This Sunday’s readings can be daunting! But we can read them well with a little help.
Pope St. John Paul II became a priest in a world marred by World War II. Our history books tell us about these hellish days experienced by so many. Can we imagine a day when it would have been illegal for us to learn to count to 100 in our own language? This is one example of the dehumanizing oppression the Polish people experienced during the war.
Much of Pope St. John Paul II’s work as a priest-theologian was aimed at helping the human spirit recover from such experiences. I think it is safe to say that Pope St. John Paul hoped to remind us of what the human being is. The human being is a creature defined by nothing other than God’s love. Created by God, we were made for communion with him.
Almost every Wednesday of his pontificate between 1979 and 1984, John Paul II offered his catecheses on the human being. He began with the creation accounts in Genesis, focusing in a special way on the text we have from Genesis for this Sunday. We hear the same passage from Genesis twice this Sunday. Jesus repeats a key line of the passage from Genesis in the reading from Mark’s Gospel: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
Communion with God
Here, then, are important lines about the human being. These lines from Genesis orient us toward our ultimate end — communion with God.
For Pope St. John Paul II such passages of Scripture reveal us to ourselves. Genesis, he teaches, reminds us that we are “spousal” at the very core of our being. And our very own bodies corroborate this revelation! We can see in the physical form of a man and a woman that we were made for communion.
| October 6 – Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time |
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Gn 2:18-24 Ps 128:1-2m 3m 4-5, 6 Heb 2:9-11 Mk 10:2-16 |
Note, friends, that Pope St. John Paul II is not insisting on marriage as our ultimate end. Marriage, rather, is one way to communion with God. It is a Sacrament. It is thus a form of life that helps us grow in a more fundamental way: as spouses of God, “brides” of Christ.
Thus, Christ’s own catechesis on marriage in Mark’s Gospel is ultimately a catechesis on the human being.
Perhaps you remember that we encountered these same lines from Genesis several weeks ago — on Aug. 25 (the Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time). Hearing these lines then, it was St. Paul who helped us see that these lines from Genesis were about the great mystery of the Church and her celebration of the Eucharist. “This is a great mystery,” he wrote, “but I speak in reference to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:32).
God joined us
God, as our spouse, has joined himself to us. And not in some abstract way. God became a human being, who loved and suffered just as we do. And God still offers himself to us in concrete ways: His whole self is present to us in the Eucharist, and the married couple, become one flesh in the Sacrament of Marriage and find God in the love of their spouse.
Said from a different angle: God does not leave us, and will not leave us. As our spouse, having become “bone of our bone” and “flesh of our flesh,” God will not take back the gift he has given to us. As Christ said, “[W]hat God has joined together, no human being must separate.”
Now we can read this Sunday’s Scriptures in a new “key.” Let’s read them in accord with our most fundamental reality and vocation: spousal people made for communion with God and joined to him in the Church. Let us always remember, with the pope saint, who we are, “from the beginning of creation” (Mk 10:6-9).
