August 14, 2015 - Receiving What We Are Given

Memorial of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Priest and Martyr

Scripture Readings

Both of today's lessons depict very clearly that our lives, even the good parts, are not wholly up to us.  In the first lesson (Joshua 24:1-13), Joshua is telling the people their story, from all the way back to Genesis, with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, right down to their present day, where they live in lands they did not till, and eat from vineyards they had not planted.  How would you feel as one of the Israelites, knowing this?  Everything becomes a gift to receive and take care of.  We realize that all of life is a gift that is not ultimately up to us.

In the second reading (Matthew 19:3-12), Jesus overturns a common thought about marriage, which is that the people had been used to thinking of marriage as something they did. Therefore they had the right to use marriage as they saw fit.  This led to numerous injustices, particularly for women.  Back then, there were two sides when it came to interpreting the particular Old Testament passage about divorce from Deuteronomy 24:1,  about a man divorcing a woman who "becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her." One of the sides maintained that it was only matters of indecency that could permit a man to request a divorce.  The other side maintained that was any matter that caused displeasure at all that permitted a man to divorce his wife.  So this question is ultimately a trick question meant to embroil Jesus in a heated dispute and make some people hate him because of the side he takes.   

But characteristically, Jesus sidesteps the controversy by taking the question to a new level.  Jesus is well aware of the pain and problems that divorce causes in his society: in ancient Israel, women without families had almost no way to support themselves, and this was even worse if they had children.  The recourse was often prostitution and the like.  This is why the Old Testament so frequently features laws about taking care of the widows and the orphans, because they were the poorest of the poor.  So when Jesus suggests that people should not divorce at all, it is a matter of care and justice for the poor, just as healing on the Sabbath is a matter of justice for the very ill.  Jesus is thereby saying that the ones who follow only the "letter of the law" are too hard of heart and do not quite understand the nature of God's kingdom.  God's love and mercy push us to seek beyond the mere letter of the law to living a more full life of discipleship that particularly means not just divorcing a woman for any reason at all. 
 
But living this out means accepting marriage, and one's spouse as a gift that is not entirely in your control, even in the times when the marriage seems not so much to be a gift.  God brings people together, people only tend to separate themselves from each other when left to their own devices.   The result of living only for our own ends - whether that is getting rid of a spouse for a vague charge of indecency of whether that is simply letting her go - is that we don't experience justice, love and mercy in our own lives either.  By receiving the gift of another person, we come to see God's great gifts.   

Receiving what we are given is especially poignant today as we remember Saint Maximilian Kolbe, martry of charity, who offered to die in place of another man selected for execution in a Nazi concentration camp. Ten prisoners were selected for starvation at the camp; each time the guards checked on that group of prisoners, they saw Kolbe leading the other nine prisoners in prayers, undergirding all of them with faith and love. Saint Maximilian Kolbe's life and death reminds us that while we cannot choose how other people respond to us - or the situations in which we may find ourselves - we can wholeheartedly choose to accept the gifts God offers to us in Jesus, and in the people He sends our way, in all walks of life. 

- Jana M. Bennett