The more God reveals to us of the Divine Mystery, the more there is to see, to hear, to embrace, to know, and to live. Like the disciples of Jesus, it is easy for us to believe that the more we know, the less there is to learn, the easier it is to interpret God’s will in all things, but especially God’s will for us as the highest and most precious point of God’s act of creation.
The creation narrative in the Book of Genesis challenges the hierarchical and patriarchal view of contemporary man and woman and of the marriage relationship in particular. That relationship is to reveal in itself the very relationship of God with the beings whom God has created... in God’s own image and likeness. Jesus also challenges the views of his contemporaries regarding the relationship between those who are living the marriage covenant, the “divide” that seems to recreate the imbalance of value and esteem between the man and the woman. And in rapid sequence, the Gospel today recounts the response of Jesus to the disciples’ seeming operation on another assumption of imbalance of value and esteem as they attempt to keep the children gathered from “troubling” him. Jesus rebukes them.
It can seem easy at times to find affirmation of our own viewpoints regarding the simplest of things as well as regarding the most profound mysteries. The Jewish leaders who approach and question Jesus in today’s Gospel reading from Luke surely had their proof texts in hand when they did so. They knew the “right” answer they were safeguarding, and they probably had discussed the “wrong” answers he might give that would allow them to trap him. Jesus didn’t give any of those answers. He drew them more deeply into the mystery under consideration, that of marriage itself, and that of their own way of thinking in light of God’s Divine Being, Divine Will, and God’s Divine Vision of us!
Fr. Tom