We have before us on this Sabbath morning the recounting of the creation of man; male and female He created them. The establishment of the sanctity and indissolubility of marriage, the sacredness of children and the Kingdom of Heaven.
Our late Pope John Paul II, knowing the crucial importance of the family in the achieving of the state of holiness and the salvation of mankind in the relatedness of unity of man and woman in marriage, delivered to us his teaching on, “the theology of the body and human love in the divine plan”. Additionally, the very first encyclical letter issued by Pope Benedict XVI was, “deus caritus est” – God is love.
And so without being scrupulously precise I would like to try to put the scriptures on this subject into the framework that the Church intends.
There are two stories of the creation of man in Genesis. The one we have heard this morning in Chapter 2:18-24 and the first few versus earlier in Gen. 2:7, “God fashioned man of dust from the soil then he breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and thus man became a living being”. We don’t hear anything yet about Eve, although we know that God created them male and female. But the man, Adam, although he was male and female, was in solitude, made in the image and likeness of God, but alone. The reality of the human race had not yet, in this snapshot of time, come about. The explanation is not anthropological only but theological.
God then said, “It is not good for the man to be alone, I will make him a helpmate.” All the animals that had been created were brought to him but none were suitable. Up to this point man was God’s greatest creation, made in his own image and likeness. What would a loving God do now? He put the man into a deep sleep and took out one of his ribs and enclosed the rib in flesh. God built the rib into a woman and brought her to the man. This is the actualization of the feminine reality in man that God had placed in him. “This at last is bones from my bones and flesh from my flesh. This is to be called woman for this was taken form man.”
We see that man, male and female, made in God’s image and different from the animals was alone in the presence of God but the feminine had to be made mortal flesh, created for the man who had been created for her. And so we have Adam’s rib. Man, then male and female, will experience being and life, God and holiness in their bodies being made in love for love. The spousal relationship that mirrors that of the Holy Trinity of three persons in one God.
The next words in Genesis are important. “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife,(man and wife, the spousal relationship) and the two of them become one flesh. Bridegroom and bride; Christ as the bridegroom and his Church as the bride: From the wound in Christ’s side as he slept in death on the cross came forth blood and water, the signs of Baptism and Eucharist, the signs of life. As the woman, Eve, the feminine came from the side of Adam so did the new Adam Christ, the male, come forth from the body of the new Eve, Mary who was a spotless virgin. As it was in the beginning so will it be, now and forever.
In the earlier of the two creation accounts are the words of God about the man and his spouse, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it.” “They are no longer two but one flesh, therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate”. They have become bodies, human bodies. Jesus took on a human body from the body of his mother, Mary. God became man.
In the Gospel of Mark the Pharisees were testing Jesus when they asked him, “Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife?” Jesus reminded them that, “because of the hardness of their hearts Moses permitted it”, but he says, “In the beginning it was not so.” The spousal marriage bond cannot be broken. “If a woman leaves her husband and marries another she commits adultery.” An annulment can be granted under special circumstances, which means that a sacramental union did not take place and the couple are free to marry other people. But of all of the annulments granted each year by the Church throughout the world seventy five percent of them are in the United States of America. We have lost sight of the eternal importance of what took place in the beginning.
Now we turn our attention to the holiness of children in God’s eyes and also the Kingdom of Heaven- Eternal life. Pope Benedict XVI named his first Encyclical, “Deus Caritas Est”. God is love. This is the foundation of what we attempt to speak of here. “In the beginning God created man, male and female he created them”. “In his image and likeness he created them”. God’s love in creating was unselfish although all of God’s actions must redound to his eternal glory. The term we use for this love is the Greek word, agape. Another word for this love is from the Latin, Caritas, which means from the heart. The English word is charity. “Love God above all things and love your neighbor as yourself” are the first two commandments of Christ - The unselfish love of God for his Children. This love must be imitated by us for it is in the choices we make each day for love and truth that we will be judged by The Lord at the moment of our death.
There is another word however which is used for love and that word is Eros - The love between a man and woman in marriage. Man and woman being bodies and being different, male and female, are sexual. They are in many different ways attracted to one another because they are made by God for one another’s happiness, and for the need of pro-creation.
“Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it.” This Eros in the beginning is powerful but it is meant to change over time into a powerful agape. The family is to be a domestic Church. As man, male and female is made in the image and likeness of God in the immortal soul so are children made in many ways in the image and likeness of their parents, that is in their DNA, their faith, their love. Godly parents who raise Godly children must battle every day in agape for their own and their children’s salvation. “Whoever does not accept the Kingdom of God as a child will not enter it.” “But whoever causes one of these little ones, who believe in me, to sin, it was better of him to have a great millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
In the beginning man, male and female, refused to obey God who was their creator. They were placed in the garden among the trees of every description; for food and shelter, and among these were two trees in particular, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They were induced by Satan to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil even though God had told them that if they did they would die. Satan convinced them to disobey and to become gods themselves, determining for themselves the moral law. They lost life, they died. They lost everything. We find, however, in the first chapters of Genesis a faint sign of hope. It is in the words of the Proto-Evangelium in Genesis 3:14. God’s words to the serpent are, “I will make you enemies of each other; you and the woman, your offspring and her offspring. It He will strike at your head while you strike at his heel" . Christ has reopened the gates of Paradise but we must say, YES to him and not NO, as both the woman and her son said YES to the Father.
Christ’s first miracle was at the wedding feast of Cana, for he would, as the bridegroom on the cross finds brought forth from his side in the sleep of death his bride the Church for whom he willingly died.
We, as baptized, form Christ’s body the Church. We are embodied souls made in God’s image, male and female, empowered in love, God’s love. In Eros transformed over time into agape to enrich the Kingdom of Heaven as children for children that all again may be one.
As St. Paul says in Hebrews, “He who was consecrated and those who are being consecrated all have one origin. Therefore he is not ashamed to call them brothers”.
Rev. D. Stanley Corcoran
Homily given at the Mission of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Chinese)
Sunday October 8, 2006
Our late Pope John Paul II, knowing the crucial importance of the family in the achieving of the state of holiness and the salvation of mankind in the relatedness of unity of man and woman in marriage, delivered to us his teaching on, “the theology of the body and human love in the divine plan”. Additionally, the very first encyclical letter issued by Pope Benedict XVI was, “deus caritus est” – God is love.
And so without being scrupulously precise I would like to try to put the scriptures on this subject into the framework that the Church intends.
There are two stories of the creation of man in Genesis. The one we have heard this morning in Chapter 2:18-24 and the first few versus earlier in Gen. 2:7, “God fashioned man of dust from the soil then he breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and thus man became a living being”. We don’t hear anything yet about Eve, although we know that God created them male and female. But the man, Adam, although he was male and female, was in solitude, made in the image and likeness of God, but alone. The reality of the human race had not yet, in this snapshot of time, come about. The explanation is not anthropological only but theological.
God then said, “It is not good for the man to be alone, I will make him a helpmate.” All the animals that had been created were brought to him but none were suitable. Up to this point man was God’s greatest creation, made in his own image and likeness. What would a loving God do now? He put the man into a deep sleep and took out one of his ribs and enclosed the rib in flesh. God built the rib into a woman and brought her to the man. This is the actualization of the feminine reality in man that God had placed in him. “This at last is bones from my bones and flesh from my flesh. This is to be called woman for this was taken form man.”
We see that man, male and female, made in God’s image and different from the animals was alone in the presence of God but the feminine had to be made mortal flesh, created for the man who had been created for her. And so we have Adam’s rib. Man, then male and female, will experience being and life, God and holiness in their bodies being made in love for love. The spousal relationship that mirrors that of the Holy Trinity of three persons in one God.
The next words in Genesis are important. “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife,(man and wife, the spousal relationship) and the two of them become one flesh. Bridegroom and bride; Christ as the bridegroom and his Church as the bride: From the wound in Christ’s side as he slept in death on the cross came forth blood and water, the signs of Baptism and Eucharist, the signs of life. As the woman, Eve, the feminine came from the side of Adam so did the new Adam Christ, the male, come forth from the body of the new Eve, Mary who was a spotless virgin. As it was in the beginning so will it be, now and forever.
In the earlier of the two creation accounts are the words of God about the man and his spouse, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it.” “They are no longer two but one flesh, therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate”. They have become bodies, human bodies. Jesus took on a human body from the body of his mother, Mary. God became man.
In the Gospel of Mark the Pharisees were testing Jesus when they asked him, “Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife?” Jesus reminded them that, “because of the hardness of their hearts Moses permitted it”, but he says, “In the beginning it was not so.” The spousal marriage bond cannot be broken. “If a woman leaves her husband and marries another she commits adultery.” An annulment can be granted under special circumstances, which means that a sacramental union did not take place and the couple are free to marry other people. But of all of the annulments granted each year by the Church throughout the world seventy five percent of them are in the United States of America. We have lost sight of the eternal importance of what took place in the beginning.
Now we turn our attention to the holiness of children in God’s eyes and also the Kingdom of Heaven- Eternal life. Pope Benedict XVI named his first Encyclical, “Deus Caritas Est”. God is love. This is the foundation of what we attempt to speak of here. “In the beginning God created man, male and female he created them”. “In his image and likeness he created them”. God’s love in creating was unselfish although all of God’s actions must redound to his eternal glory. The term we use for this love is the Greek word, agape. Another word for this love is from the Latin, Caritas, which means from the heart. The English word is charity. “Love God above all things and love your neighbor as yourself” are the first two commandments of Christ - The unselfish love of God for his Children. This love must be imitated by us for it is in the choices we make each day for love and truth that we will be judged by The Lord at the moment of our death.
There is another word however which is used for love and that word is Eros - The love between a man and woman in marriage. Man and woman being bodies and being different, male and female, are sexual. They are in many different ways attracted to one another because they are made by God for one another’s happiness, and for the need of pro-creation.
“Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it.” This Eros in the beginning is powerful but it is meant to change over time into a powerful agape. The family is to be a domestic Church. As man, male and female is made in the image and likeness of God in the immortal soul so are children made in many ways in the image and likeness of their parents, that is in their DNA, their faith, their love. Godly parents who raise Godly children must battle every day in agape for their own and their children’s salvation. “Whoever does not accept the Kingdom of God as a child will not enter it.” “But whoever causes one of these little ones, who believe in me, to sin, it was better of him to have a great millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
In the beginning man, male and female, refused to obey God who was their creator. They were placed in the garden among the trees of every description; for food and shelter, and among these were two trees in particular, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They were induced by Satan to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil even though God had told them that if they did they would die. Satan convinced them to disobey and to become gods themselves, determining for themselves the moral law. They lost life, they died. They lost everything. We find, however, in the first chapters of Genesis a faint sign of hope. It is in the words of the Proto-Evangelium in Genesis 3:14. God’s words to the serpent are, “I will make you enemies of each other; you and the woman, your offspring and her offspring. It He will strike at your head while you strike at his heel" . Christ has reopened the gates of Paradise but we must say, YES to him and not NO, as both the woman and her son said YES to the Father.
Christ’s first miracle was at the wedding feast of Cana, for he would, as the bridegroom on the cross finds brought forth from his side in the sleep of death his bride the Church for whom he willingly died.
We, as baptized, form Christ’s body the Church. We are embodied souls made in God’s image, male and female, empowered in love, God’s love. In Eros transformed over time into agape to enrich the Kingdom of Heaven as children for children that all again may be one.
As St. Paul says in Hebrews, “He who was consecrated and those who are being consecrated all have one origin. Therefore he is not ashamed to call them brothers”.
Rev. D. Stanley Corcoran
Homily given at the Mission of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Chinese)
Sunday October 8, 2006
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