The Good News for the Day, June 14, 2024
Friday in the Tenth Week of Ordinary Time (363)
Jesus says to those of us He inspires: You have grown up hearing people tell you, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” But I am telling you: anyone who looks at a woman intending to have sex with her is guilty of adultery as soon as he makes up his mind.
When your good eye is a serious problem, you get rid of it. It is better to lose a part of your body than to have your whole body thrown out in the trash. Even when your good hand is a problem, you cut it off and throw it away. It is better to lose one of your limbs than to lose your whole body, which can be thrown out into the trash.
People tell you, “If a man wants to divorce his wife, he has to put it in writing.” But I am telling you: anyone who divorces his wife—there is an exception for sexual abuse—is driving her to commit adultery and any man who marries her then is committing adultery, too.” (Matthew 5).
How easily we simplify these sayings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Along with very many others, I do not take them to heart, tending to use them automatically as judgments on other people, condemnations on our culture and civil society, and as a behavior unrelated to my own human spirit and conscience. Or they become an intellectual exercise about divorce, women, support, and sex—when these are just the surface, the front edge of a spiritual jungle, ocean and sky—mysteries about myself that need courage to explore and so become more adult.
Where is the Good News here, the dawn of joy, the challenge to improve and find the loving God?
How do I look at people of a different sex or gender? Do I generalize and let my mind stray into a cancerous and damaging view of others—generalizing, say, about men as men and women as women. Or do I “cut down—cut back” that false, harmful viewing of someone as an object, an “it” so that I respect them as individuals? Do I see them truly as individuals in all their mystery and unknowns, in their contradictions, inconsistencies and growing, changing process? Right there is the Joy!
Do I have a commitment of love that is fundamentally respect for an individual male or individual female person—a Person first? Do I see marriage as a fundamental equality of two imperfect persons fostering and nurturing each other’s incompletion towards a more mature, “new person”?
If my heart and spirit have that kind of respectful eye with which to see others—then I am not far from the kingdom of God (where there is neither male nor female) The discovery and “aha!” of joy is to discover the Person. I can love a Person of any gender, sex, or difference from me. They are—the image of God, the Person—which my spirit sees—whether a casual acquaintance, a good friend, a spouse, or a parent.
jorisheise 