25 February 2022
Friday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
The Pharisees ask if it is lawful for a husband to divorce his wife; indeed, it is lawful. But is it right? Is it God’s will that it be so?
“Because of the hardness of your hearts [Moses] wrote you this commandment.”
The law that allowed for divorce was a concession, was Moses recognizing that the people were so far astray from God that they knew not how to forgive, how to reconcile. They had lived among the Egyptians as slaves and had experienced firsthand that human beings were disposable. Divorce was lawful in ancient Egypt and sounds very similar to Moses’s “bill of divorce”; according to one archaeologist a man would say to his wife and also hand to her in written form, ““I left you as a wife for me, and I separate from you, and have no request at all from you, and I’m telling you that it is up to you to take for yourself another husband whenever you want.” It is likely Moses simply adopted the Egyptian custom, and it was likely the people were familiar with the custom as well; even before God gave them the Law, they were a people accustomed to laws affording them some modicum of power in an otherwise powerless position.
When Jesus comes He teaches differently, reminding us how it was in the beginning, that God created man and woman to love one another, to be radically one, as God is. He says to sinners, “…you shall be called, ‘My delight is in her,’ and your land ‘Espoused.’ For the Lord delights in you…For as a young man marries a virgin, your Builder shall marry you; And as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride so shall your God rejoice in you,” (Isaiah 62:1-5). How does He teach us this? Upon the Cross, where He chose the human race, and most especially His Church, to be His Bride forever. He will never issue to us a bill of divorce and send you away; rather, He will give you His very self, that the desire of the New Adam might be fulfilled, “…that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me,” (John 17:22-23)