Friday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
The wedding
He set out from there and went 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 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 him 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 him 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.” Mk 10,1-12
In the last years the secularization has very deeply dug in the society and, unfortunately, in the Catholic world. Not only the divorce is not a scandal anymore, but also a scandal are not the factual couples meanwhile the homosexual ones are starting to be considered by the same way. But Jesus says to us today that, on the subject of the wedding, one thing is the law and another thing is the project of God on the man and the woman. This crowd, which often appears in the gospels and which is not identified neither with the followers of Jesus nor with his opponents, represents the world which does not decide in front of the evangelic message, being open to it, but only partially welcoming it. The divorce was allowed also by that time, despite the restrictions dictated by the rabbis; but this, Jesus says, was admitted “because of the hardness of your heart”. Moses, as the rulers of every time and place, when promulgating this rule had to take into account the hardness of the heart of his people, because a law not conditioned by the cultural and social environment does not exist. With the arrival of the messianic times, however, we are back to the concept of wedding and family as they were originated by the time of the creation. For the Church, as for Jesus, the wedding cannot be terminated, full stop. Each of us can do whatever he thinks better, but no one can subdue the God’s will to his personal one. To become aware of the importance of this subject, it is enough to think that there are only two realities directly settled by the God’s will: the family and the Church. The family being more important than the Church. Our daughter Lisalberta, who lives her profession as a teacher with the same passion as the mother Rita, says often to us that the divorce makes the parents suffering, but it destroys the sons. However the nowadays time is full of traps and dangers and it is not easy to keep a wedding in the Christian way. There is one only mode: to pray together. It is in the prayer that a family can again build up by each day, in the love of God, that wonderful union which existed by the beginning of the times.