Friday for the seventh week in Ordinary Time is taken from Mark, 10th chapter, 1st through the 12th verse. Jesus came into the district of Judea and across the Jordan again. Crowds gathered around him, and as was his custom, he again taught them. The Pharisees approached him and asked, is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife? They were testing him. He said to them in reply, what did Moses command you?

They replied, moses permitted a husband to write a bill of divorce and dismiss her. But Jesus told them, because of the hardness of your hearts, he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. 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.

In the house, the disciples again questioned Jesus about this. He said to them, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. Jesus in this passage is not saying that there is no way in which anyone can be divorced. Divorce is something that has to happen in certain cases. And so how do we read this? Why is he so stressing the union that has to be established in marriage and must be preserved?

He told us at one time in the Old Testament that he wanted to marry us. And that image sticks with me when I think about the way he describes marriage. It’s a commitment of two people. And when they’re there totally for each other, giving to each other, supporting each other, that’s the heart of what all relationships are to be. God is the model for us. His relationship with us is the model for all of us.

To live, to be committed, to be caring, to be supportive to one another. Foreign There’s a danger that we always want to make things simpler, black and white, either or. And what I know that God is calling you and me into is a thing called wisdom, which is very different. It somehow allows for a kind of mysterious dimension to everything, so that there isn’t any simple one answer to every situation. Keep us in that world of wisdom as we discern the difficult issues that come across our life. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen.