The “yes” of conversion

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Mark 10:1-12) rehearses a passage we read in May last year when the Pharisees come questioning Jesus once more to test him. They want to scrutinise His orthodoxy on the question of marriage and divorce in Jewish law, but Jesus turns the tables, showing that Moses’s concession on divorce was to be blamed only on the waywardness of the people. Then, Jesus puts forward the teaching on marriage that belongs to the original purposes of creation and to the new law of grace in which those original purposes are in this case reaffirmed. Marriage is for life, not only as a legal convenience but because the marriage transforms the connection between the spouses into an enduring bond: So, they are no longer two but one flesh.

We might wonder here about Jesus’ failure to take account of the complexity of marital situations and the awful burdens this inflexible law would place on human beings. Isn’t He a little too rigid for the twenty-first century? If only the author of life could come up to our own sophisticated and caring levels! But, the author of life is not merely a rule maker, like some petty tyrant. In a sense, He is the Eternal Law and that law we know must be infinitely good, as He is in Himself. It is the foundation of the law in God that explains why Jesus concludes His remarks commenting that those who divorce their spouse and marry another are guilty of adultery. This was a corollary that must have made the Pharisees rather uncomfortable since they were normally the ones to put the measuring rule against the conduct of the Jews. Normally, it was Jesus who pronounced the words of forgiveness. In this case, He indicates that the moral effects of breaking a marriage bond do not recede into history simply because the former spouses have – to use that awful cliché – moved on. Yet if these are the ends of marriage, how on earth is it to be lived according to the unrelenting standards of the merciful Jesus?

Here is where we must pair this renewal of the teaching on marriage with an understanding of Jesus as the author and fount of all grace. For He who wills the end wills the means. And God who wishes all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, as St Paul says, offers humanity that chance by making available to them the living waters of His redemptive grace, the reservoirs and canals of the Sacred Heart, that flood down to us through the sacraments and the sacramentals: through every Mass we attend, every prayer we utter, every inclination of the heart towards His love. If any one thirst, let him come to Me and drink (Jesus 7:37) Jesus will declare in the temple. The renewed teaching on marriage sits alongside the combative path that Jesus traces out for His disciples. He will do the work for it is only by His grace that the work can be done; but it falls to us to decide whether we are in or out; whether we want this or not; whether we will try to follow Him or follow our own instincts; whether we will accept the awful responsibility of being His follower by allowing ourselves to be made like to Him – honoured, if such be God’s will, or unfairly reviled and rejected instead. If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too. The point is not the cross but what the cross points to: reconciliation with Him at any cost.

This is a hard saying; who can bear it? (John 6: 60) was the reaction of some people to Jesus’ teaching on His Eucharistic presence. But this is where Jesus is no longer merely a teacher of sound ethics, nor is He the kind of goodie-two-shoes minister of kindly indulgence, handing out get-out-marriage-free- cards to willing punters. Instead, in marriage as in all the Christian life, He asks of us something utterly extraordinary: that to find our lives, we must lose them. Tweaking Shakespeare’s words only a little, we might say:

Let us once lose our attachments to find ourselves,

Or else we lose ourselves to keep our attachments.

When we compare the situation of the people in Moses’ day with our own, there is something the same and something different. The something different we have just described: we live now in the reign of the New Testament of divine grace, the age of His mercy and forgiveness properly understood. If any man loves me, my Father and I will come to him and make our home in him. To understand the enormity of this promise, especially to Jesus’ listeners, we must consider that the Jews believed God was really present in the temple behind the curtains of the inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, into which the High Priest alone was admitted but once a year. And here He is now, dwelling in the humblest of His servants who love Him. Here is where all our strength must come from; not from our determination to carry on but from the divine winds of grace that carry our ships home to the eternal shores. There is life again beyond our defeats and humiliations, if only our hope holds fast to His promises and to the conviction of His all-encompassing love. Practice resurrection, as the American poet Wendell Berry tells us.

So, if this is what is different from the time of Moses, what is the same? Just our hardness of heart. While the dispensation of mercy is new, the waywardness of human wanderings is as irregular as ever it was. Humanity is not on some progressively improving path towards greater civilisation and more humane behaviour. This was a nineteenth-century myth that became a twentieth-century delusion, and heaven knows how it has infected the Christian imagination with its superficial parody of the gentler virtues while allowing the inner life to become overgrown with thorns.

Recognising our need for conversion, the danger we run through our hardness of heart, is the keystone of our docibilitas – our teachability, as we say in COLW. And let us be in no doubt that it is a grace. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus cites the prophesy of Isaiah on this very point:

For this people’s heart has become calloused;

    they hardly hear with their ears,

    and they have closed their eyes.

Otherwise, they might see with their eyes,

    hear with their ears,

    understand with their hearts

and turn, and I would heal them.

This is not a once-in-a-lifetime task to turn for healing, but rather a daily one, an hourly one: the task of the current minute. Mary is our model who never needed to turn to say “yes” to the Lord but said it freely of her own accord. Our path is more onerous in that regard but similarly imperative.

Jesus will not bend the law like Moses did, but what He offers us is of a magnitude far greater: an invitation into the inner life of the Blessed Trinity where we become His spouse in a bond even more unbreakable than the marriage bond, for it extends beyond our death. Our task is not to become decent people; it is to be radically changed into the image of Jesus, so faithful to Him that others, whether they love or revile us, will find His reflection in our every word and gesture. To be new incarnations of His love to the world: this is our calling. But first and last, we must pronounce the “yes” of conversion of heart. For what God has joined together in grace, let no man put asunder.