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Gospel Reflection for Friday, February 28, 2025
For a long time in the church, we’ve relied on the law, the fixed and stable rules. That’s how we ended up with a Code of Canon Law that has 1,752 canons or rules. And in each diocese, there are legal experts (we call them «canonists») to make sure everything is done according to the rules. Law has the advantage that the main thing is to follow the rules. But law has the problem that it stays at the external compliance with the rules. It struggles to reach the heart.
Sometimes, it seems like with so much law, we’ve forgotten a bit about mercy in the church. Sometimes, the law captures with all its radicality what Jesus expressed and what the church has tried and tries to live since its birth. But the law finds it difficult to express and make mercy a law and a rule. And sometimes, it seems like we forget that God’s heart is a Father’s heart and that in him «mercy triumphs over judgment» (James 2:13).
Today, the Gospel presents the topic of marriage and divorce (or repudiation, as the text says). Jesus calls us back to the beginning. It’s a call to radicality. Love between a man and a woman, to be authentic, can only be forever and for everything, as one of my professors used to say. Marriages are called to that radicality. Because if love is true, it can’t be any other way: forever and for everything. Without limits, without barriers.
But the truth is also that we don’t always manage to reach that radicality. Men and women are limited, we have specific circumstances. Life sometimes puts us through difficult trials where it’s not easy to find a way out. Sometimes, so often, with all the good will in the world from both sides, conflict erupts and there’s no other solution than to break the agreement, to seek the most peaceful way out possible, which will always be better than eternal conflict. We can’t always reach the ideal, but that doesn’t mean the end of life. We have to get up, try again. God the Father, and the Church, will continue to embrace us with his mercy without being carried away by the judgment that condemns and kills.