Pharisees are concerned about man-made laws. They seek to press Jesus on one such concern in this Sunday’s Gospel. It is the law on divorce. “‘Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife?’ They were testing him.” The test was to whether Jesus adhered to a harsh or more lenient view of men putting aside one wife so as to acquire another.
Marriage was in Jesus’ time, and remains for various cultures today, a primarily legal matter. Men legally control women to fill their own wants and needs. Marriages were arranged by fathers and prospective grooms for various reasons. Reasons included tribal alliances and labor and progeny needs, and therefore included polygamy. Women were taken and abandoned as men desired. They were property and treated as such; but not by Jesus. Neither did Jesus treat men as property owners. Jesus encouraged men to relinquish their dominant role and become dependent on the woman they are joined to: “a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” When we marry we become one sacred flesh sexually, emotionally, socially, spiritually. We become so day after day in the little sharings we experience together and big events we celebrate. We become so year after year in the little ones we welcome together, our own or others, and the big changes we go through. We give ourselves to, fall in love with, and commit ourselves for another human being on a journey of so many steps. And then, sometimes, one or the other steps aside. Within such a step, against the advice of the author of Genesis, we can decide that it is indeed, “good for a person to be alone.” There is much sadness in coming to such a realization. We cannot imagine and may in truth fear being alone. We feel it is too vulnerable a way to be in the world, perhaps even unhealthy. But an old love has died and if we can embrace ourselves within that truth we will feel a new love rising up within us.
“We breathe ourselves out and away: from ember to ember … Then someone may say to us: ‘Yes, you are in my blood, the room, the Spring-time is filling with you’…the place you cover so tenderly does not disappear: because beneath it you feel pure duration. So that you promise eternity almost, from the embrace … O trees of life, O when are you wintering? …We realise flowering and fading together. And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing, as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness… Who has not sat, scared, before his heart’s curtain? It drew itself up: the scenery was of Departure… behind the images, there was more than the past, and in front of us was not the future. We were growing.” (Rainer Maria Rilke Duino Elegies2, 4)
Prayer: Spirit of Aloneness, may we open ourselves to embrace and to release.
Question: Do I fear being alone, scared of the love I may find there?
October 4, 2015 Mark 10:2-16 Twenty-Seventh Sunday In Ordinary Time
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