This Sunday our readings are all about marriage and I don’t mean our modern interpretation of what marriage means and it will mean something different to every person you ask. Our readings for this weekend set the ideal of God’s purpose and plan for creation and marriage. Let us stop and think about marriage In the Catholic Church, marriage is a sacrament. A sacrament is the real presence of God, the most powerful presence of the Lord possible in this world. In the sacrament of Baptism, God is present giving the Life of the Trinity to the baptized. In Penance God is present through his Son giving his forgiveness to the penitent. In the Eucharist, the Son is present nourishing the communicant and uniting him in an intimate way to the Divine Presence as Jesus is offered to the Father for us. In the sacrament of marriage, Jesus is present uniting his love to the love of the husband and wife. That said there are many good people who are in various forms of civil partnership and I am not going to knock them around for not following what marriage is all about in the sacramental sense.
What I will say is that the people involved in the various types of marriage have made a commitment to their partners and that shows that there is something good in all of this and we need to show them respect for the commitment that is there while being true to why we think so much of the Catholic idea of marriage and what it stands for. The “rit of divorce” in the Gospel Reading for this Sunday was there to protect the woman from being discarded arbitrarily without any possibility of survival in a society where she could not work or support herself. How does our society and our Church actually treat and protect those today who find themselves as “alleged” victims or those not in keeping with the “happily ever after” scenario or those whose interactive experiences with “authority” don’t match anything close to feeling accepted? Most people will agree that there is much room for improvement. Togetherness for life certainly remains the ideal both for Jesus and his followers. But our Church community has to face the fact that many marriages break down, and some of the victims of a broken marriage feel a deep longing for a new life partner and a brand new start. But this raises an acute question for the Church community: Can there be only point-blank black and white refusals there is much debate around all of this. I have been blessed in seeing so many people getting married and many others celebrating the 25th 50th and even the 60th anniversaries of their marriage commitments. But many people will tell you that their married lives were not always a bed of roses. So today we pray for a proper understanding of what marriage means in the catholic sense as we acknowledge the goodness that are there in other forms of marriage partnerships that are much more normal these days than in the past.
Fullerton T 