Homilies and Talks
Fr. Mark 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time (10/6/24)
A reading from the Holy Gospel, according to Mark. The Pharisees approached Jesus and asked, "Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife?" They were testing him. He said to them in reply, "What did Moses command you?" They replied, "Moses permitted a husband to write a bill of divorce and dismiss her." But Jesus told them, "Because of the hardness of your hearts, he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate. In the house, the disciples again questioned Jesus about this. He said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. And people were bringing children to him, that he might touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he became indignant and said to them, "Let the children come to me. Do not prevent them. For the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Amen, I say to you, 'Whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it.' Then he embraced them and blessed them, placing his hands on them, the gospel of the Lord." In St. Peter's Basilica, as you are exiting the sacristy, you come across a great mosaic at one of the side altars, and it's the scene, it's called the altar of the lie. It's the scene of Ananias and Safariah from the Acts of the Apostles. And in this depiction, it has St. Peter standing there holding the keys in his blue and gold and Safariah laying on the ground dead. And in the background of the scene, they actually have Ananias being taken out to be buried because he had died too. That scene, the story behind that, is in the Acts of the Apostles in the early church. When you converted to Christianity, you brought everything you had and you laid it at the feet of the Apostles, and then they took it and sort of did the daily distribution. And the reason we have deacons is actually some problems with the daily distribution. But so everything that you had was entrusted to the church in the Apostles, and then they gave to everyone according to need, and that was the way the early Christian community functioned. Ananias and Safariah came, they converted, and they held a little piece of property back from the church, from the Apostles. And when Peter encountered Ananias, he asked Ananias about this, and he says, 'Did you give everything to the church?' And Ananias says, 'Of course I did,' and Ananias is struck dead because he lied. And so as he's carried out, Safariah comes in looking for her husband, and she is asked by Peter 2, 'Did you give everything when you converted to the church?' And she says, 'Oh yes, we did,' and then in response, she shares her husband's fate. Now the reason that this scene is by the sacristy door of St. Peter's Basilica is because every member of the clergy who celebrates Mass or any sort of liturgy at St. Peter's, besides the Pope, has to walk past this image. And so it was built intentionally as a reminder, specifically to the clergy, which sounds a little weird, I'm sure. But it's a reminder because that scene in Acts of the Apostles, rather than being sort of an extended capital campaign on behalf of the church, is actually a reminder that when we hold something back from the Lord, when we hide part of ourselves and want to keep it to ourselves, or hide that place of shame, or sin, or hurt, that is precisely where death enters in. It enters into our relationships, it enters into ourselves, especially our relationship with God, and especially our relationships with other people, crowned, of course, in the marriage covenant. And so it's a reminder. It's meant as a reminder to all Christians that nothing can be held back from the Lord, that when we follow the Lord, we have to give our whole selves to Him. And that's how we sustain life. And I think on this Sunday, which we have this gospel from Jesus teaching very clearly about divorce and adultery, it's important to keep that in mind, that it's precisely what we hold back from one another that causes our death, because God has a greater vision for what our lives should be, and that greater vision is offered to us in the reading from the book of Genesis. There's several points I want to draw out, and English has yet again betrayed us. So in the beginning, God creates, and then He says, "This is from the second account of creation, by the way. It's not good for man to be alone. Man there, though, is not man is in like the masculine. Man there is Adam, which just means the one from the earth, the original man, the first creation. And he's created in a sort of solitude, because in the midst of creation, he's the only one who has a special relationship with God. He's the mediating point, the priest of the original creation. And God in His wisdom creates Him first, and lets Him experience that solitude, that being alone. And God then responds to that aloneness, that solitude, of His creation, by saying we need to make Him a suitable partner. Why is this? It's because God Himself is a communion of three persons. He lives an intimate giving of oneself to another, within who He is as God. And so to create a being in His image and likeness requires relationship. It's from the logic of the Trinity's creation. Now God then, as sort of a way of teaching, starts to form out of the ground, like He did Adam, various kind of animals. God obviously knows that none of these are an appropriate partner for the man, but it's an important lesson for man to learn, that He sees that He actually kind of participates in God's creation by naming, having authority over that which is created. And then there's a difference, because when woman is created, there's several things going on here. The first of all, he says it's not a suitable partner. The word actually there is helper, and that's a really profound word precisely because the other person who's called a helper in the Old Testament is God Himself, who is the helper for those in distress. And so the fact that Adam is searching for a helper indicates this sort of level of intensity of search and the dignity that this person who is about to be created has. Now the Lord casts a deep sleep on the man, and while he was asleep, he took out one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. The rabbis that comment in the Old Testament traditions on this passage, that little snippet, go very far to emphasize the equality that's implied by the coming from the side of the man. The woman doesn't come out of the feet, the woman doesn't come from the ground and then get life and then become an equal. From her very creation, she's separated from the side as an equal, as a helper, as a partner of the man. And so in the logic of creation, man and woman have a fundamental equality and a fundamental complementarity because the woman comes from the side of the man. Now it's also important to kind of skip ahead because what else comes from someone's side but the church, when Christ Himself is put into a sleep, the sleep of death, which Paul references that He had to take on for everyone, Eve becomes the mother of all the living precisely because Adam was put to sleep as the father of all the living, and out of the sleep of death, this foreshadowing of the experience of death comes all of the living. Out of the sleep of death that is the crucifixion from the side of Christ comes blood and water, which is the church, the mother of all the living, those who have life eternal. Now it's also important to realize, so it says, "The Lord God then built up into a woman the rib He had taken from the man. All the other creatures were formed out of the earth, but the woman is built up." There's another thing that is built up in the Old Testament that this is sort of a reference to, it's the same word that's used and that's the temple, the place of worship, the place where God and man come together and humanity offers worship back to its creator. So the woman is built as a temple, as an equal, as a helper to this first man, and then we have this strange line, "This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." This is the first, the fathers of the church kind of interpret this as the first marriage to vow, because what Adam is saying is, "I take you for myself, I take you as my bride, and I give you everything I have." And that giving of everything and taking of everything is actually implied in the use of the word flesh. This is why I would propose that this gospel passage and this reading from Genesis comes in year B, because we just read the Bread of Life Discourse, where God Himself in Jesus Christ gives us His not just body to eat, but He says, "My flesh to eat." It's a reference and connection to this first word of Adam and recognizing his bride and Eve, the mother of all the living, that the flesh for the rabbis, interpreting the Old Testament for the fathers of the church and for Christians in general implies a totality of self-gift, a holding nothing back when I give myself to another. That relationship of course is crowned in the marriage that Adam and Eve undertake in this little passage, and it's then crowned even more in the marriage between Christians. And that's why it says, "This is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two become not one body, but one flesh." And this is where we're betrayed by the English again, because in the gospel, for some odd reason, that's translated as one body. But now you know it's really supposed to be one flesh. That's what the Greek actually says. So we see the complementarity of man and woman from the moments of creation. It's only after the creation of the woman that we start to see the words for man and woman, separated ish and isha in the text, and so they're relating to each other in this mode of equality that's then broken in the fall, but in the beginning it was not. So God created with a vision of the perfect, He created with a vision of what He wanted for each and every one of us, and we in rejecting Him in disobedience for went that vision. And now He's trying to clean up the mess, and that ultimately comes on the cross when the world is recreated by the sleep of the new Adam from which the new Eve arises, that is the church. Now I want to just cover a couple of points, because if you notice I'm not approaching the Gospel from the negative, what I would think is more helpful for us today, especially in a culture which so violently rejects the truth of our existence, the truth of our creation, and therefore rejects the truth that the church upholds about marriage, if we approach from the negative and just say what's not allowed, I don't think that's very helpful. We have to be given the vision of what God actually wants for us, because if we're given the vision, we can strive for the vision. If we're just given the line of no, then we can't really see the life that God wants to offer us in this reality. In the new covenant, this new relationship that Christ inaugurates with humanity, which is foreshadowed as a marriage, we see all of the fulfillment and replacement of the Old Testament, of the old covenant, this one of Adam and Eve, the recreation. And in this new covenant, we see totality in dissolubility, and we see a bride and the relationship of a bride and a bridegroom in the giving of the flesh for one another, most of all in the Eucharist, where we commune with God and he gives his very life to us through this communion. And so the church's concern to uphold what Jesus himself teaches about marriage is less about telling people what to do and more about presenting and upholding the image that God gives us for happiness and for human flourishing. And so when we realize the sign value, right, that marriage has in relating to us and reminding us of Christ's love for the church, which is what Saint Paul tells us marriage is as a sacrament, we can be reminded of the Genesis narrative. We can be reminded of what Christ has actually done for each one of us. And we can realize that there are some ways in which we don't live up to that perfection. And so the church has various means of responding to that because we're human, right? And we don't give up on the goal just because various things happen in our lives. So today we see in these readings the offering of a new life, a new life in God, a life that is marked first by the totality of self-gift in the radical equality and complementarity of the man and the woman, which is written into the very fabric of creation. And we also have the grace from the cross to respond to the gift that God gives us. So let's pray for a new outpouring of grace, especially in the married couples of this parish that we might know and live this new law of love, this new covenantal marriage well and be assigned to this whole world of God's indissoluble love for us. [ Pause ] I believe in one.