Friday in the Seventh Week of Ordinary Time, May 24, 2024

Mark 10, 1-12

Jesus came into the district of Judea and across the Jordan. Again crowds gathered around him and, as was his custom, he again taught them. The Pharisees approached him and asked, “Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife?” They were testing him. He said to them in reply, “What did Moses command you?” They replied, “Moses permitted a husband to write a bill of divorce and dismiss her.” But Jesus told them, “Because of the hardness of your hearts he wrote you this commandment. But 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.” In the house the disciples again questioned Jesus about this. He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

The last of the Prophets, speaking two hundred years before the Birth of Jesus, confounded the Jews with these words: “So take heed to yourselves, and let none be faithless to the wife of his youth. For I hate divorce, says the Lord the God of Israel, and covering one’s garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So take heed to yourselves and do not be faithless” (Malachi 2, 15–16).  God, speaking through the Prophet, seems to contradict the regulations within the Law of Moses allowing for divorce.  God seems to contradict himself, and that cannot be.  But the Jewish teachers and high priests had no answer for this problem and divorce went on as before between Jewish husbands and wives.

Now the Pharisees bring this long-standing difficulty before the Lord.  This looks like an act of surprising prudence, approaching the Son of God on a matter they cannot solve.  They might only have sought to trap him in his words, but St. Mark does not ascribe this motive to them.  They might, then, have used this problem in order to get him to reveal more about himself to them: “they were testing him”.  At any rate, they showed interested in his opinion, though he was “untaught” (cf. John 7, 15).

“What did Moses command you?”  The Lord proceeds methodically, putting the Pharisees in the position of students.  They accept this, replying, “Moses permitted a husband to write a bill of divorce and dismiss her.”  They would have expected Jesus at this point to quote the Prophets in order to introduce his own answer, but instead, he speaks on his own authority and out of his own knowledge: “Because of the hardness of your hearts he wrote you this commandment.”  That is, in the time before grace, God’s design of marriage was not understood well and without the help of his grace was difficult to achieve.  Here, the Lord Jesus makes it clear: “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.”  Like the doctrine that there was only one God, this teaching set the Jews apart from every other people, but it had been neglected for many ages.  Jesus reaffirms that the human race was made male and female, equal in dignity, and that, leaving their families behind them, a man and woman are joined together by God in such an intimate way that they become “one flesh”.  And because this union is the work of God, no human or even an angel, can unmake them or separate them so that they can be joined to anyone else: “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

St. Matthew reports that after the Lord had given this teaching, his Apostles, taken aback, said to him, “His disciples say unto him: If the case of a man with his wife be so, it is not expedient to marry” (Matthew 19, 10).  The Lord replied that not everyone was designed by God for marriage, with the implication that if a person did not think he could persevere in marriage, he should not marry, and that he incurred no shame if he did not.

It should be mentioned here that when the Church declares a marriage null, she does so because based on testimony, what she understands by marriage did not, in fact, occur.  The Church does not “make” a marriage null but she can declare it based on the discovery that one or both parties felt forced into it, that one person lied to another in order to gain the other’s consent to marry, that one or both parties were too immature to understand what they were doing, or other similar grounds.

The Lord’s teaching on marriage fulfills the Scripture which first reveals it in the very opening pages of the Book of Genesis.  He shows its place in God’s marvelous plan for the salvation of the world, and he teaches the intimacy at its heart, an intimacy which itself is modeled after that between the Persons of the Holy Trinity.