27th Sunday in Ordinary Time
(Sunday 4th October 2015)
Marriage is a self-sacrificing love shaped by the love of Christ – (Mark 10:2-16)
Love is not always what we imagine it to be. The perfect image of love is that of a God who abandoned His divine paradise in Heaven, to take on flesh. Jesus went even further, by offering Himself in a most excruciating death on the cross, so that we might be reconciled with God and brought to eternal life with Him. Love is a word that we hear very often in our culture today, and especially regarding marriage.
God created the universe out of love and ordered all things toward love. As Christians we do not try to escape the physical world, as if the physical is bad and the spiritual good. This includes everything that we are and everything that we do. In no way does the physical pleasure take away from our spiritual well being. This also includes sex and sexuality. It is part of the created physical world and it too must be understood with regard to love.
Jesus has told us that the two greatest commandments are love of God and love of neighbour. Clearly this love is a self-sacrificing love that affects everything we do, and it effects how we treat others. Pleasure, for the sake of pleasure, becomes closed in on itself. It only thinks of the self and love of God, while love of neighbour does not come into the equation. There are many times when our culture treats sex as a pleasure in itself, without being related to love in anyway. In this model the intimate act, which is designed by God to be the most beautiful expression of love between and a man and a woman, can become totally turned in on itself. Sexual pleasure is properly related to love and finds its highest point in love.
From this very beginning in the book of Genesis, God institutes marriage between a man and a woman, where the two become one body in a physical union. Jesus describes marriage in a beautiful way, where man and woman become one body. Marriage is the place, where a man and woman offer themselves to one another for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. It is a self-sacrificing love shaped by the love of Christ. This is the place where the sexual act finds its highpoint, where two people offer themselves completely to one another.
Fr. Robert McGivney