27th Sunday, 1997

Human Beings Connected to Each Other

Today, we have a characteristically odd situation in the Church, where an unmarried male is supposed to talk about marriage. Those two characteristics are really important for any priest in the Roman church today because, if we know the imbalance of our vision, and there is, I suggest, a characteristic imbalance in being an unmarried male clergyman in the Roman church today, then we might be a little more wary about what we say. So, we have to be aware of these qualifications.

Judy, when she was here, pointed out to me that clergymen, especially in the Roman church who are not married, tend to idealize women. For instance, the veneration of Mary in the Roman church as it has been carried on for a very long time by very many people, is a good example. As Judy said to me, "well, here you have a virgin mother". Now, how imitable is virgin motherhood for most women? In other words, she has just been put beyond the pale. And of course, if you read the Mariological literature it is precisely that that has been emphasized. And so we have, I think to a very large extent, basically dehumanized this figure. And I think the same thing happens, with regard to unmarried males talking about marriage. I think often enough it is a mystification of the human reality of marriage. In the stuff that I taught, even in the old days when we did marriage preparation in the parishes, I am sure I led all kinds of people down the primrose path, because from the outside, and having surrounded the whole business of sexuality with such strange characteristics, I am sure that the presentation I made of marriage was a ridiculous idealization, or better, mystification. And unfortunately, this tendency is not dead. For example, if any of you watched that "Promise Keepers" meeting - - you basically get double talk. The woman is supposed to kneel before the man and he is supposed to put his hand on her shoulder and say, "you are wonderful". But the fact remains that she is kneeling and the man is standing...and he is basically the boss! He may be a good boss, but he is absolutely the boss because that is what the Bible says!

There are more problems. What kind of experience did Jesus have regarding marriage two-thousand years ago in Palestine? Well, for example, marriages were all arranged. Marriages were more the union of two families than the union of two lovers. So, it has even been suggested by some scholars, with reference to this passage in Mark, that the problem with divorcing in those days was the idea that it could set loose family-feuding. That is the difficulty, rather than the question of divorce as the separation of these two individuals. Clearly, the socio-cultural significance of marriage in the first century of the Mediterranean world was markedly different than it is for us.

So what can we do? Well, I think we can attempt to ferret out some modest suggestions about the notion of adultery. First of all, adultery in the biblical usage, is often enough not understood for its sexual significance. If you read the prophets of the Hebrew Bible with whom Jesus was familiar, you find that when they talked about adultery they were basically talking about infidelity. They were talking about people lying to each other, people cheating each other, people being unfaithful to each other - - and they were not talking primarily in sexual terms. It is we, later on, who have fixated on the sexual, in the Bible particularly. In other words, we are talking about larger human realities than peoples’ genitalia. We are talking about how people are disposed to each other. We are talking about the choices that people make to construct a life with each other. And there you can say, "Oh well, Jesus was an unmarried male too", but presumably Jesus knew more about human relations and was more authentic in his relationships than I am. So I think that we can reasonably follow him when he starts using the term "adultery" in the context of marriage. Also, marriage is a constant metaphor in the Bible for the relationship between God and Israel. And certainly nobody is going to say that God is sexual - - at least the Jews never did.

So where are we? Well, if nothing else, if we have cleared some ground then that would be useful for us if we are put in a position again to ask the question about how I constitute my life in terms of the promises I make to other people. (This is where the notion of the "Promise Keepers" is typically badly skewed, and a typically bad reading of the biblical material, because the promises they think they are making as males to females is not in fact the promise, as I read these texts, that is in play here.) In other words, we are brought again to ask large, serious questions about the nature of our connections with each other. If it is true that I construct my existence out of my choices, that I build a self on the basis of the choices I make; and if it is also true, that human beings connected to each other is at the very heart of the whole human enterprise - - not me and my job, not me and my kids, not me and my hobbies, not me and my technology, not me and everything else that I surround myself with, to blunt, as a matter of fact, the impact of the connections I have with people, then we can look again at these texts. Then we can, for example, find out that it is not good for us to be alone. I surround myself with my dogs, television set, and CD's - - I am not alone, but how have I destroyed solitude? How have I escaped the larger responsibilities to which God calls me as a human being? How have I connected to other people? This is just an example, I hope of something, at least for me, that has proven to be a fairly useful way of reading these texts and moving forward with them, and I hope it is helpful for you also.

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RT 19/10/97