There’s no getting around the pretty obvious theme in today’s lectionary. Man and woman. Marriage.
In Genesis 2, we see that beautiful, poetic description of Eve coming from the rib of Adam. When speaking of the Incarnation, St. Anselm says that there had been, in human history, three kinds of conception: a human with no human parent—that is, Adam; a human from a man alone—that is, Eve; and, of course, many humans with both a father and a mother. It was therefore supremely fitting that the savior complete the pattern by being born from only a human mother with no human father.
Others like to contrast this in terms of the first and second Adam and the first and second Eve. The first Eve came out of Adam. The second Adam came out of the new Eve.
These aren’t the primary emphases of the readings, but they are key resonances. History has meaning; history has a relationship with the present. Redemption, salvation, the life of grace—these are never an escape from history, a release from creation, but its healing. That is important. So much of modern life is focused on the idea of the new, on getting rid of the past and moving on, starting with a blank slate. For Christianity, that is a delusion. History is what it is. We are where and who we are, and finding salvation, finding the end point and purpose of this life, has to start from this reality. As T.S. Eliot puts it in his Four Quartets, “only through time time is conquered.”
This concept of the redemption of time and history is surely relevant to what Jesus says in Mark about marriage and divorce.
The modern view of marriage and divorce is, as we know, very flexible. In civil law, marriage is merely a contract between individuals that can be formed or dissolved at will. The idea is that, effectively, you can hit pause, or stop, and restart life whenever it is convenient. Of course, no one really believes this to be the case, practically. But on paper, that is how our culture views things. And so the Christian tradition—quite clear here in today’s Gospel—that marriage is a fundamental, indissoluble reality between a man and a woman—is just very strange to many people.
This is not the time or place to say exactly why that is or what we might do about it. But we can spend a moment reflecting on our Lord’s words about marriage. It’s an interesting conversation. People ask about the allowance for divorce in Jewish law, and Jesus gives this subtle response: “For your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment.” “He” is Moses. Then he says, “But from the beginning of creation . . .,” and then he quotes Genesis. Matthew’s version of this is a little clearer and more memorable. There, Jesus says, “From the beginning it was not so.” That one phrase is the starting point for a whole group of Pope St. John Paul II’s talks on the “Theology of the Body.”
Again, we can’t do a thorough exegesis in a homily, but we can say this: the Lord’s words here are potentially explosive to his immediate audience. How so? He suggests that Moses should not be 100 percent and exclusively identified with the law of God. It’s difficult to overemphasize the importance of this one line in the Christian tradition. Here we get the implication that there are distinctions to be made in the Old Law. Some things are built into creation. Some things were directly instituted by God. Some things were instituted by Moses as a concession to hardness of heart.
So what’s happening here is not all that different from what happens in the Sermon on the Mount. Although it has always been popular for people to imagine that Jesus somehow tosses aside the Old Covenant law for the sake of some vague comments about love, in fact he radicalizes the law, deepens it, and clarifies it. Classic instance: It’s not good enough not to commit adultery; you should not consent to adultery even in your heart. The law becomes not less stringent, but more.
So when it comes to marriage, the primordial scriptural language is “the two become one flesh.” There is an undeniable permanence to this. You either become one flesh or don’t. And although it may be challenging to the world, this is the Catholic teaching on marriage. If you have a real, valid marriage, it is permanent, “until death do us part.” So either the marriage is fully real or it isn’t. If it’s not, it doesn’t mean that the relationship is nothing, or that the children are somehow wrong. It’s just that there isn’t a marriage.
Sometimes this teaching on marriage can come across as harsh—it’s a way of speaking that contrasts quite directly with mainstream culture and modern law. And it is possible, as Catholics, to lean into this in a way that is not edifying. Running around randomly telling people that their marriages aren’t real is rarely a good approach. But the supreme law of the Church is the salvation of souls, and salvation always involves confronting the truth. This is what we do every time we go to confession. It can hurt, but the pain isn’t forever. Healing is always possible.
Why, I wonder, does this teaching on divorce move straight into this famous passage about Jesus and the children? Some of that is just Mark, who always tells his story with a breathless pace. But the two incidents do go together.
Many in the crowd are annoyed at the children. Any parent knows this feeling, as do plenty of non-parents. We are adults, after all. We have important business to take care of. We cannot be bothered with childish demands and childish questions and silly things like needing to be picked up or needing to notice with awe the way a certain leaf has fallen on the ground.
This self-important adultness is, if we think back about two seconds, firmly rooted in the hardness of heart that results in bad marriage, divorce, and any number of other social ills. And in response to this type of adulthood, Jesus says quite directly: you must become as a little child.
Caryll Houselander says, “Our Lord’s words are a challenge. To become a child is a challenge to our courage: it demands first of all that we dare to grow up, to give ourselves to life, to accept life as it is, and above all to accept ourselves as we are” (see The Passion of the Infant Christ, 51).
We would do well to sit with that statement for a while.
Becoming like a child doesn’t mean becoming childish. Abandoning the adultness of misguided discipleship doesn’t mean not growing up. It means rather to be who we are, to have the humility of recognizing that we are in a world not of our making, full of wonders and truths that will always be beyond us.
Real marriage requires just this childlike approach. We speak a lot about being “ready” for marriage, and rightly so, but no one is “ready” for marriage any more than a person can be “ready” to grow up. It requires humility and openness to life, to the unexpected.
Likewise, no one is “ready” for God. The only one who was—the Lady whose “yes” unlocked the door of our redemption—exemplified this readiness not with a grown-up confidence and a fully worked out plan, but with the humble recognition that it is possible to receive a gift without fully knowing what it is or what it will be.
Let us be like children, approaching the altar of God. We are not here to claim something as a right, but to allow God to grow in us until we reach the full stature of Christ in the kingdom of heaven.