27th Sunday Ordinary Time - Year B

THE GARDEN OF MARRIAGE

The readings of this week focus on the foundational relationship of all families: the partnership between a husband and a wife.

The first reading from Genesis (2:18-24) presents God’s search of “suitable partnership” for Adam.  This Genesis creation story presents the interesting notion that it takes two attempts to find “suitable partnership” for man.  God begins the process of finding a partner for Adam with the animal kingdom.  This seems like a logical place to find a partnership for Adam since both man and “the wild animals and various birds” were created out of the same substance: “out of the ground” (compare Gen. 2:7 and 2:19).  And in Adam naming the animals, he would know them intimately (This speaks to the widespread ancient belief that naming something gives you intimate knowledge of that which you name.)  Curiously, “none proved to be suitable partners for man”.  So God attempts to find suitable partnership for Adam by using another strategy.  And this one proves effective:  God finds suitable partnership for Adam not out of ground from which he himself was created but rather through Adam’s own body.  God puts man to sleep and builds from his “side” (a more accurate translation than “rib”) a new creation.  It is the sharing of flesh and bone that united man and woman.  Now the man names this new creation “woman” and together they find “suitable partnership” in their ‘clinging’ to one another.

As the Genesis story tells us, the process of God searching and finding suitable partnership for man was not without its challenges.  It took hard work and tenacity even by God himself.  Perhaps this is why Jesus is so insistent in today’s Gospel reading (Mk 10:2-16) that “what God has joined together, no human being must separate”.  Jesus insisted that not only prohibition of husband divorcing his wife but also a wife divorcing her husband.

The second reading (Heb 2:9-11) connects to this notion of partnership between man and woman in a profound way.  But here it is not partnership between man and woman in terms of flesh and bone; here it is partnership between the human and the divine in terms of suffering and death.  Hebrews teaches us that in Jesus’ suffering and death the human and the divine have found “suitable partnership”.