DAILY DEVOTIONAL

Friday, November 16, 2018

“Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”        – Luke 16:18

Christ with this teaching is not emphasizing a Biblical Law, or bringing it back to mind, but rather is about scribes and Pharisees, Sadducees and others who used holy scriptures to justify their callousness of heart.  This law of divorce applied only to men who treated their wives as property, there is no counterpart from the perspective of the woman.  In this very way, it is unjust in its text.  Christ characterizes this law of divorce as a means of dealing with a man’s callousness of heart. 

This teaching is a caution to the men who were listening that they must remember that God looks to the heart, to the true motive of a person, to hidden intention.  To manipulate the scripture in a self-serving way is a matter of concern for God.  “Just because you can justify your intention with a quote from scripture, does not turn a wrong into something right. And when you do … you set into motion a cascade of moral dilemmas. 

We still use scripture in self-serving, possibly even more so than those “devout” men who listened to Christ admonish them.  We still treat scripture as codes of intricate law, wherein the weaving of citations we can confound God’s loving intention.  We go about making laws and rules rather than fulfilling the intentions of the Lord; we go about patching together disparate passages to prove our point-of-view.

Like humanly contrived tax law … there are always those who try to find the loopholes for their own personal gain.   Loved Ones, this is sin … the manipulation of the intentions of God.

Always in Christ’s Service,

Fr. Charitas de la Cruz