God Made Them Male and Female

Gospel Reflection for October 5, 2024 - Mark 10:2-16

And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away.” But Jesus said to them, “For your hardness of heart 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.’ So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”

And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. And 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.”

And they were bringing children to him, that he might touch them; and the disciples rebuked them.But when Jesus saw it he was indignant, and said to them, “Let the children come to me, do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands upon them. (Mark 10:2-16 RSVCE)

Out of his many lasting theological contributions to the Church, Pope St. John Paul II’s theology of the body, whose mature form is found in his collected general audiences entitled Man and Woman He Created Them, is certainly one of the greatest. Harmonizing Scripture with his background in Thomist and personalist philosophy, his monumental study was essentially an exegesis of two specific Bible passages: the first reading and the Gospel for this Sunday. His goal was to explain, in the context of both salvation history and our God-given human nature, why Christ declared definitively that marriage is, as the Catholic Church alone upholds among all Christian churches, a monogamous and permanent communion between one man and one woman which is wholly self-giving and open to new life in procreation. Despite their claims to be “Bible-believing Christians,” no Protestant sect obeys what is one of Our Lord’s clearest teachings, and even the Orthodox allow for divorce and remarriage under certain conditions.

The Holy Father connected these two passages to what Vatican II’s document Gaudium et spes called “the communion of persons” (communio personarum). As the first reading shows, man was not created to be alone: he could only be complete if he lived in an interpersonal communion. This is based not only in his spiritual faculties but in the very nature of his body, which is what the Holy Father described as the sacramental “sign of the person in the visible world,” with the person being a spiritual mystery revealed and communicated through the material body, analogous to Christ’s revelation of the mystery of Himself in the sacramental sign of the Eucharist.

Ultimately, he explains, this interpersonal communion between Adam and Eve, which he called the “primordial sacrament” or the “sacrament of creation,” was instituted by God for two reasons: to train humans in “the freedom of the gift,” a life of total self-giving love for the other; and, following St. Paul’s theology in Ephesians 5, as a sign and preview of the “sacrament of redemption,” the union of God and man through Christ’s self-sacrifice on the Cross and our participation in His Mystical Body, the Church. In this way, marriage not only corrects and fulfills man’s “original solitude,” when he lived only among non-human creatures and realized both his uniqueness as made in the image of God and his need for “a suitable partner,” to use the words of Genesis, but also acts as a sacramental sign in this world of the true meaning of human life: that God made us for Himself and we are made to live in loving communion with Him and all the saints in eternal beatitude.

How does this connect, per Our Lord’s own citation, to His prohibition of divorce and remarriage? The Holy Father explains that, for love to be a perfectly free gift of self, it requires complete commitment from both persons; in this way, through their personal love and bodily consummation, husband and wife restore the original unity of man and woman which was shattered by original sin. After the Fall, man became afflicted with concupiscence, treating the body not as a sacramental sign of the person but as a mere animal, material object to be used for our power and pleasure. Accordingly, Adam and Eve soon learned shame, covering their sexual parts with clothing in order not only to hide their sinfulness but to protect their personal dignity from the objectification of lust.

For marriage to fulfill its aforementioned dual purpose of training man and woman in interpersonal loving communion and thereby representing Christ’s loving union with the Church which He will accomplish in the Second Coming, when the Bridegroom will return and lead His Bride the Church to the mansions of His Father, (Jn 14:2-3) it must be a true gift of self, made in love and freedom, not merely a temporary contract of convenience, a means of gaining pleasure or monetary benefit for oneself so long as it remains comfortable, as is all too common today.

Christ’s restoration of marriage to its original sacramental form is considered naïve, unrealistic and impractical today, just as it has been throughout history; the same “hardness of heart” which led Moses to permit divorce inspired Protestants to do the same and now leads many people, Christian or not, to reject divorce entirely, instead simply “shacking up” for fun until something better comes along, or even dehumanizing others into objects of use in the completely impersonal medium of pornography. In this situation, children, the personification of the husband and wife’s interpersonal love which fulfills man’s nature as the image of the Blessed Trinity, in which the love between the Father and Son is personified as the Holy Ghost, become mere accessories or even superfluous inconveniences which one must prevent or throw away through contraception and abortion. Now even worse attacks against marital love and children are perpetrated through the mockery of same-sex “marriage” and the absurdity of transgenderism which detach intercourse from procreation, sex from the body and fruitfulness from marriage.

If there is no real self-giving marital love between the man and woman, the children, even if loved by one or both parents, will have only an incomplete family, one not reflecting the sacrament of redemption as God intends. Similarly, like a Christian who fails to bring forth fruit in good works, the couples which avoid marriage and voluntarily remain childless are spiritually dead, living more like self-seeking animals instead of persons created for the gift of love. By extension, in this mentality the body is treated as no more than clothing, an instrument for use by myself and others, hence men and women today dress shamelessly, without respect for themselves or one another.

For the restoration of society today, marriage must return to its original design: this requires that we regain this authentic understanding of the personal dignity of each individual and the freedom of the gift as the foundation of marriage which the Holy Father so beautifully illustrated. Christ makes this possible through what the Holy Father called “the redemption of the body,” refreshing its signification of the interpersonal love of the Trinity through the immolation of His Body on the Cross and giving Christians the grace from the transformative indwelling of the Holy Ghost by which we can overcome concupiscence and live a life of chaste self-discipline and purity of heart. We must remind the world, as Christ did, that true freedom is not found in anarchical hedonism, the domination of others or one’s own body or mere technological power but in the loving gift of self, a gift made in charity and often in sacrifice, in suffering - this alone fulfills human nature’s purpose as an image of the Trinity made for the communion of persons and grants freedom from the chains of sin which prevent our realizing this purpose and finding true happiness. As Pope Benedict XVI once wrote,

We all know to what extent Christ remains a sign of contradiction today, a contradiction that in the final analysis is directed at God. God himself is constantly regarded as a limitation placed on our freedom, that must be set aside if man is ever to be completely himself. God, with his truth, stands in opposition to man’s manifold lies, his self-seeking and his pride. God is love. But love can also be hated when it challenges us to transcend ourselves. It is not a romantic ‘good feeling.’ Redemption is not ‘wellness,’ it is not about basking in self-indulgence; on the contrary it is a liberation from imprisonment in self-absorption. This liberation comes at a price: the anguish of the Cross.

Celibates who, as Our Lord said, “have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven”, (Mt 19:12) anticipating our eschatological marriage to Christ in the End Times when “they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven”, (Mk 12:25) also share in this sacramental imagery of marital love in service to the whole Church; as Pope Benedict observed, the degree to which we love and respect celibacy directly correlates to our love and respect for marriage, and so both must be reclaimed in the world today.