Twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B; St Ann's and Chapel of Mary.
“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 take this job, to begin this course of study, to
play on this team, … 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?
“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 may think of divorce
as a modern phenomenon, but it was reasonably common at that time, amongst Jews
as well as Gentiles. We’ve found some of
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. The Pharisees think they’re serving
up a curveball for Jesus, but he changes the game. 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, and so time is
slightly less foundational to the really real than love is. Love is more fundamental than time. And God
doesn’t try to keep that secret. Good news is actually much harder to keep
secret, I think, than malicious gossip. 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 doesn’t try to 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. The creation story we heard from Genesis
portrays Eve as the only living being to be created not from earth but from
Adam. I’ve heard it said that every good marriage is not just a union, but a reunion,
a witness to the basic original unity of all humanity. 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 when children result from
that marriage, that can attest to the fruitfulness and over-flowing nature of
love. The love that God is in all its
facets can be made visible to the world in marriage: God’s fiery passionate love 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 in
the garden anymore. We do need to be
brought back, and he wants us 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.
When I say He brings us back… He doesn’t just bring us back in our
mind’s eye, bring back the forgotten memories; he acts to actually bring us
back, to restore us to that harmonious loving intimacy with all of creation,
with each other, with our Creator. By
conquering sin and death through his sacrifice on the cross, Jesus renews
creation, inviting us on a journey back to that original vision of love. And in that restored creation, marriage can
never be broken off because God’s love can never be broken off.
For so many people, though, marriage doesn’t feel
like much of a garden right now; it feels more like 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. God has compassion for those who suffer
through or from this ideal of marriage, and so should we. 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment