Coffee With God

Reflection: Mark 10:2-16

The first reading recalls what was the beginning of all things. It tells it in a romantic way. Maybe it wasn’t exactly like that, but the most important thing is contained in that story: man and woman met and recognized each other. The look did not stop at the eyes. It reached the heart. Then began a story that lasts to this day. Both felt called to become one flesh, to live united in love. There are situations in which two spouses wonder if it is still worth insisting on trying to fix a relationship that began badly and is proving to be irreparably broken. They no longer love each other, there are incompatibilities of character, they are mean to each other, speak only to offend…What sense does it make to continue together? Can God demand that we continue living together in a way that is a torment? Human logic responds without hesitation: divorce is better. When so many couples separate after only a few years of marriage, they ask: Isn’t cohabitation preferable? If things don’t work out, we break up without too many problems. Many people, including Catholics disagree with the Church on this one issue of divorce. Any priest who speaks of the Church teaching and the indissolubility of marriage soon would be unpopular for them. That was the case with Jesus too. Mark tells us that the attempt of the Pharisees by raising the question on divorce was a trap to make Jesus unpopular with the crowd. Because the Jewish society practiced divorce as an established norm. Jesus responds in a straightforward and unexpected way. He brings everything back to the beginning, to the beginning of creation, to teach us that God blesses human love, that it is he who joins the hearts of two people who love each other, he who joins them in unity and indissolubility. This shows us that the goal of conjugal life is not simply to live together for life, but to love each other for life! In this way Jesus re-establishes the order which was present from the beginning. It’s true that there are difficulties in marriage, there are problems with children or with the couple themselves, arguments and fights… It is here, we must understand well the meaning of “becoming one flesh.” In the sacrament, these two individuals have become one flesh. Which means the joys, successes, achievements, of one of them is also joys and achievements of the other. In the same way the illness, pains, sufferings, and failures of one is also the failures and pains of the other. Those in married life, must always remember that your marriage is a silent homily for everyone else, a daily homily.