Homily for 27th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
27th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Mark 10: 2-12
Gen 2: 18-24
Oct. 2, 2021
St. Joseph Church, New Rochelle, N.Y.                                                       

“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” (Mark 10: 6-8).

Jesus teaching his disciples in a house.

In last Sunday’s gospel (Mark 9:38-48), Jesus taught us that God demands our total commitment to him, even to the point of some self-sacrifice.  Today he continues teaching crowds of people who come to listen (Mark 10:1).  Some in those crowds are Pharisees, men extremely dedicated to faithfully following God’s Law.  They debated among themselves how to interpret parts of the Law, and that perhaps is why they bring Jesus a question about divorce.  For there were different schools of thought among them about lawful grounds for divorce.  There were also some Jews in Jesus’ time who objected to any kind of divorce.  In fact, over 400 years earlier the prophet Malachi had already pronounced in God’s name:  “The Lord was witness to the covenant between you and the wife of your youth …, she is your companion and your wife by covenant.  Take heed to yourselves, and let none be faithless to the wife of his youth.  For I hate divorce, says the Lord the God of Israel” (Mal 2:14,16).

Divorce means the deliberate legal ending of a valid marriage.  Jesus begins his reply to the Pharisees by asking them what Moses taught in the Law, and they answer that he allowed divorce if the husband gave a written note of dismissal to his wife.  Note that all the power in the matter is in the husband’s hands.

But Jesus takes the discussion to a deeper level.  He holds that Moses was only tolerating human weakness or, as he says, “hardness of heart” (10:5).  We can also call it human sinfulness.  That’s not what God intended, Jesus says, when he created men and women in the beginning.  We heard one of the biblical stories of human creation in our 1st reading, a story that emphasizes the equality of men and women, God’s will that they support and help each other, and their divinely ordained union:  “the two of them become one flesh” (Gen 2:24).

“One flesh” doesn’t mean only their physical, sexual union, altho that’s included.  It means a union of their persons:  their hearts, minds, emotions.  It means a complete commitment to each other.

Therefore, Jesus maintains, God means for husband and wife to be completely committed to each other.  That commitment can’t be broken by human choice or by a legal ruling:  “What God has joined together, let no one separate” (Mark 10:9).  This is God’s intent in marriage.  Jesus answers the Pharisees’ devotion to the Law by giving an answer that is itself rooted in what Moses himself wrote in the Law, in Genesis.

It’s worth a further comment.  Both Genesis and Jesus teach that marriage is an act between men and women; they’re made for each other.  “God made them male and female.  For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife.”  No other contractual arrangement is a biblical marriage, or in Catholic terms, a sacramental marriage.  Marriage can’t be temporary or non-committal.  It can’t be between persons of the same sex.

The disciples of Jesus—his closest followers, not the crowds and not the Pharisees—ask for some follow-up privately “in the house”; Mark doesn’t tell us whose house this is; the point is what Jesus stresses to his closest followers.  Not only does divorce go against what God wills, but Jesus comes back to the matter of equality of the sexes.  Unlike the Law of Moses, Roman law allowed a woman to divorce her husband.  Jesus teaches that divorce is unlawful, violates God’s law, for both sexes.  A remarriage isn’t truly marriage but adultery.  The 1st marriage of a couple remains valid and binding, and it can’t be broken by a human decree.  God joined the husband and wife; God is a 3d partner in every authentic marriage.

All of Jesus’ teaching stresses that God is the ruler of our lives.  We owe our allegiance to God’s kingdom.  Jesus’ 1st words in Mark’s Gospel are, “The kingdom of God is at hand.  Repent, i.e., turn away from your sins, and believe in the Gospel” (Mark 1:15).  It’s a serious demand upon us:  to put away our sins, our hardness of heart, and to submit ourselves in everything to God’s plan for us—his plan for creation, for society, for our own souls.