Homily: Longing and Belonging

Year B / Ordinary Time / Twenty-seventh Sunday

Readings: Genesis 2.18-24 / Psalm 217.1-2, 3, 4-5, 6 (R/v c.f 5) / Hebrews 2.9-11 / Mark 10.2-16

Let’s imagine Adam and Eve meeting for the first time. Adam is walking through the Garden of Eden. He recognizes all the animals he has named. Though they surround him, he is lonely. He longs for a companion.  Eve is also walking through the garden. She is attracted to everything around her, but she doesn’t feel complete and happy with them. In longing for another, Adam and Eve spot each other; they recognize that each is somehow like themselves, but not quite the same. Finding each other, they then stroll together through the garden to pet the animals.

“Longing and belonging”. I think this phrase, which the story about Adam and Eve expresses, is at the heart of our scriptural readings this evening.

I suspect that whenever we hear today’s readings proclaim, we are quick to focus on the themes of sex, sexuality and marriage. We learn about these themes from homilies preached, or Theology of the Body talks we’ve attended, or from conversations with our married family and friends. As we do so, we learn about the sacredness of these themes for Christian life. But we also come to know that each theme remains a mystery we are continually invited to reflect on and understand better. Perhaps, this explains our everyday struggle to express, live and celebrate human love as truly sacred. Or, as I’d like to say, to become a little more divine by being a lot more human.

This is why I think today’s readings invite us to consider how our longing for and belonging to another in relationship is really about God’s good action of ordering our lives for wellness and happiness.

Our first reading from Genesis is part of the creation story that speaks of God ordering time in terms of days and nights, space in terms of heavens and earth, and life in terms of fauna and flora. The climax of this is God ordering humankind and their relationships. This order is best summed up in this line we hear today: “the two of them became one flesh”. 

All too often we fixate ourselves on the “two” becoming “one” in sexual terms. There is a richer, more intimate way we can understand this coupling: it is about becoming one to assist God’s continuing creation in an orderly manner. Eve may be absolutely different in Adam’s eyes, but she is absolutely like him in God’s eyes. She may be bone and flesh of Adam, human, but she is God’s divine gift to complete and make him happy.  And together they are to partner in caring for God’s creation.

Each of us longs for someone to belong to; this is probably the deepest human need all of us have. For Adam, it was Eve. For us, it might be our spouse or a best friend we now have, or a soulmate we hope for. This human longing to belong to and be completed by another is an integral part of the Adam and Eve story. It can therefore help us to understand how God intended for human beings to live in community and to be in life-giving relationships with each other and all of creation. God’s wish is for us to enjoy this good order of human life.

If you agree with this scriptural way of understanding how God brings each of us into relationship, first, and then together to care for God’s creation, the natural question that follows is this: “How should you and I treat those we are in relationship with, especially, those we intimately share life and faith with?”

With openness of heart towards others. Its opposite, hardness of heart, destroys relationships. An American Jesuit friend describes this hardness of heart as the persistent stain of original sin we all have. It manifests itself whenever we are “self-loving”, “self-serving”, “self-obsessing” and “self-preserving” in our relationships with others, especially, those we are significantly bound to by vows and promises. Aren’t you and I guilty of being singularly self-centred every now and then in our interactions with others? In these moments, we do not gain anything of worth, only ruined relationships, lost possibilities, and empty lives.

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus tells the Pharisees who question him about marriage, divorce and the Law that it is hardness of heart that moved Moses to command the Israelites against divorce. This is because such hardness is the unhealthy breeding ground for divorce; it constricts one’s heart, closing it slowly but surely to God’s gift of another in relationship, and to God's promise of a happier, fuller life this other person brings into our lives. This is why Jesus admonishes against self-centredness by affirming marriage and condemning adultery. 

But there is a more foundational reason Jesus insists on the sacredness of marriage: it is rooted in God’s plan to bring two into one communion with each other, and together into one union with God. This is the divine order God created human love and life for. We know this because Adam and Eve’s story is also about both discovering how the one they seek to complete and give them true happiness is not each other, but God. Their eating of the forbidden apple is a self-centered grasping for God that is not life-giving.

How then can we become more open-hearted towards God and those God gifts us in relationships? By following Jesus’ example of welcoming and blessing the little children in today’s gospel passage. Jesus can do this because he understands that the children and the parents who brought them to him do so in trust; they trust that he will care for them as they give themselves over to him, and so belong to one another in relationship.

I believe this is the kind of trust that can help marriages to endure and to flourish. Such trust enables a partner to come to his other half in every moment of married life, whether in good times or bad, and to place himself into this other's care by asking this question, “Can I please belong to you all the days of my life?” 

Isn’t this same desire to belong what we also want from God when we sin and seek reconciliation? Surely, in those moments that we did so, we experienced God’s boundless mercy, not only to forgive us, but, more surprisingly, to embrace us back into relationship again, and again and again. 

If we have experienced God’s mercy and love repeatedly, how can we not open our hearts wider to embrace another in our marriages, in our families and in our friendships? This is why marriage must be about how each one commits himself to embrace what “could be better” in the hope that it will be. Like marriage, our relationships with family and friends are also about committing ourselves to the hope-filled possibility of what more they can become through our actions of longing and belonging. 

Indeed, it is when we dare to love another who longs to be with us in life and to belong to us through love that we will experience the kingdom of God Jesus speaks about. This is so because God’s kingdom is the divine embrace of what more “could always be better” in ourselves and in the community we are when we are in relationship.  We know this reality to be especially true when the relationships we have and share welcome, embrace and bless us daily. 

Who then is longing for you today? Who else wants to belong to you this day? Someone does. God most surely wishes to. What will be your response?

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore

photo: www.huffingtonpost.com