27th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B
Genesis 2:18-24; Psalm 128; Hebrews 2:9-11; Mark 10:2-16 (or 2-12)
Peter Folan
It couldn’t have been the Good Samaritan, huh?
It couldn’t have been God as the woman who, after finding a lost coin,
“calls together her friends and neighbors” to rejoice with her?1
No, no. Instead, we have marriage, divorce, and adultery.
And to that, I say, thanks be to God,
because this is the stuff of real life.
Not that these other stories are not real,
but at a time when marriage is getting talked about so much,
when, for many in the public square,
it has become an issue that, ironically, separates instead of joining,
we need another way forward.
We need Jesus’ way.
But if we have any hope of walking this way, we must acknowledge a hard truth:
this gospel passage, or, rather,
poor interpretations of this gospel passage,
have caused tremendous amounts of pain among the People of God.
These interpretations have left many believing that they or their parents are living in sin;
they have caused others to remain in unhealthy and even dangerous marriages;
they have made too many people feel unwelcome at the table of the Eucharist;
and, most tragically, they have erased from too many memories the words of Paul,
who reminds us, that nothing
“will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”2
But perhaps a new day is upon us.
Shortly before he died last month,
Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, himself a Jesuit,
posed the following question in an interview:
“How can the Church come to the aid of complex family situations with the
power of the sacraments?”3
There is no better way to quiet bankrupt interpretations than by asking dynamic questions.
So if poor interpretations have brought us where we are,
what are the fruitful interpretations?
As always, the two extremes must be avoided.
On the one hand,
cutting Jesus’ words in Mark and
1
Cf., Luke 10: 8-10.
Romans 8:39.
3
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=20556, cf., Komonchak translation.
2
pasting them into real-life situations today,
never bothering to think of things like
the audience for whom Mark tailors his gospel,
what the terms “marriage” and “divorce” meant then and now,
and that, in this passage, Jesus was responding to a test,4
not issuing a pastoral message,
amounts to a biblical literalism, which, in the words of the Pontifical Bib. Commission,
“invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide.”5
On the other hand,
sidelining the Jesus who finds us in today’s gospel
because we prefer something like the 8lb. 6oz, baby Jesus of Christmas Day,
the one who knows no words of challenge,
runs the risk of turning the gospel into our own playlist of favorites.
The organizers of the lectionary have done us a favor today
by pairing the first reading from Genesis with this gospel,
for the story of the man and the woman
highlights three features of marriage that Mark’s Jesus appears to affirm:
Marriage is a partnership.
Marriage is difficult.
And marriage is worth it.
First, marriage is a partnership.
That word, “partner,” comes directly from Genesis.6
YHWH God sets out to find a “suitable partner” for the man whom he created.
Literally, YHWH God seeks “a helper like one who can stand in front of the man,”
who can look the man in the eye,
whom the man can regard as a supporter, as an equal, as a partner.
In this sense, the partnership mirrors the way in which God interacts with humankind,
a relationship that the OT often calls a partnership, that same word.7
Jesus, in recalling for the Pharisees that “the two shall become one flesh,”8
continues this tradition.
In marriage, two people begin a new partnership,
a new standing-before-one-another.
And in it, they pray for the grace
to stand themselves,
to stand one another,
and, each day, to stand before one another.
4
Mark 10:2.
Pont. Biblical Commission, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (15 April 1993), I, F.
6
Cf., Gen. 2:18.
7
Cf., Deut. 33:29; Ps. 33:20, 70:5, 115:9, 10; etc.
8
Cf., Mark 10:8, Gen. 2:24.
5
2
Second, marriage is difficult.
Make no mistake about it, the honeymoon in Genesis does not last long.
Just 14 verses – verses, not chapters – after the man says so beautifully,
“This – at last! – is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,”
he sings a very different tune.
The snake has engaged the woman in dialogue, and, before long,
both she and the man have eaten the fruit of the tree
which had been forbidden them.
When God discovers all this, what does the man do? He blames both God and the woman:
“The woman, whom you put here with me,
she gave me fruit from the tree, so I ate it.”9
Jesus, and for that matter, the Pharisees,
must have also recognized how difficult marriage is, how fragile any partnership is.
Why else would they be speaking about divorce in the first place?!
Hard-heartedness, as Jesus himself says,
aggravates difficulties, and sometimes, makes them insurmountable.
Yet, the third feature remains true: marriage is worth it.
When Jesus speaks so strongly against divorce,
I find it hard to believe it is with the tone of,
“Well, you’ve made your bed; now sleep in it. Forever.”
Rather, I hear him tapping into one of the great truths of human existence:
some mysteries, some graces, some joys,
become ours only when we make permanent commitments
to something bigger than ourselves.
I bet my life on this yesterday; and married people do likewise every day.
Could there be times when the commitment is so life-draining
that keeping it can actually amount to a vicious lack of self-love?
Tragically, yes.
But are there other times when difficulties arise, when life happens,
that one stands on the brink of deeper intimacy and deeper love?
An intimacy and a love that will not be reached without an irrevocable “yes”?
Of course.
Marriage is a worthwhile albeit difficult partnership.
So is any life worth living.
And so let us pray that, whatever our vocation might be,
we may find and cling to loving partners;
we may endure and grow from the inevitable difficulties;
and we may, by saying an infinite “yes,”
gain access to that which no “maybe” will ever yield.
9
Genesis 3:12.
3