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Master·evangeli.net

Today's Gospel + short theological explanation

Friday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time
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Gospel text (Mt 5:27-32): Jesus said to his disciples: “You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery. But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart ... "

Marriage: What is getting married?

Fr. Antoni CAROL i Hostench (Sant Cugat del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain)

Today Jesus is categorical: all or nothing. Love is like that and so is the marriage, because getting married is precisely “giving my life”. It is an institution of total commitment between man and woman to “indulge in life” and “give life” (to the children). Any restriction disqualifies the marriage.

This implies a “forever” and an “only you”. Love is “totalizing”: all or nothing. The conditions and restrictions are for trade. There is no alternative. The sense of a wedding “celebration” (civil or religious) is to give this commitment publicly to society (does not make sense to hide this commitment) and before the Creator (love and marriage are a “divine invention”).

There is no bridal party without a legal act in which the man and woman mutually give and accept each other. Both the Right and the Party are social realties: No one is capable to hold a party on his own without the others

Where there is love there is no divorce, where there is divorce there is no love

Fr. Antoni CAROL i Hostench (Sant Cugat del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain)

Today, Jesus emphasizes that totality degenerates to partiality –and ceases to be love- when a "conjugal" status is pretended with more than one person or if we interpose a time limit. Marital love cannot be combined nor with temporality nor with mediocrity. A full love statement is impossible when there is an explicit limitation, either in terms of intensity, either in terms of time duration.

Getting married is something as definitive as "jumping without a parachute". Getting "married" with the legal possibility of divorce is like jumping with parachute instead: I am not fully abandoning me to the other, I am not putting my life completely in his/her hands.

-The language expresses the mood of married love: when someone says "I love you" means that it is forever, because no one says "I love you, but while you are useful to me" or "until ...". Love, in itself, has a vocation of permanence: lovers know there is eternity!