A Human Calling
Twenty-Seventh Sunday of the Year. Fr Richard Finn places Christ’s teaching on marriage within its biblical context.
Where can we find our happiness? Today’s first two readings offer us different, though perhaps complementary, answers. The foundation myths in Genesis look to our status as God’s creatures, made to flourish in the natural order of things, but also distinct from other creatures. The Letter to the Hebrews looks to Christ, to a supernatural glory to which we are called through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Before we turn to the difficult, perhaps harsh-sounding words of the Gospel, and to make sense of that Gospel’s teaching on marriage, we must first attend to these two visions of where our happiness is to be found.
As you know, Genesis has two stories about the making of humankind, as though one account alone can’t fully capture the oddity and mystery of what it is to be human. The first tells how, unlike the other creatures, Adam and Eve are made last, and together made in God’s image and likeness. They uniquely embody something that goes beyond their nature: they image for us something of God’s glorious love.
The second story, which we hear in today’s Gospel, turns the first on its head. God makes Adam first, before the other creatures, and makes Eve last of all, after the other creatures, and from Adam’s rib. Adam is clearly not made to be alone. To be human is to be innately social, made for friendship. But what do we think of God’s initial attempts at a helper? How about the giraffe – so useful for the taller branches and the longer view? Perhaps one of the cats – but no, cats expect staff to look after them! There may be a comedy which seeks to remind us, especially the men among us, that woman is not to be confused with or treated like the dumb beasts. Bernardino of Siena preached that ‘God did not make a woman out of a bone of Adam’s foot, so that he should tread her underground… but he made her out of his rib, which is close to his heart, to teach him to love her truly, as his companion.’
When Eve is formed from Adam’s bone, both must find their happiness as creatures of flesh and blood, whose genders, drives and instincts, emotions, fecundity, and sexual desire, are proper to their distinctive humanity. The real person isn’t mere spirit, or some pattern of electrons in the mind. Marriage, or the family formed through marriage, is then sanctioned as an essential institution in which our animality may be integrated into a distinctively human social order through the exercise of virtue.
Hebrews takes a very different tack. Its focus is on Jesus as the source of our happiness, the goal of our search for the fullness of life. In Him is our eternal bliss that transcends our mortal nature. Why this change of tack? Surely because the sin originally absent from Eden has entered the story. Christ is the high-priest, whose violent death in a fallen world is a perfect sacrifice of loving obedience to the Father. What all the previous sacrifices of Israel had gestured towards, now find their fulfilment in the execution which ends Jesus’ mission. Only through His Passion, and the grace which flows from the Risen Christ, may we now find forgiveness of sin and be made holy by a share in Christ’s glory. So, the family is transcended in the greater ‘family’ of ‘brothers’, men and women who in Christ are the adopted heirs of His Heavenly Father, some whom are now called to embrace Christ’s own ascetic celibacy in fraternal charity as a sign of the Kingdom.
Of course, the two readings don’t offer opposing visions. But for the physical nature of our humanity, it would be impossible for Christ’s voluntary asceticism and sufferings to have the meaning, to bear the love, which they do. Furthermore, grace perfects nature: the holiness extended to us in Christ is one in which our moral and intellectual virtues are strengthened in the presence of faith, hope, and charity; these ‘theological virtues’ direct the others towards God as the goal of all our longing.
It is against this complex backdrop of marriage as a distinctively human institution meant to integrate human heterosexuality within the social order, but where sin has played havoc with us all, that we must listen to our Lord’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. We are invited to recognise first how fallen men and women have been repeatedly unable or unwilling to live in permanent union and friendship with each other, where one or other party to the marriage has acted unjustly, uncharitably, and perhaps exposed other family members to serious harm. That suggests we must depend on the grace of Jesus Christ to save any marriage from such wreckage. We need the strength of the sacraments, including sacramental marriage itself. Husband and wife must exercise their baptismal priesthood in the love with which they honour and respect each other. This requires a cruciform love, which empties itself in generous self-giving, sacrifices itself for others.
None of this should blind us to the complex realities of marriage and the breakdown of marriage, where separation and civil divorce, for example, may be necessary to protect the vulnerable. None of this should be weaponised to pin the blame firmly at a safe distance from our own moral frailty. But, may God by His manifold graces strengthen all married couples. May He help each and every one of us to live in Christ’s fraternal charity which is fundamental vocation of us all.
Readings: Genesis 2:18-24 | Hebrews 2:9-11 | Mark 10:2-16
Image: detail from The Arnolfini Marriage by Jan van Eyck (1434, public domain)
