Jesus brings us back to God’s creative love – Mark 10:2-12

OT Yr B, Wk 27; Duncan Hall (Notre Dame)

“Go back to the beginning… how did this all start?”  When something that was meant to be wonderful starts to taste bitter, that can be just the question to ask.  What was it that so exited me and led me to begin this course of study, to play on this team, to take this job… to marry this person?  How can I bring that initial fervor to life again, in the more mature way that’s needed to deal with our more seasoned problems or our creeping ennui?

“How did this all start?”  That’s the question Jesus answers even though it’s not the question the Pharisees are asking.  They’re out to trick him by making him give his controversial answer to a legal question.  We think of divorce as a modern phenomenon, but it was reasonably common at that time, amongst Jews as well as Gentiles.  We’ve found the bills of divorce he’s talking about.  The rabbis debated what possible grounds for divorce could be, and the criteria ranged from very broad, pretty much divorce on demand, to very narrow, but none of them ever said divorce was never to happen.  Jesus cuts across all these arguments, not by discarding Deuteronomy (in fact, he explains how it reveals God’s compassion), but by going back to the beginning, to God’s original creative act.

He takes us back to the beginning when all there was, was love.  Can you imagine life without time?  I certainly can’t, it’s just such a part of how we process the world that we can’t even think without it.  But time was created, time is slightly less foundational to the really real than love is.  Love is more fundamental than time.

Can you keep good news secret?  If you’re good at that, I congratulate you, because it’s difficult.  We had a saying at university, “a secret in the Oxford sense,” which meant that you could only tell one person at a time.  Good news seems to have a will of its own in wanting to get out and it takes well-developed will power to stop it.  God didn’t keep the secret of His own love; the telling of it was creation.

In a particularly beautiful way, marriage is part of the original creation, part of God’s telling of His love.  Two people committing to live their lives as one gives testimony that can be properly sacramental to the spousal intimacy we’re all called to with God, and procreation can attest to the fruitfulness and over-flowing nature of love.  The love that God is in all its facets is made visible to the world in marriage: God’s fiery eros that burns for us; God’s familiar friendship that sits ever at our side; God’s self-giving sacrifice that went to the cross for us.  The giver is the gift.

Jesus brings us back there, because we’re not still in the garden.  We do need to be brought back.  We get wrapped up in ourselves, in our loftiness or in our lowliness, and lose sight of that love God longs to sing to us of.  He doesn’t just bring us back in our mind’s eye; he acts to bring us back, to restore us to that harmonious loving intimacy with all of creation, with each other, with our Creator.  The victorious victim of the cross, Jesus triumphs over sin and death and renews creation, bringing us back to that original vision of love.  In that restored creation, marriage can never be broken off because God’s love can never be broken off.

Many of you probably know people, perhaps love people, for whom marriage doesn’t feel like much of a garden right now; for whom it feels like more of a cross.  Problems or struggles in marriage, or a divorce; or those who’d love to be married, but despair of it ever happening.  God’s love can never be broken off.  We don’t always do a great job as Church of showing it, but we have great compassion for those who suffer through or from this ideal of marriage.  God’s love is writ large in marriage, but that isn’t working for everyone yet.  Some people have been put on a cross by marriage.  And God’s love is writ even larger there.  God’s there, holding us and loving us; He will bring us home.