REFLECTIONS TODAY
In modern times, one of the traditional values under severest attack is the unitive and permanent character of marriage. One can hardly count by fingers countries where divorce has not yet been legalized. And marriage can be dissolved for flimsiest of reasons, often under the generic “irreconcilable differences.”
Through the internet, we get to know the details in the life of celebrities: their affairs, divorces, life’s partners, problems in their personal lives and of their families. All of these can be traced to the “state of the heart.”
In the Gospel, Jesus traces Moses’ permission for divorce in Israel to the people’s hardness of heart (Greek sklērokardia). It is a negative condition in which a person ignores, spurns, or rejects the offer of God to be a part of his or her life. It is the refusal to be taught and led by God.
When love is equated simply with feeling or emotion, where suffering is spurned instead of being faced, when a person’s weaknesses are not accepted, when there is no forgiveness, then marriages will always be in danger of falling apart.
Gospel • Mark 10:1-12
Jesus came into the district of Judea and across the Jordan. Again crowds gathered around him and, as was his custom, he again taught them. The Pharisees approached him and asked, “Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife?” They were testing him. He said to them in reply, “What did Moses command you?”
They replied, “Moses permitted a husband to write a bill of divorce and dismiss her.” But Jesus told them, “Because of the hardness of your hearts he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.
For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate.” In the house the disciples again questioned him about this.
He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
Source: “365 Days with the Lord 2025,” St. Paul’s, 7708 St. Paul Rd., SAV, Makati City (Phils.); Tel.: 632-895-9701; E-mail: publishing@stpauls.ph; Website: http://www.stpauls.ph.