The man-woman relationship is as old as humanity; it is a primordial dimension of life. In the world of faith, we see in its institution in marriage the hands of the Creator, but for many, what is experienced is a human convention much buffeted by the practice of divorce (Mark 10:2-16).
Moses said
The debate about divorce has been going on since time immemorial within the Jewish-Christian tradition. Inasmuch as God created the world, everything in it must be in accord with the divine will. But when a marriage between a man and a woman appears to have reached a dead-end, what is to do that is in harmony with one’s faith? During the time of Jesus, two schools of thought were vying for popular acceptance, both views accepting the termination in divorce of the marital union and just differing over the justifying reason. The proponents of the stricter view were the ones challenging Jesus to show His color, but Jesus refused to be enmeshed in their polemical hair-splitting. Immediately aiming for the heart of the matter, He demanded to know the basis for their view: What did Moses, a prophet, their lawgiver and interpreter of God’s will, say?
Moses said, in divorcing a wife, in whom you find something unacceptable, hand her a letter of divorce (Deuteronomy 24:1). Such a bill was for the protection of the woman; it made re-marriage possible. Jesus knocked off this scriptural basis from underneath His antagonists: Moses commanded that such a letter of divorce be made, not because divorce is right, but because of the hardness of heart of the people who could not be restrained from dismissing wives and getting new ones. In the face of such unyielding “cardiac sclerosis,” damage control was all Moses could regulate.
Jesus said
HE did not only make a revealing background assessment of what Moses said. Jesus, as the prophet, the ultimate spokesman of God, reconstituted the whole subject of marriage and divorce by rerooting it in God’s plan of creation. “From the beginning of creation” provides the much-needed perspective that had been lost in the din of crashing marriages, collapsing relationships and runaway urges.
“God made them male and female” (Genesis 1:27): The complementary difference of man and woman is divinely planned. Their mutual need for, and completion in, each other is their destiny, a primeval drive hard and ineluctable, deep and fulfilling. Further, it is the setting for another level of creation, the genesis of human divinization in sharing in and reflecting forth God’s love. The union of man and wife is a priority of creation to signify and symbolize (i.e., “sacramentalize”) the endless commitment, compassion and companionship of the Creator for the creatures. Just by creating us, God identified Himself irrevocably with us, no matter the fall and sin; now intended to be the icon of this unfathomable mystery of love is the no less mysterious search and passion of man and woman for each other. “God created man in His image, in the divine image He created him, male and female He created them,” so that the union of man and wife is yet another creation, a definitive “oneness” with each other, whereby “the two of them become one body” (Genesis 2:24), a sacrament of their oneness with their Creator. What a vocation from the very moment of creation! To tamper with it can only result in adultery, meaning something abominable and totally abhorrent to the Creator and self-destructive to the creatures.
Alálaong bagá, in the joys and pains, challenges and opportunities of marriage, we have indeed to be like little children, to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:3). It is not an accident that our gospel reading concludes with Jesus’ indignation that children were being rebuked for approaching him. Assured of welcome and understanding, forgiveness and help, husbands and wives need, and should be assisted, to approach Jesus. The kingdom of God truly belongs as well to those who, with childlike confidence, remain faithful to Jesus Christ amid difficulties and failures in the married life. The lasting union of man and wife can only be lived “out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21), who personifies to us the sanctifying mystery of marriage in his normative commitment and love for the holy, but sinful, Church—a love that does not fold up before so much imperfection but transcends it.
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