God is orderly and teleological in his works. His act of creation was well planned out and purposefully ordered. Part of this order is the marriage institution, which he established with the creation of man and woman, two contrary genders that would purposefully form a whole. According to this divine order, God defined marriage as a union exclusively between a biologically male and a biologically female genders, who would then unite in love to become one flesh.
The two united
The fact that man and woman would through the bond of marriage become one flesh underlines the indissolubility of the marital union. For the two partners in this union can no longer be separated without hurting them severely. No one can cut the flesh without drawing blood. Actually, God wanted human beings to understand marriage as a serious weighty act. It is His intention that families and, consequently, human communities would be founded on this orderly and stable structure for the peace and joy of the human family.
A sad dissolution
The Jews were aware of this divinely ordained structure of marriage. However, they found it inconveniencing and annoying. The patriarchal Jewish society wanted a complete domination of the female gender. The men folk wished to divorce them whenever and for whatever reason they wanted. Thus, they looked for a way to get around the divine marital order and urged Moses to give them new rules for marriage that would favor their self-interest. Moses succumbed to their nagging and permitted them to divorce their wives. Nonetheless, they knew that their actions were not in accordance with the divine order; that according to the order of nature marriage is indissoluble. It was for this reason that the Pharisees needed a further clarification or even justification from Jesus in today’s gospel.
Natural reaffirmation
In his answer, however, he calls their attention to the fact that God established marriage from the beginning of creation as part of the overall order of nature. To support this, he quoted the Jewish scripture: “At the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason, the man will leave his father and his mother, and the two will become one flesh. They are no longer two, but one” (Genesis 2: 24). Jesus goes further to accentuate and reaffirm the unity of spouses in marriage and the indissoluble nature of marriage by saying: “What God has joined together, let no man separate” (Mk. 10: 9). For Christ, divorce is out of the question. He even declares a person who divorces his or her spouse guilty of adultery.
Choosing to love
This is admittedly a hard lesson. But it calls our attention to the price of love. For marriage is founded on love and not on infatuation or convenience. Whoever chooses to get into marriage, chooses love. And whoever makes a choice, must accept the consequences of his or her choice. Otherwise, one would become a persona non grata. One who loves only in good times, is not worthy of love and not qualified to contract marriage. For Love demands consistent fidelity and self-sacrifice. The fundamental cause of every divorce is unfaithfulness. A marriage falls apart because either one or both partners no longer want to keep their original vow to love till death separates them. This is the same infidelity that divorced man from his God.
Rising to love’s challenges
Just as there is no rose without thorns, there can never be any marriage without challenges. Every marital union has its comforts and its inconveniences. The comforts should be enjoyed, but at the same time one must strive to accept the inconveniences involved in love. For love without sacrifice does not exist. Paradoxically, one needs the bad times as much as the good moments to really enjoy marriage. Think about this: What would have been the aesthetic outlook of our world, if all things were single-colored?
