NOTES for Mar 10:11-16
Today's reading consists of two seemingly independent sayings: one about the impossibility of divorce and one about the need to receive the Kingdom of God like children. Yes, they are independent, but do you know what is unique, because divine, about the Word? It carries not only a direct meaning, but also the meaning that arises from comparing contradictory or simply different parts, and in this it is stereoscopic and therefore inexhaustible. We have to learn to read it in parallelisms. This is a very difficult task, but a necessary one. This moralizing digression, which I ask you to forgive, is directed toward one thing only: let us try to read today's passage not as two thoughts, but as one thought. Let us begin with the mention that, as is especially clear in the Revelation of John the Theologian, fornication in biblical symbolism is a symbol of paganism. This can be explained in two ways. On the one hand, in paganism generally, and among the pagans who surrounded the people of God, orgiastic cults were a common thing. On the other hand, faithfulness to one person becomes a foreshadowing of faithfulness to the one God. So when the Lord speaks about divorce, an apparently everyday matter, He is speaking about something greater than the relationship between two people; He is speaking at the same time about a person's relationship with God. And the next thought, the thought about children, confirms this. Here the relationship to the Kingdom of God is already plainly in view. But what does it mean to be childlike? We can go through all the qualities of childhood: openness, immediacy of perception, trust, receptivity. All of this is true. But since we have undertaken to read two thoughts in parallel, childlikeness also means the absence of sexuality. Let us not speak here about child sexuality or old Freud; that is something our corrupted age has arrived at, and Christ did not have that in mind. And what is love in marriage? It is a peaceful relationship; it does not have the burning, passion, strain, and everything else that belongs to sexuality. It is also the restraint of feelings toward other people, the restraint of attractions that inevitably arise. "Quench the flame of my passions," we pray to the Mother of God every morning. Why? Because only this allows us to keep God, and not another person, even the best and most beloved person, at the center of our life.