Twenty-Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time- B
During his pontificate, St. John Paul ushered into the Catholic consciousness a new way of understanding God and our existence. During his weekday audiences, he introduced what was later called the Theology of the Body.
This weekend, the Church draws our attention to the vocation of marriage in the traditional sense by recalling the beginning of time with the creation of Adam and Eve. The ancient text from Genesis recalls Adam’s problem of being alone. “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him.”
It is important to note that when Genesis refers to Adam’s solitude, it implies humanity in general and does not mean the male gender. The name “Adam” in this context describes the potential problem of a person’s isolation, whether male or female. When the text describes the creation of Eve by taking ribs from a man and giving them to a woman, God rectifies humanity’s loneliness. By creating a male (commonly known as Adam) and a female (also known as Eve), the two are destined for a nuptial relationship. The closeness of newly created persons by sharing their bodies is the precursor to marriage, which can only occur between a man and a woman. This is why Genesis tells us the “two become one flesh.”
In the backdrop of the teaching from Genesis, Moses permitted a husband to write a bill of divorce against his wife and dismiss her for specific reasons. The Pharisees, citing the Mosaic law, challenged Jesus about divorce. He replied that because of the hardness of human hearts, Moses permitted divorce. Jesus then reiterated what was taught in Genesis: no human must separate what God has joined.
Later, the disciples asked Jesus about his response, and he told them what seemed to them today to be a very difficult teaching. “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her;
And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
In the Christian world, the Protestants disregard Jesus’ teaching and permit divorce. In the Orthodox tradition, they allow a person to be divorced only once under the rationale of a fallen world. The Catholics utilize annulments that state the marriage was flawed at the outset because of some deficiency of one or both to truly enter into a sacramental bond.
History informs us that there are exceptions in an individual sense due to hardness of the heart or other reasons. Regardless, this doesn’t take away from the eternal meaning of God’s will for humanity. Here is where the Theology of the Body can help us.
St. John Paul helped us understand that every human being’s vocation is to love God, himself, and his neighbor. The premier example of this vocation is the marriage bond, whereby man and woman give exclusively to each other with their spirits and bodies. Marriage solves God’s will for a person not to be alone and is also meant to work with God to create new persons.
Therefore, every person has a nuptial characteristic most closely seen in marriage: they become one flesh through their exclusivity and openness to life. However, not all persons are married, and some will never marry. How, then, does the nuptial meaning of their bodies ever have the chance of reaching fulfillment? St. John Paul teaches the nuptial meaning of the body, which is not only limited to married couples but is made real by all individuals who want to express their love to God and one another.
St. John Paul links the person’s body to the understanding of sacramentality. Recall that a sacrament is an outward sign of invisible grace. The body can become the outward sign of the invisible desire to love God and one another. The body then becomes the sacrament of our love. What we do with our bodies reflects how we love, or not, ourselves, God, and other people. The Corporal Works of Mercy are precisely how the body of one and another act as the sacrament of love. It doesn’t matter whether a person is married; their bodies are used to express an act of love, which is invisible to the eye.
From the beginning of time, when God created humanity in his image and likeness, he set into motion the nuptial meaning of existence. Just as the Trinity is united in an inseparable bond of love, humans are called and destined to do the same. Every person has been called to a destiny of eternal life, a life by which an individual is intimately connected in a bond of love with the Trinity and one another. Eternal life and the resurrection of the body will be to fullness the nuptial meaning of our bodies.