Homily – Sunday 27 – Year B

Fr Brendan Coffey OSB

Today we have the account of Jesus’ famous prohibition on divorce. The temptation is to skip over it, talk about something else and hope nobody notices, because today’s Gospel makes fairly stark reading and we can easily come away from it thinking that Jesus doesn’t have much sympathy with those of us who make mistakes in life. And yet, that just isn’t true, is it?

He understood us very well indeed, as we see from his conversation with the woman at the well, who had five husbands and the man she was with when she met Jesus was not her husband at all; or when he was confronted by the woman taken in adultery. He was the only one who showed her any compassion. The crowd wanted to stone her to death, but he shamed them all into slinking away by writing in the dirt with his finger, just as God wrote the commandments on the tablets of stone which he gave to Moses. The law is there to give life and set us free, not to place heavy burdens upon us. Jesus understood this better than any of us. So don’t tell me that Jesus doesn’t have sympathy with those of us who make mistakes, because that’s utter nonsense; we know perfectly well that he does.

It is we who do not see and it is we who are so unteachable, just as he said. If you need proof of that, look at the wonderful job we have made of managing the world today! It is we who choose to see in part and we who do not open our eyes to the Divine Light. But from the beginning of Creation he made them male and female. And there we have it; the echo of three seemingly insignificant words. Three words that are of vital importance. In the beginning. They are not just any three words, these are the first three words in the Bible. “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” Jesus is saying to us, go deeper, go back to the beginning. If you really want to understand life’s more difficult questions, go deeper and look at the bigger picture. It’s easier to gloss over everything and find a quick fix. There is no quick fix, some wounds are just too deep. So where do we begin?

What God created was good. Jesus, more than any of us was aware of this, and in seeing that goodness, he also saw the value in marriage and family life which is beyond price, and precisely because he understood this he was also able to respond to the reality of human heartbreak when he confronted it in the woman at the well or the adulterous woman. We can only really do the latter properly, if we can first do the former.

We are very mistaken if we think that life is simple, it is not and neither are Christ’s words about life. To understand him we have to go deeper, we have to go back to the beginning and really try to understand why Jesus so insists on the sanctity and indissolubility of marriage. It is important for each of us to do this and take seriously what he has to say, because unlike most of us, he actually does know what he’s talking about. And so he came and walked among us, as one of us, to show us how to live and how to be alive.

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