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There was a young boy, maybe in third grade or so, who was doing terribly in school. He just didn't seem motivated, didn't pay attention in class, couldn't seem to get his homework done.
Now his parents weren't religious at all, but there was a Catholic school in the neighborhood, and some other families sent their children to the school and had really good things to say about it. And the young boy's parents had always heard that Catholic schools were a good choice for kids who weren't thriving elsewhere.
So, in desperation really, the parents decided to send their son to the Catholic school. And to their great surprise and happiness, the boy quickly seemed to turn things around. He would come home from school and go straight to his room and do his homework. He started bringing home papers with good marks on them. Finally he brought home his first report card, and it was filled with "A's" and "B"s".
So the parents went to their son and said: "You've got to tell us. What was it that got things turned around for you? Was it the small classes? The uniforms? The discipline?"
The boy smiled and said: "No, it wasn't any of those things. When I got there and looked around I could see right away that these people were really serious about school, and I had to get really serious too. Why, they were so serious about math that on the wall of every room I went into there was this guy nailed to a plus sign."
I tell this story because I think it is useful to remember Christ on the cross when we're thinking about today's second reading, the one from St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians.
Now the connection isn't obvious, and, in fact, this reading is one which sometimes really bothers people, makes them mad, because it looks like Paul is advocating a view of marriage that is very male-dominated, patriarchial, with all the language about wives being subordinate to husbands and such.
But let me suggest that isn't what is going on at all. In fact Paul has something in mind that is much more radical.
For starters, Paul begins this discussion of marriage by saying that both husbands and wives should be subordinate to each other. That mutual submission was a radical idea at the time, and is still pretty radical in some places. But there it is.
Later on Paul tells husbands to love their wives "like their own bodies"-- to consider that their wives are just as important to the husband as any part of their own bodies. And that's followed by a reference to the portion of Genesis which talks about the husband and wife becoming one flesh.
This isn't something hierarchical at all-- but a radical equality and unity.
One translation of this first verse that I particularly like sums it up. It reads:
"Offer yourselves without reservation to each other out of reverence for Christ."
What a great way to think about marriage-- that it is an offering of ourselves without reservation to our spouse.
But what does that "offering" look like?
Paul answers that question by making the analogy of the marriage of a husband and wife to the relationship of Christ to the Church. He says that the "husband is the head of his wife just as Christ is the head of the Church." Paul also says that husbands "should love their wives even as Christ loved the Church."
And that is where Christ on the cross comes in-- because the way Christ is the head of the Church, the way Christ loved the Church, is not by showing power, or glory, or dominance.
What makes Christ the head of the Church is the cross-- Christ's complete outpouring of Himself, His love, His very being on the cross. That's what constitutes Christ's fundamental relationship with the Church-- His complete act of self-giving.
Christ went "all in," as they say at the poker table-- put all his chips out there-- and took the huge risk of giving everything, of moving first in reaching out to the Church, to all of us, in love without knowing how it would turn out.
And Paul is saying that in a very real sense that's the husband's role as well-- to go "all in"-- to offer himself completely to his wife, without a cost-benefit calculus or a plan B.
Being the "head" like Christ-- going "all in"-- means you'd take a bullet for your wife, like a couple of guys did in that terrible theatre shooting in Auroro, Colorado a couple of years ago- -the trial just finished last month.
Being "all in" means getting up with an infant, or a sick kid, at 2:00 a.m. even though you know that if you just pretended to be asleep a little longer, your wife would do it.
Being "all in" means spending the time and energy to figure out what your wife wants or needs and doing it, without making her ask.
And ther is something fundamental about the husband's "all in" love that comes first, just as Christ's self-emptying love came first. Not in the sense of who is attracted to whom first, or who talks first to whom, but in the sense of this fundamental self-giving commitment.
It isn't just an accident that in a Christian marriage ceremony the husband says his vows first, before the wife. And it isn't just custom that in all societies the man proposes marriage, not the woman.
No, it is the husband's professed willingness to be "all in"-- the man's commitment to his wife and to any children that they may have-- that gives the woman the freedom to take the great risk herself of going "all in"-- the tremendous physical, spiritual, personal, emotional risk of opening herself up to a relationship with a man.
One translation I like for what happens here doesn't use the word "submit," it says: "Wives, respond to the love of your husband as you respond to the Lord."
And there is nothing about that "response" that is passive or secondary. It is active and crucial to the relationship.
Look around-- we're the Church and what we do is critically important. We are loved by Christ and respond to that love by loving Christ back, and by using that mutual love as a source of creation and growth and salvation, just as a wife takes her husband's "all in", adds her own, and the two become a source of new life and community and salvation.
None of this is about who makes decisions, or who has power, or who manipulates whom.
It is about a radical, virtuous cycle-- a positive cycle of virtue building on virtue, of self-offering building on self-offering-- in and through which marriage, and all of its joys and challenges, is experienced.
Paul today gives us a model of marriage that is truly worth of our aspiration-- a radical notion a way of live that is both emptying and fulfilling, of equality and unity-- much different from what we often hear.
It is a vision of marriage worthy of our reflection, and as we reflect on it, we might also pray for the grace to live this model of marriage that Paul proposes for us today.
