Young lovers say silly things. Naive things. In the new throes of romance, young lovers pledge total love, undying love, exclusive love. They pledge enthusiastically, like the children Jesus directs us to in today's Gospel. They pledge without counting the cost, without suspecting that life will throw them many curveballs in the future. Curveballs they won't know how to hit. On the FOCCUS inventory given to many young couple as they prepare for marriage in the Church, one of the true/false statements is this: We believe that everything will work out as long as we love each other. The correct answer is 'false' because the inventory is about getting couples to talk about what lies ahead, rather than naively trusting that there will be no problems. But almost all couples answer 'true.' They believe in their love for each other. Love is all that matters. Love will conquer all.
Jesus tells the Pharisees and his closest disciples in today's Gospel that these young lovers are right. These young lovers who say silly things, who promise the world, who naively dismiss the difficulties that love and marriage entail, are right. Jesus reminds us that communication and compromise are not our vocation in life. Love is our vocation. For from the beginning, Adam noticed that it is not good for man to be alone. Man's vocation is not to be successful. Man's vocation is not to be secure. Man's vocation is not to enter into relationships that are contracts. No, man's vocation is simple. It is total. Man's vocation is to love. And to show this, Jesus points the Pharisees and his disciples to a little child, and says that this child reminds us of everything that we need to know about our vocation, for sometimes, the younger we are, the more we believe in love. Sometimes the younger we are, the more we get things right. The more we believe that love really is strong enough to climb any mountain. That in the end, love is everything, and that love conquers all.
Jesus reminds us through his teaching today that it is not the unpredictability of life, no matter how unforeseen and difficult those circumstances may be, that threatens marriage. The Pharisees, and even Jesus' disciples, were convinced that it was because life was too hard that Moses permitted men to write a bill of divorce. But Jesus points not to the circumstances of life, but to the heart. He says that it is not the vagaries of life that threaten marriage, but hardness of heart. Jesus says that it is when love grows cold that marriage is in peril, and that people start counting the costs and thinking about a way out not. Circumstances always change, but it when these circumstances cause hearts to grow cold, and only then, that marriage is in peril.
In raising marriage to the dignity of a sacrament by the teaching we hear in today's Gospel, Jesus reminds us that because He has come to fully reveal the love of God, love never has to take a second place to practicality. Because Jesus has come to make the love of God more present, through His marriage to His bride, the Church, there remains the real possibility of that original vocation of man to love to be fulfilled. Because Christ has come to cure man's original state of alienation and loneliness from God, love emerges anew in Christ as man's origin, and his highest destiny. Christ in elevating the sacrament of marriage through today's teaching, says that in and through Him, and in and through His marriage to His bride the Church, we can all remain like children, and like young lovers, ready to hear and to answer our deepest vocation to love. In fact, in raising marriage to the dignity of a sacrament, Christ promises that it is His love that will seal and strengthen the love of husband and wife so that love might endure through every difficulty.
The first time I proclaimed and preached this Gospel on marriage, I was a seminarian leading a communion service in a parish while the pastor was away on vacation. Before I got through half of the Gospel, a woman in the second row was weeping loud enough for everyone to hear. She was going through a divorce. With every word I said, both in reading the Gospel, and then by preaching it, I felt like I was rubbing salt in her open wounds. I felt terrible. What kind of good news is this that Jesus speaks? I wondered how I would ever be able to preach this Gospel to people who have been so wounded by divorce. There is nothing worse than divorce. In working with many couples as a priest, I understand that divorce is rarely entered into lightly. It is agonizing. It is not something that either husband or wife ever wanted. It is not something that any couple would want another couple to go through. Divorce has touched everyone's lives in a painful way. On one hand, Jesus' teaching on the indissolubility of marriage can seem like rubbing salt in wounds that are already very painful.
Yet almost every couple I have worked with who have divorced, would say that they believe in Jesus' teaching. Despite everything, they still believe that love is possible. We are made to believe in love. Not even the pain of divorce, and the difficulties of loving and losing, can completely erase this most basic meaning of our lives. When we hear Jesus reminding us that unless we become like children, we will not enter the kingdom of heaven, we know deep down that to stop loving is to stop living, for man does not make sense without love. He means nothing without love. And we know that when we stop believing that love can endure all things, and conquer all things - when we say that the circumstances of life must determine how much we love, then we know we are already dead. Deep down, all of us yearn for Jesus to remind us that it is the coldness of our hearts that cause us more difficulty than any curveball life throws us ever could.
On this Respect Life Sunday in the Church, we are reminded too that the decline of morality in the Church, the decline that threatens life in its most vulnerable stages, is ultimately a failure for us to hear and to answer our vocation to love one another as Christ has loved us. It is when love grows cold that the call to marriage, and to chaste living that respects the unique depth and fruitfulness of sacramental marriage, seems difficult. It is when love grows cold that we love selfishly, contractually, manipulatively, and in a way that is destructive to human life. It is not simply that we have become bad people that life is now compromised and destroyed in the womb, it is because we have stopped believing in love, and have believed instead in success and in managing circumstances for ourselves.
We are renewed in faith, hope and love, my dear friends in Christ, every time we approach this sacrament of love, the sacrament of sacraments that is meant to redeem our hearts and to setets us free to love in imitation of Christ. Let us through the sacrament of the Eucharist allow Christ to soften our stony hearts with his love, and send us forth without fear to love others as he has loved us, and through our vocation to love, to bring the Gospel of life to the world! Amen. +m
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