27th Sunday 2021
Genesis 2:18-24; Hebrews 2:9-11; Mark 10:2-16
I love that First Reading, part of the second creation account from the Book of Genesis: it is one of the most glorious pieces of poetry ever written. You can envisage the scene: God, having created the man, now wondering what to do with him. It is a very different insight from the evolutionary approach taken in Genesis chapter one, accounting for the complementarity of the sexes in a literary, rather than a literal way.
There is almost an evolution in God’s thought processes as imagined here; imagined, indeed, rather mischievously. “Right”, thinks God, “I have made this creature called man, but he is a bit of a sore thumb at the moment. He needs a companion. I shall make animals, and see if they will be enough.”
So the man sits there, and gives names to the animals and birds as God brings them to him. “That’s a cow, and that’s a horse, and I’ll call that funny looking one a duck billed platypus. What’s next?”
“Aye, you’re right” says God. “You need a ‘next’, don’t you? Right, I have just created anaesthetic, so I am going to put you to sleep, and perform the first operation.”
So God puts the man—let’s call him Adam, which is Hebrew for “man”—to sleep, and forms his mate/companion/significant other/other half, out of him. And when the man wakes up, he has a totally different reaction from anything that went before. You can almost see him leaping up and down with excitement: “Yippee! Yabadabadoo! This is what I’ve been looking for! This is part of me, bone from my bone and flesh from my flesh—we need to put ourselves together again!” And so, best beloved, we have the sacrament of marriage.
Then along come the dull and dopey atheists (or so called atheists, as I don’t actually believe in the existence of atheists) shouting, in their literalist manner, “It’s not true! It didn’t happen like that! It’s not scientific!”
Of course it isn’t, you dingbats! It’s not supposed to be. Have you never heard of poetry? Have you never read Tolkien? No, of course you haven’t. If it doesn’t fit in with your own colourless, dreary, literalistic mindset, you are not interested. You don’t actually believe in science, but in scientism, a false religion which is to genuine science what Islamism is to genuine Islam. You really do need to get out more.
Our Lord takes, as the basis of His pronouncement on marriage, this insight of Genesis that marriage is rooted in the very nature of human beings; that it entails a fulfilment of that nature. The union which constitutes marriage is a complete union, making one person out of two.
Yet Jesus was the first to accept the fallibility of human nature, its lack of that completeness which is the literal meaning of perfection. At one level, it is startling that the author of the Letter to the Hebrews states that God made the man Jesus “perfect through suffering”. This doesn’t mean that Jesus was imperfect, in our usual sense of the term, but that, until He suffered, He was incomplete as a human being: He lacked something of human experience.
Always, He could recognise that incompletion in others, and was compassionate with it. He set out the nature of marriage, but was always gentle and forgiving with people who fell short of the ideal, and that must be our approach too. We must maintain the essential rootedness of marriage, whilst being compassionate with individuals, and in particular not seeking to compel people to remain in abusive relationships which are in themselves a denial of marriage.
We are also increasingly realising that there are people whose basic nature does not reflect the complementarity of the sexes, but are drawn by nature towards others of the same sex. That is a situation which calls for much more prayer and reflection than it has yet received.
