NOTES for Mar 10:2-12
Answering the Pharisees in today’s Gospel reading, the Lord says that marriage was instituted by God Himself at the very beginning of the creation of the world and is part of the divine plan. This idea was new and unfamiliar both to the Jews and to nonbiblical culture. The Jews, including the Pharisees, regarded divorce as 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 recognize a woman as a human being and regarded marriage as a concession to the weakness of the flesh. This is precisely why the treatment of women as fully human persons in the early Christian communities provoked mockery and suspicions of debauchery in the surrounding pagan world. In the legacy of two thousand years of Christian history, we sometimes encounter remnants of these ideas, but the power of Christ’s words is such that the commonly accepted errors of the public have never been 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 upon for the sake of momentary impulses.