From the responsorial psalm: “Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine in the recesses of your home; your children like olive plants around your table. May the Lord bless us all the days of our lives.”
A reading from the holy Gospel according to Mark (Mk 10:2-16)
But Jesus told them, “Because of the hardness of your hearts he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”
Out of love during creation God made man and woman and joined them together. From the same source of love, the sacrament of marriage is God’s means of consecrating man and woman in the truth of his name. Jesus publicly responds to the Pharisees’ question about divorce and then privately says to the disciples, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” One divorce or millions of them do not and cannot negate what God has made holy in the sacrament of marriage. “He who consecrates and those who are being consecrated,” Saint Paul says, “all have one origin.” In union with God and through him, we have no power to break what God makes holy.
God, help me put aside any willfulness that gets in the way of seeing your perfect plan for me today, even if that brings suffering. You have given me every good gift and every great gift, especially in the redemptive sacrifice of your Son and in the sacraments. I wonder at suffering and am easily misled in grasping its purpose, believing that it is something to be rejected rather than received. “For it was fitting that he, for whom and through whom all things exist,” says Paul, “in bringing many children to glory, should make the leader to their salvation perfect through suffering.” Guide me, Lord, in the ways of your Son toward everlasting union with you.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
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