God’s Solution to Loneliness, 27th Sunday (B), October 6, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
October 6, 2024
Gen 2:18-24, Ps 128, Heb 2:9-11, Mk 10:2-16

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• We are experiencing today a crisis of loneliness. Last year, the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy, wrote a stunning report entitled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, in which he said that social isolation and loneliness are among the biggest health concerns facing the country. He stated that many are going through life alone, thinking they have to shoulder all life’s burdens by themselves, and that if they die, most or no one will ever notice. Before Covid, he said, 50 percent of Americans reported regular loneliness and Covic made it worse. He wrote, “Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling — it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity. And the harmful consequences of a society that lacks social connection can be felt in our schools, workplaces, and civic organizations, where performance, productivity, and engagement are diminished.” As a society, he urged, we must make the same investments in addressing social connection as we do in tackling the problems of tobacco use, obesity and addiction. If we don’t, he said, “we will pay an ever-increasing price in the form of our individual and collective health and well-being. And we will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country.” That’s because, he said, “social connection is a fundamental human need, as essential to survival as food, water and shelter.”
• Social connection is a fundamental human need because we have been made in the image and likeness of God. That’s why what God reveals to us in today’s readings is so important and why, when our society fails to take these truths seriously, and structure our lives on them, we can’t help but hurt ourselves, in the various ways that Dr. Murthy notes and in many others.
• In today’s first reading from the Book of Genesis, we read that after God had created the heavens and the earth and all in it, after he had pronounced that “it was good… it was good … it was good … it was good … it was good … it was good” and with the creation of the human person, “it was very good,” he finally thundered, “It is not good for man to be alone!” It is not good for the human person to be isolated. It is contrary to our nature, having been made in the image and likeness of God who is a loving communion of persons. God said this truth about the evil of loneliness, however, only after man had come to the same conclusion. Adam was created on perfect terms with God, he had named all of creation, but something was missing, and he knew it. God was too far above him; the animals were too far below him. In order to experience the joy of living, in order to become and behave fully human, he needed a fitting partner. To remove his existential loneliness, God could have easily cloned him an identical twin. He could have just created another guy for him to hang out with. But the suitable partner God knew Adam needed was a wife. After Eve was created, we see Adam rejoice for the first time. He clung to her and, as we read, they became one flesh. They began to live in a communion of persons, in love, which helps to overcome original solitude and prepares them for an even greater means to lift them out of existential loneliness. Through their marriage, Adam and Eve also grew ever more into the image of God, who is love. Marriage is the primordial sacrament of love, when a man and woman make a committed, lifelong, nuptial gift of themselves to each other. And it’s through the human love of marriage that Adam and Eve learned how to exist in loving communion with God, to receive his gift of love and give of themselves back to him in love. And it was this love that made them rejoice. It was this love that alone could satisfy their human hearts. Because it was not good for man to be alone, God, in the very beginning, gave man and woman the gift of marriage to help them, as suitable partners united in one flesh to each other, learn how to live in loving communion, with each other and with him, and become ever more human and more and more the image of God himself. God who is love created us not for loneliness but in love for love and that’s why marriage is so important. And if marriage is so important, among other things to overcome our existential loneliness and form us more and more into the image of the divine communion of persons, then it’s obvious why the evil one would want to attack marriage. By so doing, he will not only try to obscure the image of God and destroy love between a man and a woman, but he will also lead individuals to become more and more isolated, and therefore vulnerable to his machinations.
• That is the proper context to understand today’s Gospel, when the Pharisees came to Jesus to ask him about divorce. “Is it lawful for man to divorce his wife?” This remains a very contemporary question. But as we have just seen, the question is more than one of law or even of moral right and wrong: it is ultimately a question of human anthropology. If God has created us for loving communion — epitomized by the marriage of man and woman, but likewise seen in the nuptial gifts to God and his people, the Church, constituted by the vocations of the priesthood and of religious life — the question of divorce becomes one about human nature, human happiness and human flourishing. It’s a question with enormous relevance not just to human health, as we can see in the Surgeon General’s report, but also to the good of society and the Church. We are now living in an age in which many experts say that the greatest vocations crisis facing the Church is not to the priesthood or to religious life but to the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Many young people no longer sense a divine calling, or even naturally aspire, to marriage and to family, and both the Church and most developed societies are struggling as a result. Far fewer are getting married. Those who do are having much smaller families. Recent surveys among the young have shown that between 70-80 percent say their job will be essential to their future happiness, but only 20-30 percent think marriage and family will be. St. John Paul II once said that the future of humanity passes by way of the family and, hence, the marriage and family crisis is a great threat to civilization. That’s why we need to listen to Jesus’ words about marriage todaywith fresh ears.
• When the Pharisees approached Jesus to ask him about marriage, it wasn’t a sincere question to learn or even one of curiosity. St. Mark tells us, “They were testing him.” They were in the area across the Jordan from the Holy Land where John the Baptist had been preaching and baptizing. To ask Jesus about the lawfulness of marriage and of divorce there was to ask him a political question for which John the Baptist had already been executed by Herod Antipas. John had told Herod that it was not lawful for him to be married to the wife of his brother Philip, not just because this incest by affinity was contrary to God’s plan, not just because Herodias was his niece, but for the basic reason that marrying another person’s wife certainly was certainly contrary to God’s law. Herod had already begun to think that Jesus was John the Baptist risen from the dead. To ask Jesus about marriage and divorce, therefore, was to invite him to criticize the same king and potentially, the Pharisees hoped, suffer the same consequence the Baptist had.
• Jesus responded not only by citing the Book of Genesis, but invoking, in a sense, his own memory of how things were at the dawn of creation. Since, as Genesis teaches, God in the beginning had created man, male and female, in his image and likeness and joined them in one flesh, Jesus taught, “Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate.” Divorce is objectively something that not only ruptures the bond between an individual man and woman but, since God designed marriage to help us to discover who we are in his image and likeness and to reflect by analogy God’s own relationship with his people, divorce leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of what marriage is, but also of who we are, who God is, and how we’re called to live as God’s image and likeness.
• But the question of divorce is just one type of challenge made to the truth and importance of marriage today. Jesus said that because of the hardness of heart among many of God’s people, Moses had “permitted” — never approved of — divorce. But today we have various forms of hardness of heart, and head, to the divine plan for marriage, and each one of these can attack our living in God’s image and likeness, undercut our desire for lasting happiness, and lead to an increase in social isolation and loneliness.
• One challenge come from those who try to say that marriage is irrelevant and unnecessary, who argue that marriage is just a piece of paper and that one can all the goods of marriage, including happiness, without the binding commitment. Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees today says otherwise. Man, he says, is called to leave his father and mother and cling not to a girlfriend, not to just anyone he pleases, but to his wife, to someone with whom he has been joined in a one-flesh union by God and to whom he has made a life-long, exclusive commitment. Those who claim that marriage is simply a piece of paper often want some of the goods of marriage — like sex and accompaniment — without wanting selflessly to make the commitment that true love, true happiness, and true communion, demands. For that reason, as long as the situation persists, they will probably never fully experience love, which is based on a total exchange of self-gifts; they will probably never truly discover who they really are and the greatness of their dignity, which comes only through the selfless gift of self to God and others; and they will probably never truly understand or experience the love of God, which becomes intelligible by God’s design mainly through the experience of true human love
• The second challenge comes from those who say that God’s plan for marriage, as revealed in the Bible, is too demanding, that, as the divorce rate of over 40 percent attests, to be married to one person until death is an unrealistic expectation. In order to overcome loneliness, one should therefore be eligible to a series of softer committed relationships, whether serial cohabitations, civil marriages, or the like. But these can never deliver. Jesus reminds us today that once God joins a man and a woman in marriage, they are bound to each other until God separates them through death. For that reason, he says, it’s divorce — not marriage — that is nothing more than a piece of paper, a human legal declaration that cannot change one’s marital status before God. Therefore, Jesus underlines, remarriage is adultery and seriously sinful. Notice that Jesus does not say that divorce per se is sinful, but only “whoever divorces his wife and marries another,” what we would call divorce-and-remarriage. The Church Jesus founded to carry on his mission has always recognized that sometimes, for the protection of one spouse from the other or for the welfare of children, some legal sanction may be necessary against one of the parties. It is not divorce itself that the Jesus opposes, but thinking and acting as if divorce severs the one-flesh bond that God has brought about through marriage. The Church wants always to remain close to those who have experienced the pain of divorce and help them recover. It wants to help them remain faithful to God and to the promises they have made. If they think that something was defective in their consent on the day of their marriage, the Church also seeks to help them to determine whether their marriage was valid or null. But while it might seem that a second, or a third, or a fifth marriage may be the response to the loneliness one feels, it will only do so on a superficial level. Adultery, or sin, may be the answer for Hollywood, but it is never what the human being ultimately needs, because sin voluntarily cuts us off from communion with others and from the deepest communion of all, with God.
• The third challenge comes from those who say that marriage is bigoted because it excludes two people from the same sex from marrying; to make marriage require a husband and a wife is to base it, they assert, on biology rather than love. Some who make this argument claim that Jesus himself never spoke out in opposition to same-sex marriage. They’re right in terms of Jesus’ explicit words, but that’s only because to have done so would have been absurd in the Jewish context of his time. In his response to the Pharisees, however, Jesus gives all of the principles that are necessary for us to know why Jesus would absolutely have opposed this radical revolution in the meaning of marriage. I go through this not to be polemical or to hurt or offend anyone, but to get at the truth about marriage to which Jesus witnesses. Jesus said that in the beginning God made the human person male and female, not male and male or female and female. For this reason, he continued, a man leaves not his two moms or two dads, but his mother and father, and clings, not to whomever he wants, not to his best man, but to his wife, and they become one flesh. This one flesh union is not simply the ephemeral contact a man and a woman have in the act of making love, but the incorporation of both of their flesh in a new child, who is the instantiated fruit of their union and a means by which their love will grow. This type of union is obviously impossible to those of the same sex. We can go so far as to say that the whole purpose of the differentiation of the sexes by God in the beginning is to allow for procreation, which is deepening of the image of God as man and woman together participate in God’s continual act of the creation of new men and new women, a sign of their love and a means by which their love will grow. Finally, Jesus says, what God has joined, man must not divide. This refers, I think, to more than merely the union of a particular man and a particular woman in marriage, but to the union of man and woman in marriage in general. God has created man and woman with this complementarity and for that reason marriage can never in truth be a husband-less or a wife-less institution.
• These truths about marriage are not easy for everyone to live. But the consequences of not living them can be huge. And we should not be oblivious to the fact that the evil one wants us not to take Jesus’ words seriously and accept watered down substitute arrangements for marriage, or a culture of divorce and remarriage, or even a redefinition of the essential building blocks of marriage. Anything that weakens marriage, anything that fosters sinful behavior, will increase human unhappiness by separating us from God, from others, and even within ourselves, and our sense of isolation and loneliness will grow. That’s why today we need to thank God for the gift of marriage and pray for all those whom he has given the vocation to marriage, that they may believe in love, human and divine, and structure their live according to its objective qualities.
• But there’s one more application to marriage that we need to make from today’s Gospel, because it similarly is central to the subject of human happiness and our living according to the image and likeness of God. Right after Jesus’ words about marriage in the Gospel, he turns to children. It’s not by coincidence. When disciples were trying to rebuke parents who were trying to bring their children to Jesus, as if the children would both Jesus, he rebuked his disciples and said, “Let the children come to me!,” embraced them, blessed them and placed his hands upon them. He stressed that heaven belongs to those like children and said unless we accept the kingdom of God like them we will never enter into it. Jesus wants children to come to him. He wants us to learn from children essential aspects of our living as sons and daughters of God. And because children are so important in God’s plan, as the fruit of the loving communion between husband and wife, it’s no surprise that the evil one wants to go after the kids.
• On the first Sunday of October each year, the Church in the United States marks Respect Life Sunday, on which we pray in a special way for pregnant moms and for children and commit ourselves to help them. One of the most important things we need to do for moms and kids is to promote marriage, which recent statistics have shown is the best protector of unborn children. Four percent of babies conceived in marriage will be aborted compared to 40 percent — ten times more — of children conceived outside of marriage. 13 percent of women who have abortions are married, while 87 percent are unmarried. As Ryan Anderson has argued in a recent article, sex outside of marriage “is the main cause of abortion. Marriage is the best protector of unborn human life.” And so if we’re going to change our culture in a pro-life direction after the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, Anderson argues, it will happen through a culture of marriage and of chaste continence outside of marriage. Within our discussion of loneliness and from the devil’s perspective that it is good for the man to be alone, we can also take a deeper look at the purpose of abortion in the devil’s plans. As the pseudo-sacrament of the culture of death, abortion is a great promoter of loneliness in the world. Through abortion we are voluntarily choosing to end the lives of those with whom we are summoned to live in communion. Children growing in the womb exist already in an umbilical communion with their moms. This is probably the greatest human bond that exists after the communion of husband and wife. And just as divorce attacks the good of the one-flesh communion of husband and wife made in God’s image and likeness, so abortion attacks the good of the one-flesh communion between mother and child, modeled on God’s fatherly communion with all of us. That’s why to build a culture of life, of love, of communion and of happiness, we must restore that communion between parents and children that abortion attacks. That’s what we pray for on this Respect Life Sunday. That’s what we commit to work for. Love is the solution to loneliness and abortion is the exact opposite of love.
• To the questions man and woman have in every epoch about marriage, Christ provides the answer. By going back to the beginning, Christ cuts across particular fads and misunderstandings flowing from our hardened hearts that so often are prone to substitute lust for love, selfishness for sacrifice, and fleeting pleasure for faithful permanence. With precision and clarity, Christ sketches for us the deep and abiding beauty of the great institution and sacrament of marriage to guide us and through us to guide the world. Unlike the Pharisees who came to test Jesus, we come today ready to hear him with gratitude, to follow him, and to become his echoes in the world of the beauty of human love and the call to communion in the divine plan. We come ready to have him address our existential loneliness as we enter into loving communion with him, God-with-us, at the altar. And we ask him through this bond to take us, not just back to the beginning, but to a future in the Father’s house where we will enter into the eternal loving communion of Christ and his bride, the Church, which is anticipated in the one-flesh union of holy communion we now so eagerly renew.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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