Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time Cycle B October 3, 2021

 Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time    Cycle B    October 3, 2021

 

Our Gospel today contains a strict prohibition of divorce.  We often think of divorce as a moral failure and surely there’s something of that in every divorce because there is moral failure running throughout all of life.  We never love as fully as we should.  We hear words in the Gospel like “adultery” and we cringe. But divorce is far more than something personal. It is a social reality in which people’s lives undergo massive and traumatic shift.

          The first reading from Genesis shows us that marriage is about much more than human attraction or even personal commitment.  It is saying that man and woman were created for each other, and that this relationship springs from creation itself.  Some medieval theologians, probably following the thought of Jewish rabbis, asked the question as why God created the woman from the man’s rib bone?   They reasoned that if God had created the woman from the man’s head bone then she would be above him and his superior, and if God had created the woman from the man’s footbone then she would be below him and his inferior.  But God created the woman from the man’s rib bone to show that her proper place is at his side, as his equal and partner. 

          The story about Adam’s rib helps set up the main idea: each is bone of the other’s bone, flesh of the other’s flesh, blood with the same life.  From this dimension of creation, all human beings will be shaped by their birth and their upbringing. Our commitments to each other uphold, in fact, our existence.

 

          There is also a justice component to Jesus’ prohibition of divorce.  Just think of what it would be like to be divorced back in ancient times,         

particularly for the woman.  Jesus’ prohibition of divorce speaks against the abandonment of women by their husbands, an abandonment that left them doomed to be poor and homeless.  In that patriarchal society, women lived with the ever-present risk of a failed marriage, stuck in a society that made no place for them.

          But even beyond the issue of simple justice, there is a deeply religious reason for avoiding divorce.  For if marriage is founded in creation, it is also founded in God’s unconditional love.  For Christians in an explicit way, and for all humans in an implicit way, the ultimate norm of love isn’t what movies or novels say, isn’t what society tolerates, and certainly isn’t the smallness of our human hearts.  The love that God shows by bringing us into existence, by sending his Son who binds himself to us so closely he calls us “brother and sisters” as the second reading says, and by filling our hearts with the Holy Spirit—this is the measure and standard of all love.

When we think about marriage, we certainly have to mourn the tragedy when it sometimes unfortunately fails.  But more than that, we have to uphold the ideal of love stamped upon us by our very existence and faith.  These are the ideals that hold us together in our commitments.  Even more, they show us the kind of love which we have received in God and in which we should live.  A married couple, in loving each other in good times and in bad, when it is beautiful and even when it is rough and difficult and not pretty, learn the experience of love, and so come to know in very real and concrete human terms God who IS love.  

 

    If we all lived steeped in this unconditional and generous love of God, maybe our marriages, and creation itself, would be better sustained.

The big heresy today is that each one lives for herself or himself, that we thrive when others leave us alone.  But everything about our lives, and everything about God’s Word and actions, keeps saying that the opposite is true.  Until we see how we are connected to each other, we are missing the fundamental starting point of life, the purpose of creation itself.  Our ultimate goal in not isolation, but eternal union with God, and in Christ Jesus, with every person and all creation.

AMEN.