Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time Yr B 2024

Title

Beyond Denial to Spousal Love

Outline

We are masters of denial

We are made in the image of the Triune God, but we think that we can live solo, without intimate relationship, without love, or with a substitute for a real other

So we seek our “other” in animals, often as pets, sometimes as “colleagues” in our work, often causes, including religious causes, sometimes in machines or intellectual pursuits, and even in avatars on phones that can talk to you.

God tells us that the other can only be found in a spouse who is truly our equal, our corresponding other, and, we will find later, with whom we concretize our love in children, and, as is clear in Hebrews, the children can be spiritual.

But we live in denial of this reality, a denial based on our brokenness (turned in on ourselves) and now individualism.

Our denial makes us a divorcing society

We are broken so we cut off from those who trigger our brokenness, for we cannot face that within us that leads us into reciprocally painful relationships and acknowledge that we will do so repeatedly. And of course that is why Jesus says out of love “no divorce” for it is a denial of God’s reality. And that is also why we cannot receive children, for they remind us of what we once were as children and how we need to go behind our denial of our suffering to become like our true other, Jesus, letting him reform us.

So God became our true spouse

Jesus became one of us and suffered like us so that we can find a true other who is both embodied and also knows how to deal with human suffering. He calls us his siblings.

That has deep implications for our healing

First, when I see individuals hurting others, including hurting me, I know that they are wounded too and I pray for God to deal mercifully with their wounds and that allows me to forgive, which is to entrust my woulds to him.

Second, Jesus becomes my model for how to deal with the wounds I have and my model for how to live a marriage relationship with another wounded individual.

Third, Jesus is also our spouse whose love is healing. This is true collectively for all in the church and individually especially for women religious. This is the only husband that can bring us healing and can reconcile us to our children, whether spiritual or physical.

We could draw this out to book length, but let is suffice to say that first, we must get past our denial, which is the start of repentance, take our wounded selves to Jesus our truest other like me, and allow his love to heal us and restore our children.