Marriage

Friday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time C-2

Entrance Antiphon Cf. Ps 74 (73): 20, 19, 22, 23 Look to your covenant, O Lord, and forget not the life of your poor ones for ever. Arise, O God, and defend your cause, and forget not the cries of those who seek you.

Collect Almighty ever‑living God, whom, taught by the Holy Spirit, we dare to call our Father, bring, we pray, to perfection in our hearts the spirit of adoption as your sons and daughters, that we may merit to enter into the inheritance which you have promised. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Scripture today: Ezechiel 16:59-63; Isaiah 12:2-3, 4bcd, 5-6; Matthew 19:3-12

Some Pharisees approached him, and tested him, saying, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause whatever?" He said in reply, "Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female' and said, '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." They said to him, "Then why did Moses command that the man give the woman a bill of divorce and dismiss her?" He said to them, "Because of the hardness of your hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) and marries another commits adultery." (Matthew 19:3-12)

Marriage One of the most important of Hegel’s philosophical works is his Phenomenology of Spirit. In the “Self-consciousness” chapter there is the first subsection, "Independent and Dependent Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage." In this section there is the famous Master-Slave dialectic which is widely understood to be a key element in Hegel's philosophical system, and has heavily influenced many subsequent philosophers. It narrates in story form the encounter between two self-conscious beings, who engage in a "struggle to the death" before one enslaves the other. It is a kind of parable or exemplar of the basic dynamics of reality. The "I" sees another "I" and finds its own pre-eminence and control compromised. It ignores this other or sees it as a threat to itself. The only means of re-asserting itself, in order to proceed toward self-consciousness, is by entering into a struggle for pre-eminence. Let us not go further into Hegel’s influential philosophy — he is widely credited with having provided Karl Marx with his basic dialectical system. Some have suggested that his idea also provided the inspiration for Søren Kierkegaard's conception of man’s sinful bondsman relationship with God. Others have seen an influence upon Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas about Master Morality and Slave Morality. The point of my introducing Hegel here is not to discuss an important current in philosophical thought but to show the dominance of “struggle” and antagonism in an important line of modern thought. Struggle is seen as a key to the universe and to all of reality. It is the fundamental given, the starting point, the initial law of the world. Now, it is not difficult to see why struggle and antagonism would be taken as the central dynamic of all things, because life involves a constant struggle, and struggle for survival and for dominance is to be seen everywhere. But it is a bad philosophy. This is not the law of the universe as implanted in creation by the Creator. The basic law of creation is communion. We must start not with antagonism but with communion.

The struggle that Hegel lighted on is a symptom of a breakdown from how things were made and meant to be. We must start from, and look for communion in and among things. What do we see? Everywhere there is a natural dynamic that seeks to unite. At the level of the tiniest neutron there is a system of unity, of interconnectedness in action. Living things depend on one another, and in the animal world, animals generally live and act in concert with their kind. The new-born finds itself being protected by its parent, and it instinctively seeks to be with its parent and its own kind. The imprint of communion is everywhere. The universe gives the impression of being a system, and not just a vast, antagonistic disconnection. While there is struggle, there is a deeper pining for communion. In this it bears the imprint of its Maker. The Maker of the world is not an antagonistic Being who causes antagonism and disunity in all that he does or makes. He causes communion. The struggling-against and the antagonism must have come from somewhere else. It is a great noxious weed that has appeared from the beginning. When we look at man, he is born into and for communion. He is born precisely into a family, and family derives from marriage, and marriage is the most natural thing in the world — and it is a communion of persons. Man’s happiness is found in communion. The “struggle” of life is above all a struggle not for dominance but for communion, love and mutual respect. Let this be our backdrop in pondering our Lord’s words on Marriage and its unbreakable bond. In the beginning, God made human beings male and female, our Lord reminds his listeners. He implanted in the very constitution of the human being a structure of communion, giving to it the natural impulse to the unity in one flesh of marriage. So, our Lord said, “they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate” (Matthew 19:3-12).

Marriage is meant by God, our Lord tells us, to be an indissoluble communion of persons. It is, then, the great sign of the communion which ought exist among men, and between God and man. Every married couple has the mission of bearing witness to the vocation to communion which belongs to man. This natural vocation is raised to a new dignity in the Sacrament of Matrimony, instituted by Christ, in which the married couple is a sign and a channel of the love which Christ has for his Church. Let us strive not to struggle against others, but to be in communion with them. Let this be the law of every marriage, and let every marriage be a sign of the communion which ought to prevail among men everywhere.

(E.J.Tyler)

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Second reflection: (Ezechiel 16:59-63, alternative first reading)

Personal Responsibility From the dawn of human history one of man's greatest failings has been the avoidance of personal responsibility for his actions. Someone or something else is seen to be responsible, to be the cause, and so something or someone else is to be blamed. We see it in Adam ('the woman gave me the fruit to eat'), down to our own day. But God tells Ezechiel that Jerusalem will be judged by her deeds (Ezechiel 16: 59): "Jerusalem, I will treat you as you deserve, you who have despised your oath even to the extent of breaking a covenant..." So we must take responsibility for our lives, and if we do not, we will be held accountable by God for this failure. What does this mean in the concrete? It means taking responsibility for the use we make of time as the preparation for eternity. We cannot halt or delay the inexorable march of time towards its end. Every moment of time that passes is a jewel that has gone from sight, and the question is and will be, how have we used the time that was ours? We are responsible for its use.

We must use time to lovingly fulfill the work given to us by God and to avoid offending him by sin. We can expect our work to be ordinary work fulfilled in an ordinary round, just as it was for the Holy Family those many years in Nazareth. Let's not waste time. Let's do our work in life for God.

(E.J.Tyler)

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