Sacred Heart Parish
27th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (B)
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Commenting on the words of Genesis – “It is not good for man to be alone” – Pope Benedict remarks – “If there were such a thing as a loneliness which could no longer be penetrated and transformed by the word of another, then we should have real, total loneliness and frightfulness, what theology calls ‘hell’.” It is good for us, then, in this context to listen to what the Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us about marriage – “The matrimonial covenant by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership for the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring; this covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament.”
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Certainly, marriage and the family are counted among the most precious of human goods. Families are the basic cells of human society – “The well being of the individual person and of both human and Christian society is closely bound up with the healthy state of conjugal and family life.” In our disquieting times when strange things are being said of matrimony, which is the office of motherhood, it is good for those who are active in the proclamation of the teachings of the Church to present ever anew the fundamental values of marriage and family. This can be of great help to our young people in particular who stand at the beginning of their pathway to marriage and the family. Today’s readings give the preacher the opportunity to disclose the beauty and greatness of God’s marital call to love and to the service of life, thus opening new horizons for our young people far beyond what our secular culture would allow.
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Marriage, of course, is as old as the human race. First, there was marriage in the order of creation, which still remains marriage in the order of creation, prior to Christ raising marriage to the dignity of a sacrament. The intimate community of life and love which constitutes the married state had been established by God our Creator. God himself is the author of marriage, a calling written in the very nature of man and woman as they come from the hand of their Creator. Marriage is not a purely human institution – despite the many variations it may have undergone down through the centuries and in different cultures, social structures and spiritual attitudes.
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But marriage, like everything else, soon came under the regime of sin. Original sin affects and infects everything human hands can touch. Marriage then became threatened by discord, by a spirit of domination, of infidelity, of jealousy and conflicts. In his loving dealings with ancient Israel, God placed marriage under the pedagogy of the law. Under such wonderful pedagogy, the moral conscience developed with regard to the unity and indissolubility of marriage – even though under Moses it became permitted for a man to divorce his wife. Now in the new law, the law of the Gospel, Jesus restores marriage to what was intended from the beginning.
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This unequivocal insistence on the indissolubility of the marriage bond, as we can see from the Gospel reading, left some of Jesus’ hearers perplexed and fearful that he was making an impossible demand. However, by coming to restore the original order of creation, disturbed by sin, Jesus himself gives the strength and grace to live marriage in the new dimension of God’s kingdom. It is by following Christ, renouncing themselves and taking up their crosses that spouses will be able to receive the original meaning of marriage and live it with the help of Christ. This grace of Christian marriage is a fruit of Christ’s cross, the source of all Christian life.
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I would like to comment on two specific items – the so-called goods of marriage and the symbolism of marriage. The goods of marriage are unity, fruitfulness and faithfulness. Spousal “I do” to unity tells the world that the marriage union seeks its roots in the natural complementarity that exists between a man and woman, that is nourished by their personal willingness to share their entire life project – what they have and who they are. Spousal “I do” to fruitfulness means that the service of life is entrusted to the married couple who share in God’s creative love and become God’s co-workers in the world. Spousal “I do” to faithfulness echoes the words of Jesus that no one separate what God has joined. This means that in a selfish, individualistic, secular, warring, terrorist world, spousal “I do” to faithfulness is a sign of hope that calls out to all the world that gift-love really works, that sexuality and love and marriage and the family all belong together, that marriage is the beginning of a new community, a partnership under the Holy Spirit which can tell all who witness spousal faithfulness that the deep divisions that have always prevailed and will always prevail because of sin can in principle and by God’s grace be healed.
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A final comment on the symbolism of marriage. Each sacrament has it unique symbolism. St. Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians speaks to this symbolism when he writes – Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the Church. He gave himself up for the Church. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cling to his wife and the two shall be made into one. This is a great foreshadowing, St. Paul says – It refers to Christ and the Church. We must note carefully what this text is saying to us. The text’s most important declaration is not that love and faithfulness between Christ and the Church is a model for marriage; it is that the love between man and woman in marriage is a sign that makes present God’s love and faithfulness which have definitively appeared in Jesus Christ and are abidingly present in the Church. What great dignity and responsibility in the marriage of baptized persons becomes a real and true symbol of that new and eternal covenant sanctioned in the blood of Christ. (See page 318 – The Church’s Confession of Faith, Ignatius Press)