Thought for the week 6 October 2024

Adam sounds just like a teenager when God introduces him to Eve:

This is bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh. ‘We were made for each other! We’re a perfect match.’

It’s the experience of falling head over heels in love, no thought of difficulties to come, of the many compromises that have to be made if a relationship is to survive, and rightly so, love is, we hope, blind – although now that everyone under the age of 30 seems to have identical clothes, teeth and plastic surgery be they men or women, presumably there are other indicative factors that people look for in each other! But love is the theme of the readings today, especially it seems the first and second.

But then Mark’s gospel brings things down to earth with its talk of divorce. It touches on the pain of falling out of love, on the sense of betrayal and deception — often self-deception as much as being deceived by one’s partner — that sometimes follows in the years when that initial excitement dies away and the love that was promised is no longer alive and the blind love that attracted two sets of shiny new teeth and Botoxed lips in the first place seems to turn to thoughts of law courts, writs and divorce papers. As it was in the beginning, so it is now. Legalism takes over love.

Most people are turned off by legalism. Laws, rules, and regulations can bog us down. They can curtail our freedom. There are times when we want to do something, and can’t see any wrong in doing it, but we are told that it is against a regulation, a rule, or a law. It is attractive to think that we can do away with a lot of laws and legalism.

If we use our imagination, however, it is difficult to see how a society or organisation could work without any rules. People would drive along whatever side of the motorway took their fancy. There would be no such thing as property, and so there would be no such thing as theft — you could simply take what you liked. You may have a personal moral code to live by, but you would have no recourse against someone who lived by a different code. Too much law, however, is stifling. We are then often not allowed our rights, and we can even be stopped from fulfilling our obligations. The spirit of the law should encourage us to claim our rights and fulfil our duties, but too many rules, or the wrong rules, can have the opposite effect and so it is in the church, our rules, our laws have to come from Christ or they are vanities, and they have therefore to be rooted in love and the ability of all people to flourish in love of God and therefore each other.

When God created man, as we are given to understand in the book of Genesis, he saw that it was not good for him to be alone. (Gen. 2:18) And so he created woman. In that brief account, at the very beginning of the Bible, of an essential part of God’s creation we learn of God’s wisdom, compassion and love in forming the first ‘marriage’. The continuation of the human race exists thanks to God’s willingness to allow men and women to play a vital role in the continuation of his creative process, giving them a prime function in sharing God’s re-creative power – so it is undoubtedly that the human race, God’s people – have been born and continued. This is no sensitive subject, but divinely appointed procreative biology, but it is not all the story, as we are reminded by Christ himself on numerous occasions.

Perhaps no issue has been greeted as being so sensitive to Christian faith, as the issue of how the Church deals with all these issues in the 21st century. We are indeed conscious of the diversity of views held in conscience by so many followers of Christ; and equally conscious of the anguish and pain that can be caused by a perceived reluctance on the part of the Church, to put into practice the compassion and forgiveness that is shown by Christ himself.

Hebrews takes a very different tack. Its focus is on Jesus as the source of our happiness, the goal of our search for the fullness of life. In Him is our eternal bliss that transcends our mortal nature. Christ is the high priest, whose violent death in a fallen world is a perfect sacrifice of loving obedience to the Father. What all the previous sacrifices of Israel had gestured towards, now find their fulfilment in Him. Only through His Passion, and the grace which flows from the Risen Christ, may we now find forgiveness of sin and be made holy by a share in Christ’s glory. So, the family is transcended in the greater ‘family’ of ‘brothers’, men and women who in Christ are the adopted heirs of His Heavenly Father.

You should be able to tell Christians by their realism and by their founded belief that God is greater than any uncertainties or questions that we may have. It is fashionable to say that we are all sinners. True enough, but this is only part of the truth. We are also repentant sinners, and we seek the grace of deeper conversion during the whole of our lives, however we live, whoever we are, we are all in need of forgiveness, grace and love, and the readings today call us clearly to show that to each other, more perfectly modelling the Body to which we belong, as it has been, as it is and as it shall be in the future. Love is His command, and love is why He died and rose again to share His body with us.

Adam sounded like a teenager, but we are heirs of a new covenant and our voice is a different one, honed by his experience and brought into the light by the Son of God, who we are called to imitate.