There are those who think that Jesus’s teaching about marriage has become out of date nowadays. It does not fit the facts or the experience of so many. “The world has changed, and so must we” is the principle, whether spoken or not. Well, the world does change, and will keep on doing so. But not always as much as we think. Jesus’s teaching was “counter-cultural” even in his own day. Obviously Jewish law and practice went against what he taught, as mentioned in the gospel, but so also did Roman law and culture.
Divorce in ancient Rome was very easy. One of the most famous ancient inscriptions preserved in Rome is what is called the “Laudatio Turiae.” It was erected by a grieving husband in honour of his late wife. In it he says “Marriages as long as ours are rare, marriages that are ended by death and not broken by divorce. For we were fortunate enough to see our marriage last without disharmony for fully 40 years.” 40 years without divorce was worth erecting a stone tablet for, it seems. What Jesus taught about divorce and remarriage was counter-cultural at the start. It did not fit in easily at the time he said it.
We should not get used to sin and moral weakness, seeing them as our deepest and most natural condition. It is goodness and love that are at the heart of creation, and marriages are built on them. On hearing today’s gospel our minds may well start to focus on the issue of divorce and remarriage, but Jesus wants us to discover or rediscover how it was in the beginning, at creation, and to live and love accordingly.
So we are not to put asunder what God has joined. The central and sustaining image is that the two spouses become one indivisible flesh. As Jesus says, we must go back to the beginning, to creation, and, to help fill our minds and imaginations before we hear the gospel, today’s first reading is in fact from Genesis. But we do not hear these readings just to remind ourselves of the teaching on marriage. We hear them to remind ourselves that, like the whole of creation, we were made by God, and made for good.
You should be able to tell Christians by their realism and by their founded belief that God is greater than any weakness or sin. It is fashionable to say that we are all sinners. True enough, but this is only part of the truth. We are also repentant sinners, and we seek the grace of deeper conversion during the whole of our lives. We seek to commit ourselves to a vision of human life that is based, not on the changing culture of the world, but on the solid rock of the teaching of Jesus Christ.
Fr Chris Denham
