Remedying Hardness of Heart with Purity of Heart, 27th Sunday (B), October 7, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Church of the Holy Family, Manhattan
27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
October 7, 2018
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: 

The greatest of the gift of marriage in God’s plan

We see in today’s first reading one of God’s greatest and most beautiful gifts to us. 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.” He said this, however, only after man had come to the same conclusion. Adam was 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, he needed a fitting partner. That’s why God said what Adam himself had implicitly learned: it is not good for man to be alone. To remove his loneliness, God could have easily cloned him an identical twin, but he didn’t. He could have just created another man, but he didn’t. The suitable partner God knew he needed was a wife. And after Eve was created, we see Adam rejoice for the first time. He clung to her and, as we read, they became one flesh. This is the beauty of marriage from the beginning in God’s plan. Through their marriage, Adam and Eve grew ever more into the image of God, who is love, because marriage is a primordial sacrament of love, when a man and woman make a nuptial gift of themselves to the other and receive the other’s gift not merely of a ring but a person, of a commitment of life and love. It was only through their human love that Adam and Eve learned how to love 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. From the very beginning, marriage is God’s gift to men and women to help them truly to become, through being united by him in one flesh to each other, who he created them to be, the image and likeness of God who is love and created us with love and for love.

Is Divorce Lawful? 

That’s the proper context to understand today’s Gospel, when the Pharisees came up to Jesus and asked him about divorce. “Is it lawful for man to divorce his wife?” This remains a very contemporary question. When I was coming back here from Mass this morning with the Missionaries of Charity, I was stopped at construction before getting on the FDR and there was a sign, “Divorcio Barato” with a telephone number, advertising presumably the lawyers to call if you want to have a “Cheap Divorce.” Is divorce, whether cheap or costly, lawful? The Pharisees said that Moses had given them such permission. Today, many would say that their various legislatures, governments, courts and public opinion have given permission. But what the Pharisees were asking, and what people of good conscience must ask Jesus today, is: “Regardless of what others say, is divorce lawful in the eyes of God?”

Jesus’ answer in today’s Gospel brings us all back to the image of marriage we have in today’s Gospel, which describes God’s plans for marriage: “In the beginning, 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. They are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined, man must not divide.”

Hardness versus Purity of Heart

Jesus’ answer does more than simply respond to the specific question about divorce. He gives a framework to understand so many other questions with respect to marriage that people still have today. Before we turn to parsing his response, however, let’s first look at our motivations in listening to his answer. Jesus said that Moses had tolerated divorce “because of the hardness of your hearts.” The people’s hearts were hardened to God’s message and Moses just didn’t want to fight with them all the time. It was never that divorce was wanted by God. Marriage is the greatest image of God in creation, as we read in the first chapter of the Bible: “God created man in his own image; male and female he created them; in the image of God he created them” (Gen 1:27-28). The love between a man and a woman open to children is meant to reflect the eternal, loving communion of persons who is the Blessed Trinity. Marriage is also supposed to be the greatest image of how God relates to us. St. Paul writes in his Letter to the Christians in Ephesus that Genesis’ words, repeated by Jesus, about leaving father and mother and clinging to one’s wife refer first and most of all to the fruitful, faithful and indissoluble bond between Christ and the Church (Eph 5:21-33). So divorce was never wanted by God, but it was tolerated by Moses in the Mosaic Law because the Jews’ hearts were hardened to God’s will.

What God wants from us, rather, is not “hardness of heart” but “purity of heart.” Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount that those who are pure of heart “see God,” they see him in others, and in situations and seek to do and love his will. With this gift of purity of heart, seeing God in each other, we become capable of reverencing each other out of reverence for Christ (Eph 5:21). We begin to become capable of bearing Crosses and contradictions. Our world still suffers today from not just from physiological hardening of the arteries but spiritual hardening of the heart. And so, as we listen to what Jesus says, we beg him for this gift of purity of heart. In Psalm 95, we read, “If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts!” We ask Jesus, that if our hearts are stony, to soften them, take them away and give us pure hearts, holy hearts, docile hearts, so that we may embrace his truth, love it, and with his grace live it.

Looking specifically at Jesus’ teachings, we note:

• Jesus first talks clearly about the indissolubility of marriage: “What God has joined man must not divide.” — If God has in fact joined a man and a woman in one flesh, not even all the judges in the world can separate them. A civil divorce can relieve them of certain civil responsibilities toward each other, but a civil divorce can never make someone who is bound to another by God free to marry someone else. Only God can separate them and he does that when one or the other dies.
• He talks about what happens when someone whom God has joined to another attempts to marry a third person. “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” This is a teaching that Jesus’ first apostles said, in St. Matthew’s Gospel, made the commitment of marriage “not expedient.” Adultery is one of the worst sins a person can commit. In the Old Testament, adulterers were stoned to death because of the enormous destruction adulterers do to marriages, to the families that flow from marriages, and to the society that flows from families. In the New Testament, adultery has always been taught — with murder, blasphemy and apostasy — as among the worst mortal of sins that kill God’s life in the soul. With regard to the Church’s teachings, we acknowledge that, on some occasions, marriages not only break down but, unfortunately, civil divorce may be the only way to protect the children and make sure the other provides for them. When someone’s marriage has broken down due primarily to the sins of the other and the person has needed to seek a civil divorce, that person is still normally a Catholic in good standing and is able to receive Holy Communion. The problem comes in when someone in that circumstance begins to think and behave that, after a civil divorce, he or she is free to marry another. If God has joined him or her to a spouse in marriage, however, the person is still, despite the divorce, sacramentally one flesh with that spouse. To seek to marry another, to seek, frankly, even to date another, would be tantamount to adultery, just like if someone were dating a person while married it would be adultery. These words of Jesus are very challenging today in a culture in which divorce is so common, in which we all have loved ones, friends and family, whose marriages have sadly broken down and who have not just divorced but entered into civil marriage with others. There may even be people here this morning who are in such situations. It’s important for us not to water down Jesus’ words to make them more palatable to the mentality of our age or to our preferences or individual circumstances, as many, including some in the Church, attempt. It’s important for us to say rather with faith that Jesus has the words of eternal life and that we seek to live off of every word that comes from God’s mouth.
• That brings us to an important distinction. My first two points were premised on the phrase, “If God has in fact joined a man and a woman in one flesh.” Not everyone who pronounces marriage vows is actually joined by God in one flesh. God joins only those who are free to marry and who will what he wills for marriage. The Church, in her process of the declaration of nullity popularly called annulments, investigates whether a marriage was truly valid, whether God truly united two people. If a Catholic, for example, marries before a justice of the peace, God doesn’t join them and the marriage, in God’s eyes, doesn’t exist. If two Catholics marry before a priest, but one is psychologically incapable of consent, or forced into marriage by parents, or thinks she can continue a relationship with someone else on the side, or thinks he can beat his wife up for whatever reason, God does not join them in one flesh. On many occasions, those who have gone through the painful experience of divorce, and even, on occasion, civilly married someone else, may in fact never have been truly married by God in the first place. That can be looked at through the process of seeking a declaration of nullity. If there’s someone here this morning who is in the situation of a second marriage while the first spouse is still living, I would encourage you to come to speak to me or any priest to begin a process to see whether that first marriage was valid. If it were not valid, if God had not really joined you in one flesh to another, then it may be possible that you would be free to be married in the Church to your civil spouse and return to Holy Communion.

Seeking purity of heart with response to God’s holy and challenging word, we can also make a few other applications of Jesus’ teachings today to areas in which we often find a hardness of heart toward God’s word:

Four applications

• The first is to all sex outside of marriage. In God’s plan, we are to become one flesh in the act of making love only with that person to whom God has joined us in one flesh through marriage. If God has not joined us together in one flesh with another, we are essentially guilty of violating our own and the other’s future one flesh union in marriage. If you find yourself in a circumstance like this, please do not harden your heart to the Lord’s words!
• The second is to the real definition and reality of marriage. I don’t mean to be polemical, or worse hurt anyone, but it’s important for us to recognize that Jesus says clearly in today’s Gospel that a man shall leave not his two mommies or two daddies but his father and mother and cling not to whomever he is sexually attracted but to his wife. To pretend, as our country now does after the Obergefell Supreme Court decision, that marriage can be the union of any two people who say they love each other, to say that marriage can be a husband-less or wife-less institution, is a great contradiction to what God has established and will do enormous harm not just in terms of what people, especially newer generations, understand about marriage, but also to those — our brothers and sisters, friends, family members, and neighbors —who act on erroneous notions. If we have other ideas of marriage than what Jesus describes here today, may God give us purity of heart!
• The third refers to children. By God’s design, the one flesh union between a man and a woman is to culminate not in the mere act of making love, but in the fruit to which that act leads: a son or a daughter. A child is the one flesh union of father and mother, sharing essentially half of the “flesh” of each, as God provides the soul. What an incredible reality it is that husband and wife can literally “make love” in cooperating with the Creator to procreate a son or daughter, who is both the fruit of their love and a means by which that love can continue to grow. But this gift is dramatically underappreciated today. At the same time that many people have tried to separate sex from God’s uniting a man and a woman in one flesh, many — both those who have been united in marriage and those who haven’t — seek to prevent this fruit of their one-flesh union through the use of contraception. Contraception works against that union God seeks, not just in children, but also within the couple, because it leads to a husband’s rejecting the maternal meaning of his wife’s femininity, or a wife’s rejecting of the paternal meaning of her husband’s masculinity, in the very act made by God for it to be expressed. So not only does contraception prevent the fruit of one-flesh union in a child, it also works against the union between husband and wife because it leads them to reject the other’s God-given potential in the act that God gave them to help unite them. May God gives us the purity of heart to accept this and the grace of the Holy Spirit to help persuade others to accept it and live by it.
• Perhaps the greatest sin against this one flesh union that Jesus describes today is abortion. A child is the union of the flesh of father and mother with a soul directly infused by God. The child will always be an expression of the love of parents and literally the union of their flesh. Therefore, can anyone think of anything more horrible than to seek to end the life of that union of love? To make a choice to end the life of such a baby is to kill not just an innocent boy or girl, but it’s to kill a part of the mom and the dad. It’s, in some sense, to kill love. Today Jesus shows us another way. He says in the Gospel, “let the children come to me.” He took them in his arms, embraced them, laid his hands on them and blessed them. That’s the way Jesus always wants us to treat children, no matter how young or how small. On this Respect Life Sunday, may none of us harden our hearts to this message! The Lord of life came to redeem us so that we may have life to the full, so that we may know his love, receive it, and love others as he has loved us. He has told us that whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sisters we do to him, and so in welcoming children, we are welcoming him. God wants to help us never harden our hearts to a child, born or unborn, but with pure hearts see God in them, because they, just as much as we, have been made by God in his image and likeness.

Gratitude and Praise for God’s Word about Marriage

Today, Jesus has led us back to the beginning, so that we might see with new eyes the beauty of his teaching about marriage, and to ask him for his grace that we might receive this word with truly pure and loving hearts. After the first reading, the Lector said, “The Word of the Lord,” and we all replied, “Thanks be to God!” After I said, “The Gospel of the Lord,” everyone exclaimed, “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ!” That shows the gratitude and praise we are always called to give to God’s holy and saving word, even and especially when it is hard to live and summons us to deep conversion. Today we ask Jesus to give us all the help we need to live according to his words, so that he may take us, not just back to the beginning, but to a future in the Father’s house where we will enter into the eternal union between Christ and his bride, the Church, which is anticipated in the one-flesh union of holy communion in the Mass. This is our faith. This is the faith of the Church. How proud we are to profess it, in season and out of season, in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

The readings for today’s Mass were: