Homily for 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Every great religion has sacred stories which account for the beginning of creation and the human race. The book of Genesis has two stories of creation, the second of which we hear in today’s first reading. God fashions man of dust from the soil and then breathes into his nostrils a breath of life. God’s breath is man’s life. When God plants a garden in the midst of the wasteland, this garden becomes man’s first address. He inhabits a beautiful place in Eden, but the wasteland still surrounds his domain.

The man God creates is the human race; he embodies in his person the whole of humanity. He is not one human being among many; he is the Human. To relieve man’s aloneness, God begins work at creating a helper. Then there is the striking and comical image of God creating all the beasts and the birds which he brings to man to see if he will name any of them ‘’helper.’’ There is a long procession of candidates for the post: man gives names to them all, but none is named helper. After the interviews, man is still alone. Clearly, God has to think again.

That original vision of unity completion is what Jesus calls on in today’s Gospel. Some Pharisees asks Jesus if it is against the Law for a man to divorce his wife. When Jesus asks his interrogators what Moses commanded, they reply that Moses permitted it. The Law allowed divorce to the male partner provided that he safeguarded the woman’s interest by giving her a writ of dismissal, which freed her to marry again (Deuteronomy 24:1-4). What the Law did not settle was in what circumstances divorce was legal. Divorce was man’s prerogative. A woman could sue, asking the court to compel her husband to divorce her; but it was he who divorced her. There was little agreement about the grounds for divorce. The strict school of Shammai interpreted the only ground to be adultery; the lax school of Hillel allowed a man to divorce his wife for trivial causes - if she displeased him, ‘’even if she spoiled a dish for him.’’ Not surprisingly, divorce was common in the time of Jesus, and marriage offered little security for a woman who could be dismissed at her husband’s whim. Jesus seeks to change all that.

In his answer to the Pharisees Jesus does not question the validity of the Law of Moses but claims that it was a concession to human sinfulness. He recalls God’s original plan for marriage, revealed in Genesis: that man and woman be united in an indissoluble bond. For Jesus, what God intended from the beginning is the norm for every marriage. And in attempting to restore marriage to a serious lifelong commitment, Jesus’ argument also protects the woman from being treated as a disposable possession of her husband. 

In a world where marriage was taken lightly because divorce was managed easily, Jesus calls everyone to go back to the beginning to uncover the original plan of God. It is a call to return to the roots of marriage, an invitation for man and woman to see their commitment to each other in the light of God’s seeing. This is not to punish people with idealism, but to invite them to live in loyalty to God’s original call.

Experience teaches us that things do go terribly wrong. People do make mistakes. Infidelities do happen. Hurt does appear on the agenda. Spouses do become victims and oppressors. Endless silences do happen. Marriages do collapse. There are legions of causalities to prove this, the walking wounded of broken marriages. The Church does try to make provision for human failure and inadequacy, even if the help seems to many to be slow in coming. Nevertheless, the Church must submit to the vision of Jesus, and that vision remains the norm. Because we believe that marriage is a sacrament, we refuse to see it as a casual experiment for adventurous people. In recalling Genesis, Jesus invites all of us to catch up with our beginning.