This morning our Lord speaks to us
about marriage and family. And Jesus has taught us also about divorce. Now, I
know that there are some with us today who are divorced or who have been
divorced in the past. And instead of putting my foot in my mouth, let me just
say this: if you are divorced and if you feel condemned by Jesus today or if
you have questions about your situation and what the Church teaches, why don’t
you come and see Monsignor or me? Let’s do that. Because I know that this is
not an easy teaching for you to swallow. And Monsignor and I are here to help.
So, let’s do that: give us a call and let’s meet. I think you’ll be refreshed
by what you will hear when we sit down together.
Jesus calls us this morning to
contemplate the beginning—the beginning of all things, and in particular, the creation
of man and woman. Why does He do this? Because those who are challenging Him
today are arguing from the past—but from a past that is not far enough back.
They say that Moses allowed for
divorce. Jesus says, ok, but we need to go further
back in time: to the beginning. And in the beginning, before Adam and Eve
sinned, things were a little different. Actually, things were fundamentally
different before the first sin: before the first sin, our hearts weren’t hard.
Jesus, then, by calling us back to the very very beginning calls us back to the
time when man’s heart was not hard, when man knew clearly and well the plan of
God. And this is why he calls His audience to the beginning too: their hearts
had also grown hard.
So Jesus says, “From the beginning
of creation… God made them male and female.” My question is: “why?” Why did God
bring into being two forms of our species? And why did he make their union the
very means by which He could issue forth His new creation? And why, having made
them both in His own image, did he make them complimentary? This is what Jesus wants
us to ponder this morning: to ponder our very creation, to ask the deeper
questions about His plan, and about what that means for us who are created in
His image and likeness, and also as male and female.
To speak
about God’s image and likeness, we must know who God is. And you all know that
He is Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—a communion of persons whose very
life is love. Simply, God is Family. He is the first family; the Source of all
families, the bond of communion. This means that we, who are made in His image,
are made for communion—and that our families are an image of family. If we are
to be a family, it is because God is Family first. And so, if we want to be a
family, shouldn’t we have God at the center of our family?
But what
else is God? We know that He is love. But this love is not fluffy love or love
like a candy bar. It is not selfish love or love that wavers. God’s love “bears
all things… endures all things…” God’s love is powerful. *The Cross* When we
see the love that newlyweds have, we see passionate, self-giving love. But that
is the image. God is the source. This means that God is in His very Being
ecstatic, passionate, life-giving, powerful, selfless love. This is why He
creates in the first place: to share this love. Love necessarily pours itself
out as gift.
This all
said, why did God create man and woman to be united in marriage and to have
their union be the means by which love and life—His very image—would increase? Perhaps
His plan all along is to have marriage point beyond itself. Have you ever
thought about this? That God made marriage for a purpose? On one level, marriage is to bond the couple together, to
bring forth life… But on a whole-nother
level, marriage is to draw the man and woman into the very ecstasy of heaven.
Human marriage is meant to be a foretaste and a means by which God draws the
man and woman into communion with Himself—to know Him and to love Him.
This means
too that the very person, made in God’s image, reveals to us the mystery of
God. The body itself points us to heaven and to God, for the body reveals that
we are made for communion, that we participate in the bearing of life, and that
we can offer ourselves as gift—as images of God, who said: “This is my body,
given for you.”
Marriage
and Family and Male and Female—they are made to point us beyond ourselves.
And that’s
all well and good, but we all know that marriage can be messy. It is not easy.
We find that we’re often battling—battling with our spouse, battling with our
own interior desires. (This is why, after St.
Paul describes marriage in Ephesians 5, he then speaks
about the Spiritual Armor and the Spiritual Battle in Ephesians 6). We often
lose sight of where marriage is supposed to point us. We turn marriage in on
itself and we think marriage is an end in itself instead of a means to
something greater. We can do the same thing to the person and to the body. And
when that happens, we’re no longer loving. We’re using.
The
opposite of love is not anger, says Pope John Paul II (because anger bespeaks a
love betrayed or disappointed or hurt. One can still love and be angry). The
opposite of love is use. When we use somebody, we don’t love them. We are
turning them into an object for our self-gratification. That is not love; that’s
selfishness.
Lust is a
form of use. Lust peers at the body, longs for its consumption, and when used, lust
discards the rest. The problem with lust, then, is not that it sees too much.
The problem with lust is that it sees too little: it doesn’t see the God which
the person images. Lust distorts the image and obscures the heavenly vision.
Lust says, “This body: this is your heaven.” Lust turns the body into an idol,
when the body is really an icon. Lust destroys the icon. It is iconoclasm.
Let me back
up for a moment. There is a difference between the temptation of lust and the
sin of lust. Here’s the difference: when a thought enters into your mind, you
have an opportunity to show it the door or to let it sit down for a while. We
sin when we don’t show the temptation the door.
Now, Jesus
comes to us today and bring us back to the beginning because, in the beginning
it was not so. There was no lust. Adam and Eve could look upon one another and
see God in each other clearly. This is why they were “naked and without shame.”
They did not experience shame because they had pure sight; and so they had no
need to protect themselves from the eyes of use.
Jesus comes
to us today to offer us pure hearts again; for, “Blessed are the pure of heart.
They shall see God.” He wants to enter into our marriages and families; He
wants to enter into our hearts so that we will stop using others; He wants us
to see His plan so that we can practice being a gift to others, instead of
consuming others. This self-mastery is called chastity.
But this is
doubly tough in a world were the distortion is normal. All men and women
experience the temptations that I have described above. It can also be said
that some experience these temptations such that they are attracted to a member
of the same sex. I say this to all our brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, to
all who struggle with lust or use or same-sex attraction: in the beginning, it
was not so. We are all called to contemplate the beginning and to pray to be
open to God’s plan for marriage and for man and woman. This is why Jesus speaks
to the disciples today: in their hardness of heart, they had made normal
something that was not in His plan. And, in doing so, they had made themselves
slaves to their desires.
My friends,
we are not called to be slaves to our self-seeking desires. Our hearts are
meant for more. They point to something greater: to God and to heaven. But if
we normalize lust or abuse or same-sex attraction, we lose that vision and we
become slaves again.
This is why
I am most concerned about past legislation in recent times that has sought to
redefine marriage and family according not to God’s plan, but to certain
politicians’ whims. It concerns me even more that this legislation that
fundamentally disregards God’s plan should be passed off to us and couched in
terms of equality and “rights” of law. What great damage this does to our
families and to our hearts and to our children! The right of law has no right
to redefine the laws of God!
In a
democracy, the duty to protect the laws of God fall to us. There is no king on
our structure of government. We rule in his stead; our vote takes his voice.
And so, if we should let marriage and family be destroyed—and it has suffered a
lot in recent decades (and I dare say it is close to crumbling)—then its
destruction should not be the fault of someone in Washington . It would be our own.
This is why
“responsible citizenship is a virtue and participation in political life is a
moral obligation. This obligation is rooted in our baptismal commitment to
follow Jesus Christ and to bear Christian witness in all we do. … Our focus is
not on party affiliation, ideology, economics… as important as such issues are.
Rather, we focus on what protects or threatens human life and dignity.”
God is
Family. We are made in his image. It is no hyperbole to say that God is under
attack as family is attacked too. And I’m not surprised: because it was like
that too in the beginning….
Almost paradise /
We're knocking on heaven's door /
Almost paradise /
How could we ask for more? /
I swear that I can see forever in your eyes /
Paradise
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