Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, you may not have noticed, but this is the third week running that children have played a significant part in the Gospel. The first time, three weeks ago, our Lord took a little child and said to His Apostles, ‘anyone who welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me.’ Then last week, His words were dark and alarming, warning that ‘anyone who is an obstacle to bring down one of these little ones who have faith, would be better thrown into the sea with a great millstone round his neck.’ And finally, today, He shows His indignation, even anger against those of His disciples who were trying to keep parents from bringing their children to be blessed by Him, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. I tell you solemnly, anyone who does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’ Mark then tells us that He put His arms round them and laid His hands on them, and blessed them.
These three sayings of our Lord manifest His love for children and His appreciation of their special closeness to the kingdom of God, which comes from their innocence and openness. It is the corrosive power of sin that blights this. Our Lord refers to those who effectively spoil the innocence of children in His warning that those who corrupt the young deserve to be drowned. Adult life, He suggests, needs to recover this simple trust. It is not easy, but it is necessary in order to be able to enter heaven.
But there is another aspect to today’s particular Gospel that is of great importance. The Gospel began with the Pharisees putting a question to our Lord concerning the permanence and indissolubility of marriage. They are testing Him to see what He will say. In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses had permitted divorce, but it was seen to be shameful, so the Pharisees asked our Lord in what circumstances was divorce permissible? Our Lord’s reply was uncompromising. This permission was only a toleration granted because the people were ungovernable, and not because God approved it in any way. On the contrary, God had made marriage indissoluble from the beginning of the human race, as we heard in the first reading from the Book of Genesis, and so it was not just for the Jews, nor for religious reasons alone that marriage is declared indissoluble, says the Lord, but because it is written into human nature that way.
This is what many inevitably see as a hard saying, but this is nothing new. The Apostles were amazed, as we can read between the lines, and asked Jesus to explain His meaning further. Does He really mean what He seems to have said to the Pharisees? Yes. But why? Why does the merciful Lord, the great forgiver of sins, the friend of sinners and tax-collectors, say something that He knows full well will be a bombshell to many who hear Him say it.
This is very serious indeed. Only a few days ago in Rome at the Synod, there was a penitential service at which forgiveness was asked for those who, and I quote, ‘use doctrine as a stone to hurl at others.’ You may wonder what this really means; I do. For instance, is it wrong, sinful even, to teach what our Lord taught, even when this is painful to hear and difficult to put into practice? If so, then this accusation of using doctrine as stones to hurl at people must be directed even at our Lord Himself. That surely cannot be right!
So much is at stake. Marriage is not just about good feelings, or about romantic love. Our Lord talks about a man and a woman becoming one flesh, not just setting up a partnership. Incidentally, what a terrible word ‘partner’ is, when it is used as a deliberate replacement for ‘spouse’. Partners, in the way we use the English language, means persons with whom we either do business, or play games. What a terrible model for a spousal relationship that is! A spouse is someone to whom one person has given him or herself. It is a gift of one’s entire life to another, a gift of mutual trust, and a means of creating a unique bond of unity which cannot be broken in this life. The word ‘partner’ can hardly be fitting for such a crucial relationship as that between a man and a woman for life!
The reason why our Lord lays such great emphasis on the unbreakable bond of those who become one flesh is itself of huge significance to our times. In 1967 Pope St Paul VI published one of the most important letters not only of his reign, but of our age. Like our Lord’s saying in today’s Gospel, it was shocking in its unswerving directness and clarity. In that letter, called Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul against all expectations taught that artificial contraception is always wrong, even in marriage, even when circumstances are profoundly difficult for a husband and wife. It is essential to human life that a married couple, made one flesh by God, in all their acts of loving marital union, should be open to the gift of life, that is, of children. Once you separate out the bringing of children into the world from the act of intercourse, you change radically what intercourse is. It can become a game, a partnership, and no longer a sharing in God’s creative love. Anyone can play that game if the responsibility of having children can be eliminated. Humanae Vitae teaches that the real fruit of Christian marriage is children, should God so decide. But if sexual acts become divorced from the begetting of children, then a lot of distortions follow. For instance, children are no longer seen as the fruit of the union of man and wife, and so it is no accident that less than ten years after contraception had become generally accepted, IVF was invented, in which babies were conceived in the laboratory rather than in the womb, a process in which many human embryos, when surplus to requirement, are simply wantonly destroyed. And once you take apart the idea of man and woman as one flesh giving life to children in the family, then you begin to conceive of all sorts of other distortions of marriage itself, such as so-called ‘same-sex marriage’, in which it is impossible for the two partners to become one, life-giving union. Whatever such unions are, they are not ‘marriage’ as human nature has been designed by God, nor in the sense that it is taught here by our Lord.
And so it is that our Lord, as well as firmly rejecting the whole practice of divorce as accepted by the Pharisees, also points to children as being the crown of this union for life of a man and a woman. It is because this teaching of our Lord’s has been rejected in our society that divorce is now so freely available, and is so very common in practice and, unsurprisingly, cohabitation has now become more common even than marriage itself. But what does marriage really mean if it is not permanent, - if it is not a lifelong union made to express love and mutual trust in the bringing up of children that a couple have together conceived and brought into the world?
Nearly 60 years on from Humanae Vitae we can see all too easily how the breakdown of the real meaning and purpose of human sexuality in marriage has led the world down a terrible cul-de-sac of broken relationships, loneliness, abuse and perversions of many kinds. Only a return to the clear teaching our Lord gives in the Gospel can bring society back to health and provide the loving conditions for children to grow in trust and confidence, and so to be better fitted to make good, stable, loving unions themselves once they reach adult life. It’s what the grace of the sacrament of marriage is given for; to strengthen married couples in all ways. By abandoning Christ’s teaching, the world has plunged into a downward spiral of sexual chaos and misery. Our Lord was not afraid to teach a hard saying when He knew how much was at stake. But He never used truth as a stone to cast at sinners. Neither does His Church cast stones at anyone when she teaches what Christ taught, precisely because the entire future happiness of the human race depends on that doctrine.
Make A Comment
Comments (0)