‘What is more striking: a woman healed from a tumour or a father, happy with his baby without the mother?’ Sunday Reflections, 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Servant of God Chiara Corbella Petrillo

(9 January 1984 - 13 June 2012)

[Photo from official website]

Readings (Jerusalem Bible: Australia, England & Wales, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Scotland)

Readings (New American Bible: Philippines, USA)

Gospel Mark 10:2-16 or 10:2-12 (English Standard Version Anglicised: India)

And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife,  and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

[And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them.]

 

Léachtaí i nGaeilge

Pope Benedict XVI with young friends

Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it (Mark 10:15; Gospel). 

 

I have been involved with Worldwide Marriage Encounter since 1981, initially in Canada and then from 1984 until 2017 in the Philippines and now in Ireland. The most important reality that I have come to see very clearly through Marriage Encounter is that the relationship between husband and wife in the Sacrament of Matrimony is the foundation of the Christian family.

Continue at Bangor to Bobbio.