Written on January 29 and posted today as a Favorite . . .
Vermeer: Christ in the house of Martha and MarySo be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma. Ephesians 5:1-2
You became imitators of us and of the Lord, receiving the word in great affliction, with joy from the Holy Spirit, so that you became a model in Macedonia and in Achaia . . . For you became imitators in God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: you suffered from your own countrymen the same things those churches suffered. 1 Thessalonians 1:6, 2:14
This portion of 1 Corinthians deals with problems in liturgical assembles; the church Paul established in Corinth was experiencing difficulties in maintaining the customs instituted by the apostle and so he writes to counsel them. He encourages them to remember who they are and all that God has given them; he asks them to serve as good models of Christian living – even though he, Paul, is not with them. He asks that they call upon their faith in Christ’s promise to be with them always in the offering of bread and wine. He asks that they put aside the corrupt ways they have allowed the creep into their spiritual practices.
Samaritan WomanSome of what we read is troublesome when we look on these words from our place in the twenty-first century. Commentary tells us that Paul’s attitude toward women was in concert with the thinking of that day. Fundamentalists take these words literally and diminish women to a status below men. Most scholars today aver that if Paul were living in our world he would give women equal status with men. But rather than focus on some of Paul’s words here, what we canfocus on is the way Christ himself treated women, beginning with his own mother, and the sisters of his friend Lazarus, Mary and Martha. It is clear from the Gospel stories that the Samaritan Woman in John 4, the woman with the hemorrhage in Matthew 9, Mark 5, and Luke 8, the Canaanite/Syrophoenician woman in Matthew 15, and Mark 7, the woman crippled by a spirit for thirteen years in Luke 13, the woman caught in adultery in John 8 are all important to Jesus. He uses women in his parables in Matthew 13, for example – The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough – and in Luke 15 with the woman and the lost coin. There are other instances but these few serve to show the respect with which Christ treated women and thisis what we are called to model.
Bernardino Luini: Mary MagdaleneAs Paul writes to the Corinthians – and to us today – about how we misuse and even abuse the gift of presence God gives to us each day either through the Eucharist or in any other form, we might remind ourselves that while we strive to imitate Christ perfectly we will miss the mark frequently. And as we read through the many stories we have about Jesus, we find one thing in common: Jesus loves us all, greatly and deeply. Thisis what Paul calls us to imitate. Thisis what we can strive to be and do. Thisis the person we can follow no matter our circumstance, gender, or status. This is all that God asks of us. This and nothing more.
The Noontimes 