"Behold I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him..." (Revelation 3:20) A collection of my Sunday homilies for Holy Mass as well as some occasional talks and reflections. May my words enable you to hear the voice of Christ, who asks that you open the door to Him. Please share this podcast with others if you benefit from listening to it.
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11:33
Hard teaching for the ears of the 21st century in today's Gospel reading!
But it was hard teaching for the ears of the Pharisees as well in the 1st century. Our human nature is wounded by sin and so we can find ourselves not receptive to God's reasoning and plans. There can be a response to question it and even to ignore it, and some may reject it. Thankfully, we also have the effects of grace which turns our minds, and also our hearts, towards what God speaks to us, because we sense in it not only what is true, but also what truly satisfies the human heart. Marriage, sexuality and human relationships lived according to God's plan will only bring peace and human flourishing.
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frpchandler@armidale.catholic.org.au
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We have become acutely aware over recent decades that there is a difference between what is lawful and what is moral. There was a time in history when the legal system mirrored the moral system. That is called Christendom. This lasted from the Christianized Roman Empire until the latter part of the eighteenth century. In the twenty first century we see not only a disconnection between law and morality, but also a contradiction, even an outright legal attack upon morality. For those of you who are listening in New South Wales, we must note here that the proposed debate in October on the deliberate ending of human life that will be conducted in the New South Wales Parliament, and if you are listening in other parts of the country, you will know that those laws have already been passed sadly. For all of this, it is consoling for us to hear again that Jesus came to restore creation to the purity of its origins. That is why in the gospel of today's holy mass he points his enemies back before Moses to the beginning, there to see the intention of God, the creator of man and woman. This is where truth is found. Christ says that divorce violates the divinely willed order of creation. Moses permitted it only as a concession to the people's hardness of heart. Marriage he reveals is a sacrament, a divine life giving sign. Through the union of husband and wife, God intended to bestow his blessings on the human family, making it fruitful, multiplying it until it filled the earth. That's why today's gospel moves so easily from a debate about marriage to Jesus blessing children. Children are blessings the Father bestows on couples who walk in his ways, as we hear in today's Psalm. Let's turn our attention to the first reading from the book of Genesis. This reading has important lessons for us about the nature of the human person and the whole created order that God established. Each human being, starting with Adam, exists in a kind of solitude, distinct from the natural world and from other persons, including God, but each person is created to be in relationship with all of them. Mankind has the capacity to understand nature, but nature does not have the capacity to understand mankind. Adam could give names to the animals, but they could not name him, and only God can name the human person. We can imagine Adam having a great time playing with the animals and them with him, but he needed someone truly equal to him. And this is why God made human beings male and female, so that each could have a suitable partner or helper. As human persons men and women are equal in dignity, but complementary. Each has something the other needs, physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Adam and Eve were created married. Thus husband wife is the most fundamental and essential human relationship. It gives rise to the second fundamental and essential relationship child parent. God Himself is the author of marriage. Humanity did not invent it, so it is not simply a human institution, it is not the creation of a government. It is neither just a purely personal relationship between two consenting adults, because the well being of the individual person, and of both human and Christian society, is closely bound up with the healthy state of married and family life. When we turn to sacred scripture we see that it begins with the creation of man and woman in the image and likeness of God, as we've heard in the reading today from Genesis, and the Bible concludes with a vision of the wedding feast of the Lamb in the last book of the Bible, the Apocalypse. Between these two bookends, so to speak, sacred scripture speaks of marriage often, of its mystery, of its institution, and the meaning God has given it, its origin and its end, its various realizations throughout the history of salvation, the difficulties in it arising from sin, and of course the renewal of marriage in the new covenant of Christ and the Church. We have witnessed in the last century a slowly building and now a crashing tidal wave of forces aimed at the destruction of marriage and the family. First contraception in the nineteen thirties, the sexual revolution of the nineteen sixties, then radical feminism, no fault divorce, abortion on demand, reproductive technologies that made possible procreation separate from the conjugal act, homosexual rights, internet pornography and the hookup culture, so called same sex marriage, and finally most recently the truth, supposedly, that gender is not binary, but is something people assign for themselves. None of that none of this is a progressive liberation from some sort of slavery, as the mass media describes it. The truth about man and woman resides in God. We are created male or female. Men and women are equal, but complementary. Marriage can only be between a man and a woman. Marriage by its nature is exclusive and permanent and open to children. The marital embrace has two purposes, unitive and procreative. Contraception is immoral. The supreme good of marriage is children, and children require fathers and mothers to sacrifice themselves for each other and for their children. Marriage and family are the place in which husbands and wives grow in holiness through their sincere gift of self to one another and to their children. One of the many reasons that Catholics treat marriage and the family with such seriousness is because if we were to let that go, we would lose the entire sense of what is happening here and what happens at every holy mass. Christ has given himself for and to the church in a way that resembles the self giving of husband and wife. The gift of his person to the church happened at Calvary, clearly when his side was opened and blood and water flowed out. But it is continued through time and repeated throughout time at every mass. At every mass Christ expresses his love as bridegroom to the church who is bride. With the regular gift of his very person to the church, vividly done at Holy Communion, He confers the fruits of His redemption, namely grace. He gives Himself and everything He possesses to the Church, and to each member of it. No matter what our age or state of life, all of us must defend and hold marriage and the family in the highest esteem. This is for the benefit of human society and also to give honour to God. Let us remember too that if we want Christ in our lives, everything everything has to be made subject to him, including our ideas about marriage.
