Marriage: the mystery of two people made one by their love of God and one another. It seems to me that marriage, a sacrament grounded in love, is essentially Triune. The best way I have found to understand and explain this is to ask, more than a bit rhetorically: "What is the Holy Spirit but the love between the Father and the Son personified?" Clearly, this is not a "natural" family. It is a supernatural family.
Even the Holy Family is not a natural family but an incarnation of the supernatural family. The Church, composed as it is of God's adopted children, reborn through Christ in the waters of baptism by the Spirit's power, is a supernatural family. As Jesus asked earlier in Saint Mark's Gospel: "Who are my mother and [my] brothers?" He answered his own question: "whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother" (see Mark 3:30-31).
Love that is love, while it certainly has an indispensably affective dimension, goes beyond feeling. Love is not only a choice, an act of the will but a difficult, sometimes sacrificial choice. Love requires putting one's beloved before one's self, setting aside one's own wants, desires, and convenience. This is an easy, even beautiful thing to write or to say, but it is hard to do, very hard. I know because I fail at it regularly.
In Jesus's day, a divorced woman faced a predictably frightening future. It would be difficult if not impossible for her to remarry. If she had family to fall back on and who were willing to assist her, she might be alright. If not, she wouldn't be. Discarded women in Jesus's culture may have had to turn to prostitution or, failing that, begging.
It's important to note that there was no question of a woman divorcing her husband. Nonetheless, in his normal somewhat oblique way, Jesus seeks to level the playing field. He goes further back in the Law- back to Genesis. He invokes what I call the Bible's Ur verse on marriage: Genesis 2:24. You see, while love is prolific, it isn't just about sex and procreation. As many married couples who don't have children of their own demonstrate, love can be prolific (pro-life-ic) in many and varied ways.
It is not a random juxtaposition that Mark's Gospel has Jesus welcome little children at end of his teaching on divorce. It's a tough teaching. With this teaching, he publicly rebuked then then-current Jewish ethos, grounded in the Law. He did so by clearly demonstrating from the Law that Moses (not God), permitted divorce only because of the failure of so many to love. What is sin but our failure to love?
Who does Jesus point to as an example of the kind of love that incarnates God's kingdom? Little children. As the first line of Ubi Caritas, translated into English, states: "Where charity and love are, God is there." While the Eucharist is the sacramentum caritatis, flowing as it does from the altar of God, Christian marriage, too, is a sacrament of love.
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