James addresses the twelve tribes in the dispersion. This designation has from ancient times referred to the Jewish people, but should we understand that James is addressing only Christians from among the Jews? Since the content of the letter concerns all Christians, by the twelve tribes we are entitled to understand the brothers who make up the Church, the people of God of the New Covenant.

The call to rejoice in temptations initially makes a strange impression. One can, of course, find a reason for joy in the fact that if the powers of darkness attack you, this means that you do not belong to them. But such awareness can lead to self-satisfaction, then to self-deception and proud self-exaltation, and that is itself a satanic trap.

So it is not temptations themselves that we should rejoice in, but the fact that the Lord gives us strength to cope with them, to stand firm against enticements. We should not fear them and lose our heads out of fear, but we should recognize them in time and be ready to receive help from above.

Today's reading is devoted to two themes: the theme of divorce and the theme of children taking part in Jesus' conversations. In the first case it is interesting to note how Jesus interprets the norms of Old Testament law. He evidently separates in them what has been revealed by God as a commandment to be followed from what God permits a person, condescending to human weakness. Divorce is indeed permissible from the point of view of Old Testament law: it would have been impossible and meaningless to demand from sinful humanity the fullness of family and married life that was given to people before the fall and was later lost.

Then it becomes clear that marriage and family life are God's gift, and that fidelity in married life is a commandment given for all times. The possibility of divorce, however, is not God's gift at all, and certainly not a commandment; it is only a concession to human weakness, a forced concession that cannot exist in the Kingdom of God, where the fullness of life no longer requires any concessions. Jesus sets the bar as high as possible, but His demands cannot be any lower, because He offers them with the understanding that they are made of those who live not according to the laws of this world, but according to the laws of the Kingdom of God, where these demands turn out not to be excessive at all, but entirely ordinary.

The same applies to the presence of children: in a world that lives by the laws familiar to us, any appearance of children can only interrupt a serious conversation and get in the way. But in the Kingdom of God, where the depth of a person's participation in communion apparently depends less on age, the presence of even a small child at an "adult" conversation may not only fail to interfere, but may even enliven the conversation. That is how different the laws of the world we know and are used to are from those by which the Kingdom of God lives.

Answering the Pharisees, the Lord in today's Gospel reading says that marriage was established by God Himself at the very beginning of the creation of the world and is part of the divine design. This thought was new and unfamiliar both to Jews and to nonbiblical culture. The Jews, including the Pharisees, considered divorce permissible, but the Lord, "as one having authority," rejects this provision of the Law of Moses, given "because of your hardness of heart."

The nonbiblical world often refused altogether to see a woman as a human being and considered marriage a concession to the weakness of the flesh. That is why the fact that women in the early Christian communities were treated as full persons provoked mockery in the surrounding pagan world, along with suspicion of sexual immorality. In the legacy of two thousand years of Christian history we sometimes meet remnants of these ideas, but the force of Christ's words is such that the generally accepted errors of the public were never able to distort the truth completely.

For us today, however, what matters more is that marriage established by the Creator's will deserves respect, like every divine institution, and must not be trampled for the sake of momentary impulses.