Friday of the 19th Week in Ordinary Time

“With God All Things Are Possible”

I seem to get this Gospel reading each time it comes up! Matthew and Mark have very similar passages regarding Jesus’ teaching on divorce. Those passages, today’s passage from Mt 19 and its parallel in Mk 10, along with an additional brief but consequential teaching in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount in Mt 5:31-32 (where Jesus says that a man divorcing his wife causes her to commit adultery and that anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery), are the entire basis for the Church’s prohibition of divorce and remarriage. In the two parallel passages from Matthew (today’s reading) and Mark, Jesus says that any man who divorces his wife and marries again commits adultery, but in Matthew he says this to the Pharisees whereas in Mark, he says it privately to the disciples with an added teaching that any woman who divorces her husband and marries another also commits adultery. Matthew also contains the so-called Matthean Exception where Jesus says that divorce and remarriage is adulterous except in matters of an unlawful marriage, as the translation we use for liturgy has it today, or unchastity, sexual immorality, infidelity or fornication, as some other translations interpret this. There is a great and ancient debate over what Matthew means by this and we certainly can’t get into that here.

It is very difficult to ignore these passages with any legitimacy (“It was due to the hardness of your hearts…”, Jesus says, making it impossible to simply ignore). There is, however, a different way of looking at it, not to imply that it lessens the teaching in any way. But in the Lord’s day it was very easy for any Jewish man to divorce his wife, whereas it was not easy at all for a woman to divorce her husband. Also, a woman divorced was separated from all her former husband’s responsibility towards her. Without her own family or another man to fall back on, she could easily be left destitute, since women in the very patriarchal culture that was ancient Israel, had little legal means or rights. It stands to reason that Jesus’ teaching against divorce and remarriage was very much in response to this glaring injustice and inequality between husbands and wives. However, to state the obvious again, we can’t possibly get into all that here!

The nineteenth chapter of Matthew contains this passage on divorce, as well as Jesus’ encounter with children and his encounter with the Rich Young Man, as he has come to be known (his meeting with Jesus is found in all three Synoptic accounts). We will not, because of Sunday and the feast day Monday, hear the story of the Rich Young Man in Matthew this coming week, and Jesus’ encounter with the children will be read in tomorrow’s liturgy. Therefore, I feel free to comment here a bit on those passages also, since no one else will be writing about them here. To all Jesus’ teachings resulting from these three incidents, the disciples respond incredulously (although we merely assume that in regards to the passage with children). Regarding Jesus’ marriage teaching they exclaim, “If that is so, then it is better not to marry!” and in Jesus’ teaching against wealth after meeting the Rich Young Man, they exclaim, “Then who can be saved!” As for Jesus chastising them for keeping the children from him, they might as well have said to him, “Children (and women, analogously) don’t count!”

To the disciples’ incredulity about his teaching on divorce, Jesus simply replies, in the final analysis, that some (those who can accept the teaching) will choose celibacy for the “sake of the Kingdom.” To their astonishment at his teaching regarding wealth he says, “All things are possible with God.” and in the case of children, “It is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” (That fuller passage comes from Mark’s account in 10:14-15) In all of them, Jesus very much leaves his disciples (and all of us, by extension) feeling very challenged. Living in and for the Kingdom is a different thing entirely than living in what we would call the conventional wisdom! To use today’s passage on marriage to illustrate the difference, many people get married with little or no spiritual understanding of what they do. As a couple, they do not rely completely on God or pray together or see their love as coming from above and thus something that requires constant spiritual assistance and attention. They seek to remain married by their own power and understanding, with only the love they had when they married to sustain them. Without God and the Spirit very much at the heart of their marriage, I frankly wonder how any couple could stay together, “for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part.” As Psalm 127 says, Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. And that is true for virtually everything else we do as well.