Week 07 Friday (Year 2)

Readings: James 5.9-12; Psalm 103; Mark 10.1-12

The image of God is male and female: this is what we learn from the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis. She is equal to him. In fact she is in a way superior for she is made not from soil, as the man himself was, but from soil already inbreathed by God's spirit - the living man. Nothing made directly from the soil is satisfactory to the man until the woman appears who is made from him. So she is other than him and at the same time his equal: this at last, he says, is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. Between them, therefore, friendship and love are possible, things not possible for the man with any of the other creatures that have been made.

The image of God that the man and the woman constitute together is seen in one way in their shared fertility. Together they generate offspring as God himself (we will learn this much later) generates a Son. They are the image of God also in the possibility of love between persons who are other than but equal to each other. Both terms are important, 'other' and 'equal', though it is sometimes difficult to hold them together in a proper way.

Everybody knows the anxieties about marriage that are raised by the disciples. There is the ideal and there is the reality. Already within the New Testament the question of divorce comes up and whether the ideal reaffirmed by Jesus is too difficult for some, perhaps most, people. 'Hardness of heart' afflicts all human relationships and marriage is no exception. In fact because of the intimacy involved, sensitivity is heightened and the consequences of a hardening of the heart is therefore all the greater.

At the beginning, it was not so, Jesus says. In the future, it will not be so. But what about now, the present moment, in these present conditions of human life? Learning to receive is key in every relationship and it is what Jesus will speak about tomorrow, when he moves on to speak about children.

For now we can say this: nobody enters properly into marriage with the thought that it might end. The desire and the intention is that it will continue forever. If somebody were to enter into marriage without that desire or without that intention then it would not be a marriage at all. But still things can go wrong. People may be incapable of living up to the responsibilities that go with it. People may be lacking in understanding or freedom at the moment in which they enter into it. People may experience of a hardening of their heart for one reason or another, a situation that makes it seem impossible for them to continue in relationship with another person.

So it is, and the Church seeks to respond to such situations with justice and compassion, while continuing to promote the gift of marriage which, Jesus says, is the desire and intention of God for his human creatures.