Can We Image Heaven Here On Earth?

Friday of the 19th Sunday in course 2024

I looked up the first reading we just heard on a sermon website to which I frequently contribute, and discovered no sermons posted on the passage from the prophet Ezekiel. Frankly, I find the story pretty gruesome on first reading. But some Scripture can be metaphorical. God is telling Ezekiel to give His message to Jerusalem, capital of the tiny kingdom of Judah, in the years after Assyria and then Babylon had subjected them to foreign rule. The message is a look back at the history of God’s relationship as husband to Israel’s as wife. And the message goes all the way back to the first years of Israel’s life in the promised land. That was the time of the Judges.

And the era of the Judges was not the best for Israel. Just read the book, full of betrayal and conflict and blood. So Ezekiel paints a picture of Israel as a newborn, daughter of a pagan Hittite and a pagan Amorite, the original inhabitants of that area. Actually, the picture painted is of a newborn being left to die, just like some babies from a late-term abortion, a survivor left to die without any care. But a compassionate passerby saw her lying untended, crying her last breaths, and commanded her to live, treating her like a favored offspring. So she grew, as Israel prospered under King David, and was prepared to enter a marriage covenant with the Lord. The picture here is of the preparations for a splendid Jewish wedding. But Israel became infatuated with her own beauty and riches–gifts of God–and went “whoring” after false gods. (The Scriptures are very expressive here.) Quite a few lines are then omitted in the Lectionary, because the Church wants to get to the real point of this reading. God would not abandon her–or us–to licentiousness and false gods. He would establish and ratify a new covenant, one that would never be broken.

How? Turn to the Gospel, after reflecting with Isaiah about his promised salvation, about God actually, physically, being with His people in their midst.

The Pharisees came up to Jesus–Who we know is the real author of Torah–and ask him a question that had caused a riff in the rabbinic tradition. “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?” Now some rabbis taught that a guy could divorce his wife even if all he did was burn supper. Others had more sensitivity to the injustice of that and specified strict reasons for divorce. You’ll notice that the wife is being treated more or less as property, not a human with dignity equal to the husband. Jesus found the answer right at the beginning of Torah, and He made it applicable to everyone. In Genesis we read about the man and woman being joined together by God for the growth of the human family. He says “a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” And he reasons from that quite logically: “they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder." Jesus goes on after a question about Moses’ rules on divorce, and prohibits divorce universally, unless the marriage is made unlawful by porneia. Now porneia is one of those Greek words that has to be interpreted. The Church has taught for ages that the use here has to do with the marriage being invalid, and specifies what can make a marriage invalid. For instance, a man cannot marry his sister or niece because of the incest prohibition. So any attempt to do that makes the union not a real marriage.

What Jesus is clearly trying to do is restore the original reality of human marriage, which is a precious gift given to humans for the rearing and education of each generation, as men and women gardened the earth and multiplied. Divorce can be a terrible injustice, especially to the women and children. Marriage is supposed to image the union of Jesus and the Church, a covenant of total love and self-giving, the kind of reality that Ezekiel foresaw and St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians about. If we follow the Holy Spirit’s lead in marriage, it can truly witness to a world in need the kingdom of heaven right here on earth.