Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, October 2, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil
October 2, 2021

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when we will enter into the dialogue Jesus had with the Pharisees when they approached him in the area across the Jordan from the Holy Land and asked him a question about marriage. It wasn’t a question of curiosity or even to learn. St. Mark tells us, “They were testing him.” Jesus was in the area where John the Baptist had been preaching and baptizing and to ask him about the lawfulness of marriage and of divorce was to ask him a political question for which John the Baptist had already been killed 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 but because marrying another person’s wife certainly was. Herod thought that Jesus was John risen from the dead. To ask Jesus about marriage and divorce was to invite him to criticize the same king and suffer the same consequence.
• Jesus responded not only by citing the Book of Genesis, but invoking, in a sense, his own memory of how things were in the beginning. “In the beginning,” Genesis teaches, “God created man in his image and likeness; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them,” because man is most fully in God’s image and likeness when he is united to the woman in a communion of persons in love. Just as in God, the mutual love of the Father and the Son eternally generated the Holy Spirit, so the mutual love of husband and wife can generate a third person, who is both a living fruit of their love and a means for that love to grow. In God’s plan, marriage is a singular sign and participation in God’s image and likeness. “Therefore what God has joined together,” Jesus adds, “no human being must separate.” Marriage is part of God’s wisdom from the beginning to bring us into the loving union of the Trinity.
• In recent years, however, we know that the wisdom of God’s plan with regard to marriage and divorce been getting challenged from both inside and outside the Church. Many have begun to question openly whether God’s plan for marriage, taught courageously and consistently by the Church since Christ founded her, is true and relevant. These doubts or confusions about marriage are fraught with enormous consequences: for 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, if we misunderstand what marriage is, we will misunderstand who we are, who God is, and how we’re called to live our life in God’s image and likeness.
• I think there are three main categories of challenges about marriage that our contemporaries need to take to Jesus:The first comes from those who try to say God’s plan for marriage shown in the Bible is irrelevant, that marriage is not necessary. The second comes from those who say that God’s plan for marriage is too demanding and, as the divorce rate of over 40 percent attests, to be married to one person until death is an unrealistic expectation. The third 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 on biology rather than love, they say, and this is just an effect of “heteronormative bias.”
• How would Jesus respond to these three categories of challenges? I think he would do the same thing he did 2000 years ago, by taking us back to what marriage really means and then applying it to the particular questions. Just as he did in this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus would challenge our contemporaries to overcome the “hardness of heart” due to sin that clouds our judgment on marriage. Then I think he would repeat the same words about the origin, meaning and mystery of marriage that he said to the Pharisees about the beginning. These three sentences contain, in nucleus, Jesus’ response to the questions of modern man.
• To those who think marriage is only a piece of paper, Jesus tells us that marriage is a part of God’s plan for man and woman from the beginning. 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 commitment. Those who claim that marriage is simply a piece of paper want some of the goods of marriage — like sex and accompaniment — without wanting selflessly to make the commitment that true love 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.
• To those who think that the indissolubility of marriage in God’s plan is too hard, Jesus states clearly 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, divorce is nothing more than a human legal declaration that cannot change one’s marital status before God, and remarriage is adultery and therefore seriously sinful. Jesus does not say that divorce itself 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 Church always 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 this pain 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.
• To the final group of challengers, who think that marriage traditionally has been a form of bigotry, we sometimes hear the claim that Jesus never spoke out in opposition to same-sex marriage. That’s because to do so would have been absurd in the Jewish context of his time. In his response to the Pharisees, however, Jesus gave 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 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. For this reason, he continued, a man leaves not his two mommies or two daddies, but his mother and father, and clings, not to whomever he wants, 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 love and a means by which that 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, for man’s and woman’s participation in God’s continual act of the creation of new men and new women. 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 the heterosexual union of man and woman in marriage in general. God has created man and woman with this complementarity and for that reason marriage should never be allowed to a man-less or a woman-less institution.
• As we see, 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 misunderstands 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. God bless you.

The Gospel on which this week’s homily was based was: 

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