Mark 10:2 - 16
A young couple decided to get married.
The future groom went to his father and said, “I know I want to
marry her, but my feet smell so bad she won't want to come near me.
The father replied, “Just wash them with soap and water twice a
day, and keep your socks on when you are in bed. The future bride
went to her mother and said, “When I wake up in the morning my
breath is so bad; I'm afraid he won't want to be in the same room
with me.” The mother replied, “First thing in the morning before
you open your mouth go to the bathroom and brush your teeth.” So
the young couple got married and everything was going fine until one
day the new husband woke up in the middle of the night and noticed he
was missing a a sock. His wife woke up and asked “What's wrong,
honey?” The husband looked at her with horror and said, “Don't
panic, but I think you swallowed my sock.”
Today we hear Jesus echoing that
passage in Genesis. I looked at several translations, and it's
interesting that in all of them Jesus does not exactly quote Genesis.
If you look at the first reading, it says “That is why a man
leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife and the two then
become one flesh.” Here the reason is that God made woman from the
body of the man and Adam recognizes that they are part of the same
substance. Of course the first couple disobey God by eating the
fruit of the forbidden tree, and this unity which existed before the
fall is ruptured. God asks Adam why he disobeyed, and Adam replies
“This woman whom you gave to me, she gave me the fruit, and I ate
it” Now there is a wedge between Adam and Eve. She then says,
“The serpent tricked me, and I ate it.” Eve drives a wedge
between humanity and nature. And the consequences are grave; nature
will suffer, women will bear their children in pain, man will have to
wrestle with the earth to keep himself alive, and ultimately all will
die, death has been introduced into the world. And one consequence
can be seen in the Book of Deuteronomy, where Moses decrees “When a
man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens that she finds no
favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, he
writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends
her out from his house.” The relationship envisioned by God is
completely disturbed and ruined. In Jesus' time there was a great
debate about divorce; some rabbis thought that any reason was reason
enough, while others thought that there had to be a very good reason,
like adultery. Jesus, however, calls their attention back to the
beginning, but uses slightly different words: “God made them male
and female, and for this reason a man shall leave his mother and
father and cling to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
Now that original sin has entered the world, becoming one flesh is a
process, not something that instantly happens.
My wife and I have been married for
more than fifty two years. I think we have a happy marriage; she is
pretty close to perfect and one quality that I really like is that
she has poor taste in men. But we are not really one flesh, not yet.
There is still in each of us an essential loneliness, we will never
know each other completely, nor will we be known on this side of the
grave. Every loving relationship is the same; a mother never
completely knows her daughter; two friends never completely fill up
that empty space. And children can grow apart from their parents,
and friendship can cool down, but married couples cannot easily call
it quits; they've made public vows, they have children – and there
are two ways married couples deal with this; the first is that they
struggle for dominance, they struggle to make the other into the
ideal. And when the other doesn't change enough it can lead to
mental and physical abuse, or to indifference. Like the young man
who approached his father with the news that he was planning to
divorce his wife. “Why, son, why?” said the father. “I guess
she just doesn't make me happy,” replied the son. The father said,
“Don't be a fool son. Your mother and I have been married for 50
years and we've never been happy.”
The other approach is to forgive each
other – forgiving him or her for not being the person that
completes you, that fills up all your empty space, that completely
relieves your loneliness, that is the missing piece of the puzzle.
Forgive the other because you are not yet one flesh, but still are in
the process of becoming. As Father Ronald Rolheiser said, “We
cannot not disappoint the other”. Because of original sin, because
of the fact that we are real people with our own egos, our own
personalities, our own pattern of sinfulness, and mostly because, as
Saint Augustine put it, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in
thee, O Lord.”
Marriage is an icon of the Trinity,
where three persons love so perfectly that they become one. Marriage
is an icon of the love between Christ and his Church, where He lays
down his life for his Bride, and she joyfully submits to his
headship. But marriage is also an icon of all loving relationships
between human beings, which are meant to partially and incompletely
answer those longings that will not be truly satisfied until we
raindrops dissolve into the ocean that is God, as Saint Jane Frances
de Chantal said.
And if we forgive, if we accept that
we cannot not disappoint the one we love, we can move on from that
point with our lover as we both seek to join our souls with Jesus
himself.
Jesus ends his discussion by pointing
out that unless you become like a little child you cannot enter the
kingdom of heaven. Little children, of course, have nothing of their
own and are completely dependent on others just to live. And yet to
them everything, however imperfect, is gift. And when we recognize
that our loving relationships, especially if we are married, are
sheer gifts, we will begin to enter the kingdom of heaven.
