Sunday 7 October 2018

Twenty Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Masses    8.30am    10.15am      6pm
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Holy Baptism 2pm
ROSARY UNDER THE CROSS 3pm
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Mass from the Ordinariate Missal-Divine Worship Tuesday evening 7.30pm

9th October-Memorial of Blessed John Henry Newman

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St Peter's Catholic Church, Leigh on Sea 

 EASTWOOD PARISH

Home to the Southend Ordinariate Mission

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What God Has Joined: Scott Hahn Reflects on the Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Download Audio File
The Sacrament of Matrimony, Rogier van der Weyden, 1445-1450
Readings:
Genesis 2:18–24
Psalm 128:1–6
Hebrews 2:9–11
Mark 10:2–16

In today’s Gospel, the Pharisees try to trap Jesus with a trick question.
The “lawfulness” of divorce in Israel was never an issue. Moses had long ago allowed it (see Deuteronomy 24:1–4). But Jesus points His enemies back before Moses, to “the beginning,” interpreting the text we hear in today’s First Reading.
Divorce violates the order of creation, He says. Moses permitted it only as a concession to the people’s “hardness of heart”—their inability to live by God’s covenant Law. But Jesus comes to fulfill the Law, to reveal its true meaning and purpose, and to give people the grace to keep God’s commands.
Marriage, He reveals, is a sacrament, a divine, life-giving sign. Through the union of husband and wife, God intended to bestow His blessings on the human family—making it fruitful, multiplying it until it filled the earth (see Genesis 1:28).
That’s why today’s Gospel moves so easily from a debate about marriage to Jesus’ blessing of children. Children are blessings the Father bestows on couples who walk in His ways, as we sing in today’s Psalm.
Marriage also is a sign of God’s new covenant. As today’s Epistle hints, Jesus is the new Adam—made a little lower than the angels, born of a human family (see Romans 5:14Psalm 8:5–7). The Church is the new Eve, the “woman” born of Christ’s pierced side as He hung in the sleep of death on the cross (see John 19:34Revelation 12:1–17).
Through the union of Christ and the Church as “one flesh,” God’s plan for the world is fulfilled (see Ephesians 5:21–32). Eve was “mother of all the living” (see Genesis 3:20). And in Baptism, we are made sons and daughters of the Church, children of the Father, heirs of the eternal glory He intended for the human family in the beginning.
The challenge for us is to live as children of the kingdom, growing up ever more faithful in our love and devotion to the ways of Christ and the teachings of His Church.

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