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Master·evangeli.net

Today's Gospel + short theological explanation

Friday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
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Gospel text (Mk 10:1-12): (…) Jesus told them "(…) 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.” (…).

Divorce? There is no love without eternity

EDITORIAL TEAM evangeli.net (based on texts by Benedict XVI) (Città del Vaticano, Vatican)

Today, the Gospel invites us to place the reality of love in general - and of marriage, in particular - in its true perspective: that of the Creator. God is love - only Him - and He instituted marriage. If human love, does not want faltering, it needs to live sheltered with a greater love: God’s eternal love. There is no love without eternity

Human love always lays claim to eternity. Nobody could say (or accept): "I love you for X years" (to put a limit to "I love you" sounds like an affront). Consequently: to promise "I love you" is turned from a promise into the fulfillment of reality only when it is wrapped in a love that can truly impart eternity. Human love, in and for itself, represents an unredeemable promise: it strives for eternity and yet, it can only offer mortality. Yet, on the other hand, this promise is not meaningless and contradictory, if ultimately eternity is alive within it, nonetheless.

—Jesus, stay by us so that our love becomes true: we need the wait of the Eternal God.

The various forms of the erosion of marriage (free unions, "trial marriage"…)

EDITORIAL TEAM evangeli.net (based on texts by Benedict XVI) (Città del Vaticano, Vatican)

Today, the various forms of the erosion of marriage, such as free unions and "trial marriage", and even pseudo-marriages between people of the same sex, are instead an expression of anarchic freedom that are wrongly made to pass as true human liberation.

This pseudo-freedom is based on a trivialization of the body, which inevitably entails the trivialization of the person. Its premise is that the human being can do to himself or herself whatever he or she likes: thus, the body becomes a secondary thing that can be manipulated, from the human point of view, and used as one likes. “Licentiousness”, which passes for the discovery of the body and its value, is actually a dualism that makes the body despicable, placing it, so to speak, outside the person's authentic being and dignity.

—The true expression of freedom is the capacity to choose a definitive gift in which freedom, in being given, is fully rediscovered.