Blind spots and refusals again

An audio file of today's gospel and blog can be found here via this link.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 19: 3-12) once again offers several mysteries for our contemplation. The Christian laws of marriage, as God intended it from the beginning; the union of the spouses in one flesh; the gift of purity as it is given by God. Yet from a COLW perspective, one sentence stands out amid all the others: that Moses tolerated divorce in the Old Testament because the people of God were so unteachable.

If we think of unteachability as a strictly intellectual limitation, we have not really understood all its implications. Another word for lack of teachability here would be hardness of heart. It was not just that there was a mental blind spot among God’s chosen ones; theirs was a moral refusal to rise to the responsibility enjoined by what God had established from the beginning. In mitigation, we should remember that the age of grace was not yet fully born before Jesus’ death on the Cross.

There is a correlation, therefore, between the higher expectations in the teachings of Jesus and the fulness of grace that His redemption makes available to us. His condescension to our weakness – His mercy on the sinner - is not a ticket for us to wallow in irresponsibility or indulgence. It is a route out of our misery.  But how?

We become more teachable in two ways. First, our minds become more teachable when we allow our imaginations to embrace the breadth of God’s mysteries. In the nighttime discussion with Nicodemus, Jesus leads Nicodemus to see things in new ways. Nicodemus becomes, as it were, a model of teachability, allowing his imagination to become receptive to things beyond his normal ken. It is not that he is a passive listener, far from it; rather, he is an attentive questioner, and Jesus unfolds for him not only the mysteries of the past, but the promise of the new revelation that His own coming signifies. There are more things under heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our normally limited philosophies. In an age when our visions have become narrowed to the breadth of a mobile device, our minds and our Christian imaginations need to find their way back to the soaring breadth and height that our medieval cathedrals still symbolise for us. Like Dostoevsky said of Russia, we need to sit at the feet of Christ again and learn his gospel.

Yet, the second way we become more teachable is through our gradual surrender to the Father’s forming action, shaping now not only our minds but our hearts through His grace, enabling our minds to rise to the mysteries that He reveals and strengthening our wills to choose the responsibilities these mysteries call us to.

Our greatest tragedy is sin unrepented, but after that comes this tragedy of unteachability which stunts and limits us, withers God’s work, and renders us partially sterile, making us spiritual eunuchs by our own childish hands.

Who will free me from the body of this death, says St Paul – the blind spots and refusals that mar the work of God in us? Thanks be to God – He concludes - who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!