Marriage is not our creation

“WHAT therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” (Mk 10,9) 

 That, in a nutshell, is how God created and designed marriage for us. It’s a lifelong, unbreakable commitment that is founded on God’s love and on our faith in him. Marriage is never just our own invention that would depend on how things go nor on the terms we set for it. Marriage should be entered into according to God’s designs for it, according to his terms, and not ours. 

 Thus, in the wedding ceremony, the man and the woman, armed by God’s grace, promise each other that they will stick together “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.” 

 As designed by God, marriage is for a man and a woman who in their God-based love for each other make themselves one flesh. Being a God-based love, it has to go beyond the human level of love. It has to be a love that is supernatural as shown to us and shared with us by Christ. 

 This God-based love will definitely be quite a tall order for us, since we are expected to go beyond our human and natural powers and resources. But as long as our faith in God is deep and strong, we can hack it, because more than us it is God himself who will enable us to love as God loves as shown to us by Christ. This God-based love can handle anything in our life. 

 Given the confusion and errors now besetting this issue on marriage, we need to reiterate that marriage is meant only for a man and a woman. There’s no such thing as same-sex marriage. Why? Because marriage is meant primarily for procreation of children. 

 And it has be exclusive—that is, between one man and one woman. It cannot be polygamous. Why? Because marriage is based on a love that involves the use of the body. Since in love, everything is supposed to be given to the beloved by the lover, once that body is given to the beloved, it cannot anymore be shared with another partner. Unlike in a love that is spiritual, the more people we love, the better. 

 But more important to realize about marriage is that it is actually a path to holiness. It is not just a purely human and temporal affair. It has great potentials for the parties involved to pursue the common goal of ours to attain holiness, our identification with God through Christ, since we are all God’s image and likeness. 

 That is why everything has to be done to make marriage achieve its fullest dignity. And that means that we have to purify and elevate the love that is the very germ of marriage to the supernatural order as it should be. 

 That love has to develop from simply being natural and body-emotion-world reliant to being more and more spiritual and supernatural, driven by grace rather than by mere natural forces. 

 With the sacrament of marriage, the love between husband and wife is already guaranteed to have all the graces needed to make that marriage reach its fullness. What is needed is the faithful and generous correspondence of the parties concerned to those graces. 

 The parties involved should realize that their love for each other should reflect and channel the very love Christ has for the Church. Yes, the union of husband and wife should be like that of Christ toward the Church. (cfr. Eph 5,22-33)

Christ’s anger meant for our conversion

From time to time, we see Christ showing anger over certain issues. This only validates the fact that anger is not necessarily bad, since it is part of our human nature and definitely also of the supernatural character of our life. We just have to be very careful about it, seeing to it that our anger is righteous anger, and not just the anger of a brute animal. 

 When Christ got mad over some leading Jews of his time, (cfr. Lk 10,13-16) that was because despite the many good things Christ showed them, they persisted in their own self-righteous ways and even went to the extent not only of not believing in Christ but also of finally condemning him to death. 

 We too should feel the anger of Christ, since we cannot deny that despite everything that Christ has done for us, we continue to be erratic in our ways, falling into all kinds of anomalies and sins. By feeling Christ’s anger, we should also feel the need for us to have another round of repentance and conversion. 

 Let’s just be frank about ourselves. We are all sinners! No matter how much we try to be good and holy—and to a certain extent, we can actually manage to achieve that ideal—we can still find ourselves falling into sin, if not big ones, then small ones, which can actually be more dangerous since we can tend to take them for granted, until we get used to them and would not feel anymore the need for repentance and conversion. 

 We have to understand that conversion is a continuing affair for all of us in this life. We can never say, if we have to follow by what our Christian faith tells us, that we are so good as to need conversion no more. We are all sinners, St. John said. And even the just man, as the Bible said, falls seven times in a day. 

 Besides, it is this sense of continuing conversion that would really ensure us that whatever we do, whatever would happen to us, including our failures and defeats, would redound to what is truly good for the parties concerned and for everybody else in general. 

 That’s because conversion brings us and everything that we have done in life to a reconciliation with God, from whom we come and to whom we go. 

 Also, Christ’s anger is actually a call for us to practice sincerity and consistency in our life, avoiding even the slightest trace of hypocrisy and double life. In fact, we should develop what is called as unity of life, rooted on our earnest effort to identify ourselves with Christ who is the pattern of our humanity, the savior of our damaged humanity. 

 We have to understand that only with Christ can we aspire to have unity and consistency in our life, one that is not rigid. Rather it is a consistency and unity that knows how to adapt itself properly given the different and changing conditions and circumstances of our life. 

 So, we really have to earnestly pursue the effort of living and defending our Christian identity all the time. We should not be afraid to show our Christian identity at all times and in all situations. We should not be Christian by name only, but also by our thoughts, desires and deeds, and in all aspects of our life. We should not be Christian in good times only, but also, and most especially, in bad times. We should not be Christian only in our sacred moments, but also in our mundane activities.

We are vital cooperators of Christ’s mission

WE need to realize this truth about ourselves more deeply and stably. We are meant to be living cooperators of Christ’s continuing mission of human redemption. And this is not only for a few, but actually for all of us. Of course, this truth of our faith can be acted on in stages. We cannot be all of a sudden active cooperators of Christ’s mission. It takes time, effort and, of course, God’s grace for us to achieve this ideal and dignity. 

 “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so, ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest,” Christ told his disciples, and is now telling us. (Lk 10,2) Despite the limitations and inadequacies we think we have to carry out this mandate, we should just try our best to respond to it. 

 We cannot deny that especially these days, there is a great need for these “laborers for the master’s harvest.” Today’s mission lands are not so much those places and people who are far away from the mainstream, those who still are kind of primitive in their culture and deprived even of the basic material necessities, as those who are in developed countries but very far in their faith. 

 More than far from the faith and from God, many people today look more resistant and even against God and anything that has to do with religion. They are more challenging since the attention and evangelization to be given to them require a more complex strategy. 

 In a sense, these places and people can constitute as the new peripheries that Pope Francis likes to talk about. And when he said that the Christian missionaries as shepherds should be ready to acquire the smell of the sheep, to be sure it will be a different smell from what we usually expect from poor, underdeveloped places and people. But just the same, it will be the smell of the lost sheep, even if the smell is sweet to the senses. 

 We therefore have to make some drastic updating of our understanding of what a missionary is. We should not get stuck with the common textbook idea that a missionary is usually a priest or nun who goes to a far-away place, and literally starts a settlement there. 

 While this concept of a missionary is still valid—it will always be—it now cries to be expanded to reflect its true character, especially given today’s fast-moving and more complicated world. 

 We have to understand that everyone, by virtue of his sheer humanity and much more, his Christianity, is called to be a missionary, and that he does not need to go to distant lands because his immediate environment already needs a more effective, down-to-earth evangelization. 

 Yes, even the ordinary guy in an office, the farmer, the businessman, the politician, the entertainers, artists and athletes, are called to be missionaries. That’s simply because as persons with a prominently social dimension in our life, we have to be responsible for one another. 

 And the biggest responsibility we can have for the others would be their moral and spiritual welfare, much more than just their economic or social wellbeing, though this latter concern is also very important. It is this responsibility that we have to learn how to be more serious about and more competent in fulfilling. This is the current situation and challenge to all of us.