Persevering in Letting Our Yes be Yes, Seventh Friday (II), February 25, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sister of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
February 25, 2022
James 5:9-12, Ps 103, Mk 10:1-12

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel, Jesus speaks about the meaning of marriage, but in so doing he describes not just what marriage is God’s plans but opens a window into who God is, who the human person is, and how he’s called to love. And in the first reading, St. James focuses on virtues that will help us to persevere in living out the nuptial reality of our existence. These are, by God’s providence, good lessons by which to frame my latest regularly scheduled Mass with you. Since my first Mass here, March 20, 2015, I have come 358 times to celebrate Mass with you, where together we have entered into the consummation of Christ the Bridegroom’s one-flesh, faithful, fruitful, indissoluble Covenantal union with his Bride. It’s here where we have sought to say to our compassionate and merciful Lord a yes that means yes in response to the yes he is and says to us. And we give him thanks for the way he has allowed us mutually to strengthen each other’s faithful fiat and adamant amen. As we seek to bless the Lord with all our soul, have our whole being bless his holy name and forget not his benefits, let us enter anew into today’s readings, which summarize in a sense all of salvation history.
• When the Pharisees come to Jesus to try to trip him up with a question about whether it is licit for a man to divorce his wife, Jesus said that Moses permitted divorce because of the hardness of hearts, but that divorce and remarriage were not part of God’s plans. Jesus begins at the beginning, with the creation of the human person: “From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate.” “God created man male and female,” as we read in the Book of Genesis; “in the image of God he made them.” That’s why Saint John Paul II in his beautiful catechizes on Human Love in the Divine Plan (popularly called the Theology of the Body) said that the greatest expression of the imago Dei is the family: God is a unitary Deity but a loving communion of persons and therefore, the image of God is more than just man’s rational nature, but his capacity to live in a communion of love. And the greatest human example of that loving communion of persons is marriage, where analogously to the way that the Father’s and Son’s love spirated the Holy Spirit the love of a man and a woman can beget a child, who is a fruit of their love and a source for that love to grow. That’s what marriage was in the beginning, the primordial sacrament, the external sign in the visible world pointing to the interpersonal communion who is God. All of nature, from the beginning, is communal, and the human person was created with a nuptial nature meant to bring him into communion with others and with God.
• When Jesus came, he sought to elevate marriage from this primordial sacrament to one of the seven sacraments, a sign and means of intimate communion with God. It was meant to point to, and be inserted within, the nuptial dimension of the Covenant God makes with us his people. After quoting the words Jesus cited in today’s Gospel from the Book of Genesis, that a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh, St. Paul says, “This is a great mystery and I’m speaking of Christ and the Church” (Eph 5:32). Human marriage now is meant to be a sacrament not just of God’s interpersonal loving communion but also a Sacrament pointing to the spousal covenant God makes with his redeemed people. Since Christ’s love for the Church is faithful, indissoluble and fruitful, human marriage is meant to be the same. If someone wants to get a glimpse of Christ’s love for us, we should be able to point to the way a Catholic husband loves his wife, laying down his life to make her and their children holy. If someone wants to see how the Church is supposed to respond in love to the love of God, we should be able to indicate a Christian wife’s fidelity to her husband.
• Because marriage is connected to the reality of the inner life of God and the whole structure of the redemption, we can now see very easily why the devil who wants to destroy God’s plans would attack the family. He attacked the first family of Adam and Eve, getting them to distrust God, turn on and blame each other, cover their vulnerable parts from each other lest the other take advantage of them or they should their lust in return, and ultimately, in the next generation, to kill each other. The devil always attacks the family because of its centrality in God’s plans. One of the ways he seeks to attack the family is through the hardening of hearts that can lead couples to divorce. If no man can rend asunder what God has joined, then that means that no amount of Family Court judges can divide but God has united, and that even the husband or the wife don’t have the power to nullify the interpersonal communion God has brought about. And yet so many nevertheless try to do so, and every divorce is a tragedy, a contradiction of the communion and covenant God had intended. It only takes one to bring about this rupture of communion. In Biblical times, all it took was for a man to write a decree of divorce and give it to his wife. It didn’t have to be for anything serious at all. Many women, no doubt, were victimized by this. But in our own day, especially in places where there’s no fault divorce, any party can do so. Sometimes it can happen because of the hardness of heart that flows from the adultery of the heart we call lust. Sometimes it can happen because of the hardness of heart that flows from lack of forgiveness. But divorce is not part of God’s plan. In fact there is no divorce in God’s plans. If he’s actually joined a man and a woman — if they freely gave valid consent with openness to life, with a desire to love and honor each other with fidelity, conscious of what marriage is — then divorce is just a piece of paper. That’s why Jesus says at the end of this passage, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another [in order to survive, because in Jewish culture a woman was taken care of by a man (a husband, a father, a son, an older brother)], she commits adultery.” Even if there’s been a divorce civilly for whatever reason, there’s still a marriage joined by God and people are called to remain faithful to it. In many cases it will be hard, even heroic, but it’s key for us to remember Jesus has been heroic in his fidelity to us, no matter how many times we’ve been unfaithful to him, and he promises us the grace of his presence to help us through those difficult times. But we need to believe in him and in his words even when they’re challenging.
• How do we build marriages that don’t end up in divorce? St. James in today’s first reading gives us some very important principles, basing himself — as he does throughout his entire Letter — on what Jesus taught us in the Sermon on the Mount. These are principles that apply to all our relations, but they’re important, too, with regard to marriage as to our covenantal communion with God.
• “Do not complain, brothers and sisters, about one another.” Marriages start to go south once the spouses begin to complain rather than compliment each other. It’s one of the reasons why the Church has spouses commit to “love and honor each other as husband and wife for the rest of your lives.” To honor each other each day for the rest of one’s life means, basically, to praise and revere each other, to say, “You did this. You didn’t have to. And I’m grateful.” Many times in marriage people can lose that reverence, that daily gratitude. They can start focusing on the 10 percent in each other that irritates them more than the 90 percent they love. Rather than thanking a wife for spending 90 minutes preparing dinner, the husband can complain that the asparagus is too soggy. Rather than thanking her husband for taking overtime to provide for the family, the wife can nag him repeatedly, “When are you finally going to take out the trash?” Couples need to praise more than criticize.
• The second tip St. James gives is to stop judging each other’s motives. Basing himself on Jesus’ injunction in the Sermon on the Mount “Don’t judge lest you be judged,” St. James tells them to remember that “the Judge is standing before the gates” and tells them not to judge so that “you may not be judged.” If we’re going to judge others at all, we should choose to judge them favorably rather than negatively, to give them the benefit of the doubt rather than treat them with a hermeneutic of suspicion.
• The third tip is to persevere. St. James said, “Take as an example of hardship and patience, brothers and sisters, the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Indeed we call blessed those who have persevered” and then invoked the famous perseverance of Job. Marriage is hard. It requires patience. Just like a prophet is least accepted in his native place, so often husbands and wives are often least appreciated in their home. That’s why the apostle reminds us to follow the sacrifice and patience of the prophets. There will be rough times, just like there were for the prophets, but in the end things for them turned out forever well. Marriage is a sanctifying institution, a bridge to heaven, and sometimes the way its seeks to make us saints is through persevering forgiveness.
• The last tip is about reiterating one’s consent. Repeating Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount, St. James says, “Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’” For married couples, this means not only that they should be truthful to teach other, but that they continue to reiterate their “Yes,” their “I do!,” to each other each of the days of their marriage. They said “yes” when they pledged to love each other in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, in poverty and prosperity, all the days of their life. It’s obviously a huge challenge when they enter a time they’d consider “bad” or “worse” to remember and reiterate one’s commitment. But that’s precisely what Jesus always does to us, renewing his commitment to us every time we fall. He’ll give us the strength we need to love each other as he has loved us by being as merciful with each other as he is with us.
• As I complete seven years with you today, I would like to thank you for the witness of your spousal fidelity to Christ the Bridegroom, whose friend I have sought to be. Rather than hardened, your hearts have remained open, trusting and loving, living out the heart transplant received at the beginning of your Christian life, when, fulfilling Ezekiel’s prophecy, God takes out our stony hearts and replaces them with hearts of flesh. I thank you for the way you have clung to the Lord Jesus. I thank you for the way you, in response to God’s kindness and mercy, have been kind and merciful to me. I thank you for the way you have encouraged me rather than complained, the way you have persevered as I may on giving days have preached too long, the way you have proclaimed a resounding personal and communal yes. And I thank God and you for the way, through the Sacrament of Penance, I have been privileged to see how you and He seek to turn even your “no’s” into “yeses,” allowing the medicine of his mercy to bring good even out of the illness of sin. What a great gift it has been for me to come here, where I have been greatly strengthened by your spousal love to love the Lord more and better.
• For the 358th time together, we come to the altar. The Mass is the consummation of the spousal union between Christ and his Bride the Church, when we, the Bride, take within ourselves the body and blood or the Bridegroom and become one flesh with him. What God has joined, and he has joined us with his Son through the Sacraments, no one can separate. The more we come here faithfully to love the Lord and receive his merciful love, the more we can share that fruitful, faithful, unbreakable love with each other.  And so together we forget not God’s greatest benefits as with all our being we bless God’s holy name.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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