Fr. Bill Carroll – The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, October 6, 2024
And God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.”
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Beloved, it is not good for us to be alone. We are made for community. Marriages, friendships, and other relationships are intended to bring us together.
God wants all our relationships to be governed by equality, mutuality, and holy, Christ-like love, so that each of us has a stake in the relationship. When Adam sees Eve, he rejoices and recognizes her as his equal: “This at last (he says) is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. For she alone, of all the creatures God has created, is my equal.”
Too often, the human story has been one of inequality and violence. This despite today’s lesson from Genesis and our baptismal promise to “respect the dignity of every human being.” And it’s true, some people have sought to justify male domination with this story, but that relies on a misreading. When God speaks, God defines the woman as the equal of the man: “I will make him a helper as his partner (God says).” This is a mutual relationship: he will be her helper and her partner too.
Even the teachings of Jesus on divorce, as harsh as they seem, are intended to preserve God’s gift of equality. Seeking to trap Jesus, the Pharisees ask him whether it’s lawful for a man to divorce his wife. In reply, Jesus cites our lesson from Genesis. “In marriage (he says) the two become one flesh…Moses allowed you to divorce your wives only because of your hardness of heart.”
Jesus is working within the limitations of his time and culture. He’s trying to protect women from their husbands’ arbitrary decisions to put them away. In his day, divorce rendered women economically vulnerable, since it put them outside the family and tribal networks they needed to survive.
In our lesson today, Jesus is not so much teaching against divorce, as he is teaching in favor of vulnerable women. One might ask what Jesus would say today, when divorce often leads not to poverty and social exclusion but to liberation from relationships, some of them violent ones, that diminish the people involved.
In any event, though, the Church’s teaching has evolved, so that we now admit exceptions to the teaching of Jesus on marriage and divorce. In so doing, we are trying to be faithful to his liberating intent. This development begins in the New Testament itself. In Mark, Jesus is against all divorce, no exceptions. Just a decade later, in Matthew, he allows for divorce in cases of adultery. Here, we can see the early Church wrestling with messy, human reality. Today, many churches, including ours, recognize additional complexities–without denying the teaching of Jesus.
Making pastoral provision for the needs of real people is not the same as giving up on the norm. In Christian marriage, we aren’t allowed to hedge our bets. In marriage, couples promise unconditionally to stay together “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death.” These vows challenge us to move beyond the transactional understanding of relationships that is everywhere in our market-driven society. Instead, Jesus invites us to embrace the neighborly and freely-given love at the heart of God’s vision for us all.
Sometimes, marriages do break up too easily. Sometimes, we deprive ourselves of the benefits of community, where we have to stay in relationship and let our commitments shape us over time. To give up too easily on these commitments is as big a mistake as keeping us together no matter what the cost. Sometimes—certainly in cases of adultery, abuse, or abandonment—we can choose to admit brokenness, seek healing, and move on.
Beloved, we are partners in God’s creative work. And, unlike any merely human partnership, the community between God and us can’t be broken. In the Bible, marriage is held up as a sacred mystery which points us to the union between Christ and his Church.
This, incidentally, is the heart of the matter when it comes to same-sex marriage. If marriage is about lifelong commitment and freely-chosen relationship between equals, how does it make sense to confine it to couples of the opposite sex? Two people make solemn vows to each other, intending to remain together for life. They promise to keep Jesus at the heart of their relationship. The community that God thereby brings about should reflect his faithfulness, his justice, and his self-giving love. Same-sex couples have brought a blessing to the Church in my view, forcing us to reclaim the Christian meaning of a dying institution—one that’s too often been debased and disconnected from the Gospel.
Today’s readings are not just about marriage, though. They are about every community and all our relationships. The Church itself (like every city, every town, every nation) is a type of community. We have been given to each other, so that we might learn to share God’s love.
The fact that we often hurt and betray each other does nothing to annul God’s call to us—to live together as neighbors. In Christian community, we love each other. It isn’t always easy, but we love each other. Again and again, we choose to love–not because it’s easy, and not because of anything we get in return. But because Jesus taught us to love each other—and showed us how.
Despite the violence of our world, which cost him his life, Jesus was not afraid to become “bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.” That’s what our lesson from Hebrews is all about. For our sake, the Son of God becomes human. He becomes our brother and shares our humanity. In our flesh, he expresses God’s “very nature.” The nature of God is love.
We are living members of his Body, the Church. We are his partners in the holy work of love. Throughout history, God has searched for a faithful partner. Jesus says “yes” to God with all his heart. In every moment and every choice, he says “yes” to God–and “yes” to us. He renews our humanity. He lives and dies for us all
And so, we are never, ever alone.
Amen.