Ask a room full of Catholics why marriage is permanent and most of them will answer with something about commitment. Two people decide, two people follow through, and the strength of the bond tracks the strength of their resolve. That answer is why the bond feels negotiable the moment the resolve thins out.

Today’s readings put the weight somewhere else entirely. The Pharisees come to Jesus wanting to know how wide the exit is, and he takes them back past Moses to the sixth day of creation. Meanwhile Ezekiel is told to describe a wedding in which the bride was picked up off open ground, still bloody, with no family, no name, and nothing whatever to recommend her.

Both readings say the same thing about covenant. It holds because of the character of the one who swore it. Jerusalem never earned the robe or the crown, and Ezekiel is careful to say she was beautiful only because of a splendor she had been handed. So when we treat a vow as a contract that lapses when the other party stops being worth it, we are saying something about God without meaning to. We are saying his covenant works that way too.

Today the Church remembers a Franciscan who stepped out of a line at Auschwitz to keep one marriage from being severed. He is the best commentary on this Gospel I know.

The Readings

First Reading: Ezekiel 16:1-15, 60, 63

Again the word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, make known to Jerusalem her abominations, and say, Thus says the Lord God to Jerusalem: Your origin and your birth are of the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite, and your mother a Hittite. And as for your birth, on the day you were born your navel string was not cut, nor were you washed with water to cleanse you, nor rubbed with salt, nor swathed with bands. No eye pitied you, to do any of these things to you out of compassion for you; but you were cast out on the open field, for you were abhorred, on the day that you were born.

“And when I passed by you, and saw you weltering in your blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live, and grow up like a plant of the field.’ And you grew up and became tall and arrived at full maidenhood; your breasts were formed, and your hair had grown; yet you were naked and bare.

“When I passed by you again and looked upon you, behold, you were at the age for love; and I spread my skirt over you, and covered your nakedness: yea, I plighted my troth to you and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord God, and you became mine. Then I bathed you with water and washed off your blood from you, and anointed you with oil. I clothed you also with embroidered cloth and shod you with leather, I swathed you in fine linen and covered you with silk. And I decked you with ornaments, and put bracelets on your arms, and a chain on your neck. And I put a ring on your nose, and earrings in your ears, and a beautiful crown upon your head. Thus you were decked with gold and silver; and your raiment was of fine linen, and silk, and embroidered cloth; you ate fine flour and honey and oil. You grew exceedingly beautiful, and came to regal estate. And your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through the splendor which I had bestowed upon you, says the Lord God.

“But you trusted in your beauty, and played the harlot because of your renown, and lavished your harlotries on any passer-by.

“…yet I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish with you an everlasting covenant.

“…that you may remember and be confounded, and never open your mouth again because of your shame, when I forgive you all that you have done, says the Lord God.”

Gospel: Matthew 19:3-12

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one’? So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?” He said to them, “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery; and he who marries a divorced woman, commits adultery.”

The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry.” But he said to them, “Not all men can receive this precept, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.”

Scriptural Analysis

The Bride Found In A Field

God tells Ezekiel to make known to Jerusalem her abominations, and then opens the indictment with her pedigree. Your father was an Amorite, your mother a Hittite (Ezekiel 16:3). Jerusalem was a Jebusite city before David ever took it (2 Samuel 5:6-9), and the charge here is that her behavior has stayed true to the blood she came from. She is being told, in public, exactly where she started.

Then the birth scene, and the details are all deliberate. The cord uncut, no washing, no rubbing with salt, no swaddling bands. Those four acts were the ordinary work of an ancient midwife, the minimum any newborn received. All four are withheld. And the child is thrown out on open ground, which was a real practice in the ancient world for infants nobody wanted, usually a death sentence by exposure. The prophet is describing a person with no claim on anyone.

Then God passes by. He does not clean her first or check whether she is worth the trouble. He speaks one word over a bleeding infant: “Live.” Everything after that word is gift.

Now watch the language when she is grown. “I spread my skirt over you.” That is a legal gesture, the same one Ruth asks of Boaz on the threshing floor when she says, “spread your skirt over your maidservant, for you are next of kin” (Ruth 3:9). It means a claim of protection and betrothal. And God says plainly what he is doing: “I plighted my troth to you and entered into a covenant with you, and you became mine.” The covenant with Israel is a marriage. That is the whole grammar of the passage, and it is the reason the Catechism says the prophets, seeing God’s covenant in the image of exclusive and faithful married love, prepared the conscience of the Chosen People for a deeper understanding of the unity and indissolubility of marriage.^[1]

Then comes the adornment, and it reads like a coronation: bathed, anointed with oil, dressed in embroidered cloth and fine linen and silk, given bracelets, a chain, a ring, earrings, a crown. Fine flour, honey, and oil for food, which are the ingredients of temple offerings. And the line that carries the theology: her beauty was perfect “through the splendor which I had bestowed upon you.”

Verse 15 is where it turns, and the sin is precise. “You trusted in your beauty.” She keeps the gift and forgets the giver, and once the gift becomes the ground of her confidence, it becomes something she can sell. Ezekiel calls idolatry harlotry because the word is exact. If the covenant is a marriage, then worshiping another god is adultery in the strict sense.

The lectionary then jumps to verses 60 and 63, and the jump is a mercy. “I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth.” She has forgotten it. He has not. And notice the order in verse 63, because it is easy to read backwards: she remembers, and is confounded, and is silenced by shame, “when I forgive you all that you have done.” The forgiveness comes first and makes the honest shame possible. A soul that has never been forgiven cannot afford to look straight at what it did.

The Question With A Trapdoor

Jesus has just crossed into Judea beyond the Jordan, which is Perea, which is Herod Antipas’s jurisdiction. That is the territory of the man who had John the Baptist arrested and killed over this exact subject (Matthew 14:3-4). The question is not academic.

Saint Jerome saw the trap clearly. The Pharisees wanted him caught between the horns of a syllogism, so that either answer could be used. Permit divorce and remarriage and he contradicts his own preaching on chastity. Forbid it outright and he can be charged with speaking against Moses.^[2] And the phrasing “for any cause” is doing work. The Fathers noticed that these men avoided asking which causes, because a list would have tied them down to fixed limits, and appetite refuses limits.^[3]

Jesus refuses the frame. Saint John Chrysostom noticed that he withholds a flat “it is unlawful” and instead builds the answer out of a proof, so that his questioners cannot file it away as one rabbi’s private opinion.^[4] He goes behind Moses to Genesis, and to two verses. God made them male and female (Genesis 1:27), and a man leaves father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and the two become one flesh (Genesis 2:24). Jerome notices the singular. Our Lord says “his wife,” not wives, and the whole sentence gives one bond only.^[5]

Chrysostom presses the “one flesh” until it hurts. As believers who love one another spiritually are called one soul, Acts describes the whole company as being of one heart and one soul (Acts 4:32), so a husband and wife are called one flesh. Which means, he says, that as it is a wretched thing to cut flesh, so it is an unjust thing to put away a wife.^[6] The image is surgical on purpose. Divorce is described as an amputation performed on a living body.

Then the conclusion: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” Chrysostom reads this as a double charge, against nature because one flesh is being divided, and against law because God joined and God forbade the sundering.^[7] Jerome puts it more sharply still. God joined them by making the two one flesh, so man may not separate them; only God may.^[8]

The Pharisees fall back on Moses, and Jesus corrects their verb. Moses allowed, for hardness of heart. Chrysostom notes that our Lord defends Moses in the process and turns the accusation back onto the questioners.^[9] Jerome catches the exact wording: he did not say God permitted you; he said Moses did, which puts the certificate of divorce in the category of a human concession.^[10] And the Fathers understood that concession as damage control. Moses permitted the lesser evil so that men who had come to hate their wives would not do something worse to them.^[11]

Saint Augustine asks the question that should stop us. How great was that hardness, when not even the delay of drawing up a bill of divorce, which gave just and prudent men room to talk a husband out of it, was enough to move these men to renew their conjugal affection?^[12] The bill was a speed bump. They drove over it. That is the hardness of heart our Lord is naming, and it is an interior condition long before it becomes a legal document.

Those Who Can Receive It

The disciples’ reaction is honest, and Jerome does not pretend otherwise. If a wife can only be sent away for unchastity, what about a wife who is a drunk, or cruel, or impossible to live with? The apostles feel the weight and say it out loud: better not to marry.^[13]

Our Lord neither softens the teaching nor scolds them for flinching. “Not all men can receive this precept, but only those to whom it is given.” Jerome warns against reading that as fate or luck, as though continence fell on a few by accident. It is given to those who asked God for it, who wanted it, who fought for it.^[14] The Fathers put it plainly: without the aid of grace we do not have the strength, and that aid is not refused to anyone who seeks it, since the same Lord said ask and you shall receive.^[15]

Then the three kinds of eunuchs. Jerome distinguishes them: those born so, those made so by other men, and those who have made themselves so for the kingdom of heaven. Only the third has a reward promised, because to the first two nothing is owed, their continence never having been chosen.^[16] The principle behind that is worth keeping: a righteous act is not in the deed unless the will goes with it, so honorable continence is the kind the will embraces, not the kind the body is forced into.^[17] Chrysostom is blunter. Making oneself a eunuch means putting away evil thoughts, and no amputation ever brought the peace that a bridle on the thoughts brings, because desire has its source in an unguarded heart.^[18]

This is where both halves of today’s Gospel come together. The Church reads Matthew 19:12 as our Lord’s own invitation to virginity for the sake of the kingdom, an unfolding of baptismal grace and a sign of the supremacy of the bond with Christ.^[19] And she teaches that spouses receive the original meaning of marriage and live it by following Christ, taking up their crosses, since the grace of Christian marriage is a fruit of that cross.^[20] Married fidelity and consecrated celibacy stand on the same foundation. Both are only possible as gifts, and both point at the same wedding. Saint Remigius, reading Ephesians 5:32, saw the whole of Genesis fulfilled in Christ: he left his Father in coming down from heaven, left his mother, the synagogue, cleaved to his wife, the Church, and the two are one body.^[21]

Which sends us straight back to Ezekiel. The Church is the foundling in the field.

Daily Application

Today the Church celebrates Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe, and no saint on the calendar fits this Gospel better.

Kolbe was a man who received the word about eunuchs for the kingdom. He entered the Conventual Franciscans at 16, took doctorates in philosophy and theology, founded the Militia of the Immaculata, and built Niepokalanów into a friary of 700 men, publishing a magazine that reached a million subscribers. Then Poland fell, the friary was bombed, and in 1941 he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz.

When a prisoner escaped, and the commandant selected ten men to starve to death, Kolbe stepped out of the line. The reason he gave was one sentence: “I would like to take that man’s place. He has a wife and children.” Franciszek Gajowniczek walked back to the ranks and lived another 54 years. He was there in Rome in 1982 when Kolbe was canonized.

Sit with what that means alongside today’s Gospel. A celibate priest, a man who had made himself a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven, gave his life so that one man’s one flesh would not be cut. The two vocations in Matthew 19 met in a starvation bunker, and the celibate one spent itself to protect the married one. That is what the Church means when she says these states of life are not rivals.

So here is the challenge for the married. Your vow does not rest on your spouse continuing to deserve it, because Ezekiel 16 has already ruled that out as the basis of any covenant God makes. God bound himself to a bride who brought nothing to the table and then betrayed him with the very gifts he gave her, and he still says, “I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth.” Fidelity of that kind is a decision to keep remembering after remembering has stopped being pleasant.

And take Augustine’s question seriously, because it is the practical one. Those men could not be moved to renew their conjugal affection even when the law gave them time to reconsider. Affection can be renewed. That is the interior movement this Gospel asks for, and it is almost always concrete. Name one thing you did for your spouse in the first year of marriage that you quietly stopped doing, and do it this week without announcing it. Then pray Ezekiel 16 over your marriage and let it reframe who the generous party actually is.

If your marriage has already broken, hear the rest of the reading. Verse 63 says the shame comes after the forgiveness, which means God never asks anyone to earn their way back to the point where mercy becomes available. The Church distinguishes carefully between the spouse who was unjustly abandoned and the one who destroyed a valid marriage through grave fault,^[22] and she has a tribunal, a confessional, and priests whose whole job is to walk this with you. Make the appointment. Do not carry it alone another year.

And if you are single, or consecrated, or waiting on a vocation you cannot yet see, take Jerome at his word. Continence is given to those who asked God for it, who longed for it, who fought for it. So ask. Kolbe asked at 12 years old, was handed two crowns, and took them both.

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Notes

1. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Libreria Editrice Vaticana–United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2000), no. 1611. ↩
2. Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 1, St. Matthew, trans. John Henry Newman (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1841), 650–51, citing Jerome. ↩
3. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:651, citing Pseudo-Chrysostom. ↩
4. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:653, citing John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 62. ↩
5. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:652, citing Jerome. ↩
6. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:653, citing John Chrysostom. ↩
7. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:653, citing John Chrysostom. ↩
8. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:653–54, citing Jerome. ↩
9. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:654, citing John Chrysostom. ↩
10. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:654–55, citing Jerome. ↩
11. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:655, citing Pseudo-Chrysostom. ↩
12. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:654, citing Augustine, Contra Faustum 19.26. ↩
13. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:657, citing Jerome. ↩
14. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:657, citing Jerome. ↩
15. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:657–58, citing Pseudo-Chrysostom. ↩
16. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:658, citing Jerome. ↩
17. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:658, citing Pseudo-Chrysostom. ↩
18. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:659, citing John Chrysostom. ↩
19. Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 1618–19. ↩
20. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1615. ↩
21. Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 1:653, citing Remigius. ↩
22. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2386. ↩