Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time / Msgr. Owen F. Campion
The Sunday Readings
The Book of Genesis is the source of the first reading for Mass this weekend. Among the first five books of the Bible, Genesis reveals important facts. God is the creator of all. He gives life.
God created humanity in the genders of male and female. God willed that the two genders, united in one male and one female, complement each other and enrich each other’s lives.
The Scriptures at times are accused of belittling women. Certainly, the Scriptures were developed within varying cultural contexts, often different from today. To an extent, they were influenced by these cultural contexts.
The culture surrounding the development of Genesis was not strictly Hebrew. Rather, it was enveloped by paganism. In this paganism, women were little better than animals.
Genesis takes pains to declare the dignity of women equal to that of men. This is the meaning of the story that Eve was created from Adam’s rib. Adam and Eve, man and woman, were one in their nature—a revolutionary, fundamental basis for the time and place in which Genesis emerged for looking at both men and women.
Both genders possess equal dignity, because all are created by God and infused with an eternal soul.
Ultimately, every person, regardless of everything else, holds the supreme status of being God’s own, created uniquely by God, each a physical and spiritual earthly sign of God.
This reading is a powerful testament to the historic Jewish and Christian concept of marriage. Ordained by God, marriage should never be defiled.
For its second reading, the Church offers us a passage from the Epistle to the Hebrews. It also reaffirms the dignity of each human.
According to the reading, humans who love God and are faithful to him will one day rejoice in his presence. They will be with God. The key to attaining a place in God’s presence is Jesus.
Because Jesus is human as well as God, he loves all people as brothers and sisters.
St. Mark’s Gospel provides the third reading. It is a familiar passage. The question centers upon the legality before God of divorce itself, not the grounds for divorce.
It is often assumed that this question put to Jesus opened an entirely new debate, and that in replying, Jesus set aside the law of Moses.
The debate was vigorously underway at the time of Jesus among people learned in the tradition of the law of Moses. No universal agreement pertained as to what this Jewish legal code meant in this regard.
By settling the question, by ending the debate, Jesus appeared in the role of the divinely constituted and divinely empowered representative of God the Father.
Jesus set the question in its proper place. Marriage is God’s creation. It is subject to his will. Ideally, marriage reflects God’s love in the hearts of the spouses.
In the same passage, though on another occasion, Jesus blessed children. Like children everywhere and always, these children were innocent and vulnerable, but with great potential, not simply to succeed in a material sense in this life but to live with God in eternal life.
Reflection
Fundamentally, these readings call us to a divinely revealed truth so often and so outrageously ignored in the world. Each human being is God’s precious child, his priceless masterpiece of creation. No one, and no society, has the right to demean or compromise this dignity.
The agonizing problems of our day all spring from the refusal to honor all human beings as God’s own. So, terror and prejudice reign.
Marriage, like human dignity, also comes from God. It is fully and absolutely within the overall purpose of God, namely, to enable men and women better to know, love and serve God and then finally to be with him in the wonder of heaven along with the angels. †