Friday of the 10th Week in Ordinary Time

"A Tiny Whispering Sound"

We have been following stories of the great prophet Elijah all week from the first book of Kings. Today’s passage is a very famous one. Elijah is instructed to go outside his cave and wait for the Lord to pass. But God is not in three traditional manifestations of God and God’s power; wind, earthquake and fire. Instead, God is in that “tiny whispering sound.” How many times have we sought God in either great feelings or signs or wonders or some such kind of unmistakable manifestation? Instead, we might take a hint from Psalm 131:

O LORD, my heart is not haughty,
nor are my eyes raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
Rather, I have stilled and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child on its mother’s lap.

Only when we are still and quiet can we hear God in that tiny whispering sound. God speaks to us in the small and ordinary of our lives far more than in the tumultuous and large, because that is where we spend the vast part of our lives. If we are not still and quiet, even within the whirlwind, we will miss the Lord speaking at all times to us so softly and gently.

We have also been all week in Matthew’s great Sermon on the Mount. Matthew’s sermon, as well as Luke’s parallel sermon (on the “plain” in Luke), are probably a collection of various sayings of Jesus that were being shared in various “oral” traditions in the Apostolic Church and that the evangelists simply gathered together and presented as a “sermon” of the Lord’s. But whatever their source, we are most grateful for them. They are best taken more metaphorically than literally (as is so much of Scripture). They point to something higher or greater than their mere literal meaning.
This is obviously the case with the Lord saying, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away!” It would be a terrible mistake to take this literally! What the Lord seems to be telling us is that sin is such a devastating thing that it would almost be worth losing one of our bodily parts rather than to fall into it, but not that we should actually do such a thing. It’s like something that awful (plucking out an eye) not the same as it. That’s what metaphorical means.

As for the Lord’s teaching on marriage here, it is more difficult to understand that solely metaphorically. Of course, I believe, when Jesus talks about lust as already committing adultery in one’s heart, that seems to imply a metaphorical understanding similar to plucking out one’s eye that follows. Yet there are some other aspects to consider here. First of all, the Lord seems to be referring to men here, not women (even though he speaks of divorced women at the end). And there is a reason for that. Men, in ancient Israel, could easily divorce their wives, leaving them destitute if they had no family to fall back on. Women, however, could not easily divorce their husbands at all. Thus, there was a true unjust inequality going on in marriage of Jesus’ time. Could it be that these marriage teachings of Jesus were more addressing those injustices against the women of his day than in so much simply forbidding adultery absolutely? It’s worth pondering.

At any rate, it’s very difficult to escape the conclusion that Jesus holds marriage as a very sacred trust that must not be entered into lightly or without the deep love given by God’s grace alone, certainly not without a deep faith and trust in God. Indeed, to expect two people to spend their whole lives together without this shared deep faith and trust in God and a love for each other based in it, is perhaps finally one of the greatest heights of folly.