, who likes to record the feelings of Jesus, says that he was quite “indignant” at his disciples’ behaviour, saying:

Let the children come to me; do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.

“Children” here can be taken in a wider sense to include all those who approach Jesus with a completely open, unprejudiced mind—and also those who have a low status in our society.  Such people are often more ready to hear the message of the Kingdom and to take an active part in it.

So Jesus says:

Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.

Only those with the openness and simplicity of a child will be able to enter the Kingdom.  These words were, no doubt, addressed to all-knowing scribes and Pharisees and their like, and also to the disciples.

Jesus then took the children, put his arms around them, laid his hands on them and blessed them.  Jesus knew the importance of physical touch in communicating with people, in expressing encouragement and affirmation and in bringing healing.

This passage can be linked, in a way, with the recent one on scandal (Mark 9:42-50).  The disciples, perhaps not deliberately, were blocking access to Jesus by those who were most open to his teaching.  As people who are responsible for children, either as parents or teachers or in other roles, we need to be aware of how—by word or action—we can block our children from being exposed to Jesus’ message of Truth and Love.   But we can also be a block to other people who can be influenced and turned away from the Way of Christ by our unchristian way of behaving.

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Commentary on Luke 4:24-30

This Gospel, and the Gospel story of the Samaritan woman (John 4:1-42), are both linked by the story told in today’s First Reading about Naaman, a Syrian general, who was miraculously cured by Elisha the prophet.

The Gospel is the second part of the scene in the synagogue in Nazareth, where Jesus officially announces his mission as Messiah, Saviour and Liberator. The first reaction was one of amazement that Jesus, their townsman, could speak with such power:

All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. (Luke 4:22)

There was amazement, but no real faith in him. Familiarity had blinded them to his true identity, and they reject him. For them he is just ‘Joe the carpenter’s boy’.

Jesus says he is not surprised by this reception:

Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.

He then goes on to give two examples taken from the lives of two well-known Old Testament prophets. They are not quite examples of prophets not being received by their own people, but rather of prophets reaching out to other peoples, non-believers.

When there was a great famine among the Israelites, it was a Sidonian widow who was helped by Elijah. Sidon was the place where Jesus would heal a gentile woman’s daughter. There were many leprous people in Israel, says Jesus, but Elisha was sent to cure Naaman the Syrian, another Gentile.

Jesus’ hearers are incensed by what appear to them arrogant and insulting words. In their minds, they were not rejecting a prophet but an impostor. They find his remarks about Elijah and Elisha highly objectionable.

The references to Elijah and Elisha help to emphasise Luke’s image of Jesus as a prophet like those who went before him. They also lay the foundation for the future mission of the Apostle to the Gentiles.

We too can very easily fail to recognise the voice of God in certain people who in fact—whether they are aware of it or not—are bringing a message from him. Like the people of Nazareth, we can think we know them too well to have to listen to them. We feel it would be inconceivable that God could speak to us through such people. Fair warning that this probably happens most of all with people we see every day during our lives.

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Commentary on 2 Kings 5:1-15

The central character in today’s First Reading is Naaman, an army commander from Syria under the king of Aram, probably Ben-Hadad II. He was held in high esteem by his king because of military victories, which the Bible attributes to the power of Yahweh. In the writer’s view, victory is to be attributed to the God of Israel, who is seen as the ruler and controller of the fate of all nations, and not just that of Israel.

Now, Naaman was a ‘leper’. The New Jerusalem Bible calls his condition a “virulent skin disease” because, whatever it was, it did not seem to exclude Naaman from coming in close contact with people. In ancient times, real leprosy was, tragically for the victim, often confused with other chronic skin diseases.

Although Israel had concluded a peace treaty with the Aramaeans during the reign of King Ahab, there were still minor skirmishes on the borders between the two states for control of a place called Ramoth Gilead. These followed a battle in which King Ahab had been killed. It was as a result of one of these skirmishes that a young Israelite girl was taken captive. She would prove the link in bringing healing to Naaman.

We could well stop to reflect for a few moments on this young girl. Although a simple slave, she played a crucial role in the healing and, together with the austere prophet Elisha, offered a startling contrast to the ostentatious wealth of Naaman—wealth which had no role to play in his being restored to health.

She knew about the prophet Elisha, who was living in Samaria and suggested that her master should go to him for healing. The king, Ben-Hadad, gave his full approval for Naaman to go to Samaria and see Elisha and promised to write a letter of introduction to King Joram of Israel. The Syrian king obviously believed that Elisha was subject to Joram and that the prophet’s services could only be bought with a generous gift—hence the 10 talents of silver (a huge amount of money), 6,000 shekels of gold and the 10 festal robes which Naaman brought with him. He thought that God’s gift of healing could only be bought with money.

On the other hand, King Joram is horrified by this and rends his clothes in despair. His own faith in God’s healing power was so weak that he thought that Ben-Hadad was simply looking for a pretext for war by asking the obviously impossible—the cure of a leper. But when Elisha hears of it, he scolds the king for his failure to consult his prophet.

Naaman now arrives in all the glory of someone in his exalted position with horses and chariots. He will overawe the prophet by his presence, power and show of wealth. He must then have been somewhat surprised to be told by the prophet what he must do. And what he had to do was to bathe seven times in the River Jordan. Elisha clearly indicates that the healing power comes from the power of the God of Israel, but only if the general does what he is told by the prophet.

The prophet himself was not strictly speaking a healer. Ritual washings were practiced among the Eastern religions as a purification rite, and the number seven was generally known as a symbol of completeness. Naaman was to wash in the muddy waters of the Jordan River, showing that there was no natural connection between the washing and the desired healing. Perhaps it was also being suggested that one needed to pass through the Jordan, as Israel had done (see Jos 3—4), in order to obtain healing from the God of Israel. Much later, Jesus would also pass through the same waters of the Jordan and be filled with the Spirit of his Father.

Naaman finds this an affront to his dignity. He expected the prophet to come out to him, wave his hand magically over the afflicted spots and effect an immediate cure. Instead, he has to do what he is told by someone he regards as a foreign underling. And what is worse, he is asked to bathe in the Jordan. What was wrong with the rivers that flowed through Damascus—the Abana and Pharpar? The Abana was called the ‘Golden River’ by the Greeks and is usually identified with the Barada River today, which rises in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains and flows through the city of Damascus. The Pharpar River flows eastwards from Mount Hermon, just to the south of Damascus. In fact, the waters of these rivers were hygienically far superior to the muddy waters of the Jordan. But that was precisely the point—it was not the water which brought the healing.

Deeply insulted, Naaman turns round to go home. But his servants plead with him. After all, if Naaman had been asked to do something difficult, he would have done so. Why not obey the prophet when he asks something so easy? Naaman puts his pride behind him, goes to the river seven times and emerges with his skin like that of a new-born child. He is both physically and spiritually reborn.

However, we need to be aware that there is a deeper meaning to the story. Naaman, the Gentile submitting to the command of Yahweh through his prophet, is put forward as a contrast to a disobedient Israel, which still wavered in its divided allegiance to Yahweh and to Baal. God’s blessings are only to be found in total submission to his will and his commands. In today’s Gospel, Jesus will bring up this point himself, much to the anger of the Jews to whom he was speaking.

The clear lesson of the story is given in the last sentence when, after being cured, Naaman goes back in gratitude to Elisha and says:

Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel…

A minor lesson for all of us arises from Naaman’s indignation at being told to bathe seven times in the river Jordan. Wisdom comes from the slaves in his household who said to their master:

…if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, ‘Wash, and be clean’?

How often do we not see God coming into our lives because of our prejudices and blind spots?

It must be understood from this passage that the true healer is not Elisha, nor the muddy waters of the Jordan river, but God himself. And the healing is the result, not of the washing in the river, but in Naaman’s eventual submission and obedience to God’s spokesman.

It was exactly the lack of this attitude on the part of the people of Nazareth (spoken of in today’s Gospel) that prevented Jesus from healing the people of his own town.

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Commentary on Luke 13:10-17 Read Monday of Week 30 of Ordinary Time – Gospel »

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Commentary on Ephesians 5:21-33

In today’s reading Paul begins speaking about family relationships and, specifically, about the relationship between husband and wife. As we go through the first part of the reading we will feel a certain level of discomfort as it, in part, certainly conflicts with attitudes which prevail in our contemporary society. Two points must be made.

First, the reading reflects the prevailing attitudes of Paul’s day, and it could not be otherwise. We certainly do not have to accept all of these attitudes now. Second, the reading must be taken in its entirety and, under the cultural overlay, we have to discern the very deeply Christian ideal which Paul proposes and which, in many respects, represents a major step forward in the concept of married life.

Paul’s central message is right there in the opening sentence. He writes:

…[be] subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Marriage is built on a deep, mutual respect of each partner for the other. Paul will show how, in each relationship, each partner can have a conciliatory attitude that will help that relationship. The phrase “be subject to one another” was probably not originally part of the traditional material that follows, but derives from the author.

It is debated whether the exhortation is applicable only to the section on wives and husbands, or also includes the passages on the mutual relationship between parents and children, or masters and slaves from Colossians (Col 3:18-23).

The opening statement, (“[be] subject to one another out of reverence for Christ”) at first seems to be contradicted by the way Paul immediately speaks of the way the wife should respect her husband. She is to look on her husband as the head of the household similar to the way that Jesus is Head and Lord of the Church. And the wife should “be subject” (‘submit’ or ‘be subordinate’ in some translations) to her husband in the same way that Church is subject to Jesus her Lord (in Paul’s time, wives sometimes addressed their spouse as “lord”).

To ‘be subject’ means giving up some of one’s own rights to another. If the relationship called for it, as in the military, the term could connote obedience, but that meaning is not what’s called for here. In fact, the word ‘obey’ does not appear in Scripture with respect to wives, though it does with respect to children and slaves. In context too, this subjection (submission) is seen as primarily given to God through the husband, just as we say that we love God by loving those around us, or for the Religious, obeying God by obeying their superiors.

Certainly this way of speaking reflects the prevailing ethos of Paul’s time (and we should not forget that it still prevails in many societies in our own day), but it has increasingly become unacceptable in Western society. As it is presented here, it appears that the wife is in an inferior position to her husband. More contemporary views see the roles of husband and wife in marriage as being different and complementary, but not unequal.

In a sense, too, while Paul seems to use the relationship of Jesus with the Church as an example of the relationship of the husband to the wife, in fact, it is the love of Christ for his Body, the Church, which is the very model of Christian marriage. And Paul’s emphasis is not on obedience and subjection, but rather on a mutual, self-giving love.

Paul then turns to the husband and what is expected of him. The total picture probably goes far beyond what the average gentile husband of the time would have found acceptable. Paul begins by saying that:

…the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, and is himself its Savior…

The Church does recognise Jesus Christ as Lord, but it also knows that that Lord gave his life in love and service for each one of us. There is a very nuanced concept of ‘head’ here. As the husband is seen having a kind of authority over his wife just as Jesus has over his Church, there is also a sense of responsibility for the well-being of the partner. Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as the Church is to Christ. But the Christ we submit to is one who forgives and loves and nurtures, and who takes care of our needs through his Body, the community.

By drawing a parallel between a human marriage and the marriage of Christ to his Church, these two concepts are made to illumine each other. Christ is the spouse of the Church because he is her head and because he loves the Church just as a man loves his own body when he loves his wife. The model of the husband’s love for his wife is the love that Christ showed for the Church by giving his life for it to make it holy. The wife has certainly not been asked to love her husband to that degree. The analogy between the relationship of Christ to the Church and that of the husband to the wife is basic to the entire passage.

Speaking of the Church as the bride of Christ, Paul says that he (Christ) made:

…her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word…

This would seem to point to the sacrament of Baptism. So that when Christ took the Church to himself it was:

…without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind, so that she may be holy and without blemish.

It was customary in the Middle East, at the time this letter was written, for the ‘sons of the wedding’ to escort the bride to her husband after she had bathed and dressed. As applied mystically to the Church, Christ washes his bride himself in the bath of baptism, and makes her immaculate (note the mention of a baptismal formula) and introduces her to himself.

Husbands, then, are to love their wives in exactly the same way, with the same degree of care and tenderness. They are to give the same love to their wives as they do to their own bodies. And, in fact, in loving their wives in this way, they are also loving themselves. And just as healthy men care for their own bodies, Christ loves his Body, the Church, of which we are its ‘living parts’.

Finally, Paul, quoting from the book of Genesis, sums up the reality that is a true marriage: where a man leaves his parents, becomes joined to his wife and the two “become one flesh”. It is clear that, in spite of the impression given in the first part, Paul sees marriage as a totally reciprocal relationship. The basis for such expressions of self-giving love is the quotation from Genesis. If the husband and wife “become one flesh”, then for the man to love his wife is to love one who has become part of himself. Paul also makes this Genesis text a prophecy of the marriage of Christ and the Church: a mystery, like that of the salvation of the pagans, that has been hidden, but is now revealed.

All of this, it would seem, proposes a degree of love and intimacy and care for the wife which went far beyond the customary demands of the time. There would be little problem in a wife ‘subjecting’ herself to such a tender and caring husband. It is, in fact, a call for a total giving of the one to the other. Both give and receive all the love that each can give and receive.

Paul calls it a “great mystery” and indeed it is a reality which we can never fully understand. The profound truth of the union of Christ and his ‘Bride’, the Church, is beyond unaided human understanding. It is not that the relationship of husband and wife provides an illustration of the union of Christ and the Church, but that the basic reality is the latter, with marriage a human echo of the relationship.

A Christian marriage, then, is a living out of the union of Christ with his bride, the Church. And nowhere else in our human experience do we see the love of Christ for his Bride more clearly exemplified.

Paul then concludes the passage by summing up that the husband:

…should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband.

The reciprocal is also true—the husband is to respect his wife and she is to love him as she loves herself. More than two thousand years after this was written, we could hardly express it better.

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Commentary on Ephesians 4:32-5:8 Read Monday of Week 30 of Ordinary Time – First Reading »

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Commentary on Ephesians 6:1-9

Paul continues speaking about relationships in the home. Today he speaks of children and slaves. (The Latin word familia includes the whole household: parents, children and servants, who all lived under one roof.)

Children are to obey their parents—in the Lord. This means that they hear in their parents the voice of God; in obeying them, they obey the Lord. This, of course, presumes that what parents tell their children to do is in accordance with truth, love and justice. Children are not bound to follow immoral instructions; on the contrary, they should reject them.

The Fourth Commandment is:

Honour your father and mother.

Paul says of it:

…this is the first commandment with a promise—”so that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth”.

The promised reward to filial obedience of long life is a reference to the book of Deuteronomy (5:33) where the “promise” was the ultimate occupation of the land of Palestine, the Promised Land. Here, “earth” refers to the life without end that Christ brings. It is the same meaning as in the Beatitude:

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
(Matt 5:5)

“Earth” here also refers (as it does in the rest of the Beatitudes) to the Kingdom.

Parents, too, are reminded that there is a limit to their authority. That limit is set by the love and respect that the Gospel calls for in all human relationships. They are told:

…do not provoke your children to anger…

Children will not always be happy with the decisions of their parents, but where there is clearly a genuine care for their well-being, long-term resentment will not be a problem. Children do have a great sense of justice and fairness.

Next, Paul addresses slaves. We come to a practice which to us, now, is completely unacceptable. We need to remind ourselves that it has been only in the relatively recent past that the institution of slavery has been seen as morally unacceptable. Up to that time, it was practiced as a perfectly normal arrangement by nearly every society. Even the Church did not address it as a problem for a long time. The question in Paul’s time was not the existence of the institution of slavery, but rather what both the Old and New Testaments taught about the proper treatment of slaves.

It needs to be said that some slaves even in ancient times would have been treated well and seen as integral parts of the household. They would have been given a level of love, respect and care. Even so, the idea behind slavery, that people could be reduced to the level of animals or objects to be bought and sold, and to be the property of other human beings, should be seen as anathema—a violation of personal dignity.

Paul calls on slaves to be totally obedient to their “masters”. As stated in the Jerusalem Bible:

“The Greek for this word [‘masters’], from which our English term ‘despot’ is derived, indicates the owner’s absolute authority over his slave. Roman slaves had no legal rights, their fates being entirely in their masters’ hands. Slavery was a basic element of Roman society, and the impact of Christianity upon slaves was a vital concern. Guidance for the conduct of Christian master and their slaves was essential.”

For Paul, the slaves are to see the person of Christ in their masters and so they behave well, not just to please their employers, but because, as Christians themselves, they are—like all other Christians—slaves of Christ.

Everyone, be they slave or free, will find the same reward for all the good they do. A slave might be recognised as such by his status, but in practice, he was to be loved as a brother in Christ. We see Paul express this attitude in his letter to Philemon (Phil 1:8-21), which deals with the treatment of Onesimus, a slave who has run away.

There is a word, too, for the masters. Once again, as with husbands and wives, children and parents, Paul emphasises that there are mutual responsibilities on both sides:

Stop threatening them, for you know that both of you have the same Lord in heaven, and with him there is no partiality.

They are to treat their slaves well and with respect. Both master and slave are serving the very same Master, who is not in the least impressed by social status.

We have here, in this comment of Paul, already the seed of the end of slavery—the equal and inviolable dignity of every person. Freedom is everyone’s right; no one can ever belong, as a piece of property, to another person.

In reading this passage, we need to reflect on the way we treat our children today. In some ways, the challenges facing parents in modern society are far greater than in the past, but the basic principles remain the same.

We do not have—at least in most societies now—slaves in the strict sense, but there are still great gaps in the social status of people. There is still a huge level of exploitation within countries and between countries over people who are employed to work for us. There are still countries who subjugate some groups of people to forced labor. As well, we have the enormous problem of child labour and what sometimes is tantamount to slavery involving thousands of people. Economic and sexual abuse are rampant. The ‘sex trade’ involves the abduction and slavery of thousands of young boys and girls. The main reason for its existence is the market which so-called ‘free people’ provide. In many ways, we have little cause to criticise the society of Paul’s day.

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Commentary on Phil 1:1-11 Read Friday of week 30 of Ordinary Time – First Reading »