HE NEVER DIVORCES US

27th Week in Ordinary Time
Mk 10:2-16

The call to Christian married life is a vocation to holiness in the context of conjugal love. Spouses are called to mirror in their love for each other the love of God for us. Thus, spouses are supposed to be living reminders of how much God loves us. By answering this call and fulfilling their vocation to mirror God’s love to us, Christian spouses grow in holiness even as they assist everyone in the community to strive for holiness themselves.

Divorce is a blatant attack against this sacred calling. It violates us, God’s people, even as it violates God and the spouses themselves. A Christian, therefore, cannot advocate divorce and remain a true follower of Jesus.

Let us make things clear.

Separation of spouses is not divorce. If we know a battered wife, we should advise her to leave her husband before it is too late. Common sense dictates that she must stay away from her husband and even live separately from him for good. If a husband brings home a mistress, takes drugs, or molests his children, should his wife continue living with him? Separation from her husband, however, does not give the wife the right to enter into another marriage while her husband lives. Living-in with another partner is likewise unacceptable. The same holds true for her husband.

A declaration of nullity of marriage is not divorce. When a Church declares a marriage null and void, what the Church says is that from the very start there is no marriage contracted due to some impediments or defects in either or both spouses or, using a technical phrase, in the canonical form of the marriage.

We hear civil courts granting appeals for divorce but we hear church tribunals declaring nullity of marriages.

Divorce is not the separation of spouses neither is it the declaration of nullity of marriage. Thus, divorce does not belong to the Church’s concept of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. A strict reading of canon law yields to the understanding that divorce is a legal fiction, an invention to accommodate the caprices and whims and the distorted view on marriage of those who promote it. One may even wonder if a law on divorce is actually the personal need of those who tenaciously advocate or foolishly enact it into law. Jesus Himself answers those who try to entangle Him with the web of legal interpretation regarding the divorce bill that Moses wrote, “Because of the hardness of your hearts (Moses) 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 flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”

The love between Christian spouses must be configured to the love between God and His people. The vocation of married spouses is to mirror God’s love for His people through a love proper to Christian marriage. When we are unfaithful, neglectful, ungrateful, unloving, idolatrous, and sinful, God does not divorce us, does He? If He does, then it is valid to consider divorce in Christian marriage. But He does not. He never will.