Robert Barron - The Biblical Vision of the Family
Peace be with you. Friends, our readings, the first reading from Genesis and the Gospel from Mark are super important, because they have to do with what we call technically Christian anthropology, the Christian or biblical understanding of who we are, and most specifically in relation to marriage and family, topics obviously of importance to a lot of people today, how we define ourselves, who we are. The readings, in kind of a beautifully compact way, bring this out. So what I want to do is just march us through this Genesis readings, from chapter 2 of Genesis, read those first three chapters of Genesis in a way you get the whole trajectory of the Old Testament. But let's look at this line by line. "The Lord God said, 'It's not good for the man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him.'"
Now, that's saying an awful lot. In basic biblical anthropology, the fundamental unit is not the individual. You'll find that in some of the founders of modern political philosophy, look at Thomas Hobbes, look at John Locke, where the individual and his rights and prerogatives and so on is the building block of society. Not true in the Bible, not true in Catholic social teaching, in which the fundamental building block of society is not the individual, but the family. The Lord God said, "It's not good for the man to be alone".
The Bible is not an individualistic system. It certainly respects and acknowledges the rights and freedom of the individual. Of course it does. But the building block of our social theory, if you want, is not the individual, but the family. We are built for togetherness. We're built for another. There's just something inadequate if we are alone. "So the Lord God formed out of the ground various wild animals and various birds of the air, and he brought them to the man to see what he would call them". There's so much packed into the poetry of those lines.
Notice, please, the human being was also drawn from the dust of the earth. We are cousins, close relatives of all the other animals. We human beings are indeed made from the earth. We stand against any system that would say the real me is the soul and the body's just kind of this appendage or the body's a prison. You'll find that in Plato. Or the body is something I can manipulate arbitrarily. You find that in modern wokeism and ancient Gnosticism. No, no, we are our bodies. We come from the dust of the earth as the other animals do. We forget that at our peril, and that would be sermon for another day. But all forms of dualism, Platonism, Gnosticism have that problem.
The Bible is very clear. Like the other animals, we are formed from the dust of the earth. But, here's the difference. We also had, in the language of Genesis, breathed into us by God the Spirit. Now don't think of it simply as like the air coming in and out of the lungs. The Spirit here, the ruach in the Hebrew, the pneuma in Greek, spiritus in Latin, it means breath, but that's a symbol for the higher spiritual and intellectual powers that we have. Think now of mind and will and freedom and creativity. We're of the earth, yes, but we're also of the spirit. We participate in the very mind of God. And this is why, listen now, this is why as the animals come before Adam, he names them. Literally, he catalogs them. Katalogon in Greek would mean according to the word.
See, participating in God's own mind, Adam, the human being, can now recognize the intelligibility in things around him. So Adam, naming the animals, is showing his God-like capacity. So even this being, yes, from the earth, this embodied reality, but is also a spiritual reality. We forget that at our peril. You can denigrate the body, you can also denigrate the spiritual, and say, "Oh, it's just an epiphenomenon of the brain or something". No, no. The bible's very clear. The coming together of the two is what makes up the human being.
Notice, please, he catalogs, he names the animals according to their objective intelligibility. He recognizes, it was Joseph Ratzinger who taught me this little trick, to recognize, re-cognize, is to think again what's already been thought, Adam naming the animals is thinking again what has already been thought into them by God. Now, in doing this, the church Fathers saw this, in doing this, Adam becomes the prototype of all scientists, of all philosophers. Isn't that beautiful? This animal from the earth, yes, like the other animals, but yet has this godlike capacity to participate in the very mind of God. How powerful. How powerful, that anthropology. So Adam gives names to all the animals, but then God and he both realize, but none of these is an adequate partner for me.
"So the Lord God cast a deep sleep on the man and while he was asleep, took out one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. The Lord God then built up into a woman the rib that he had taken from the man. And when he brought her to the man, the man said, this one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh". Don't see the creation of Eve here from the rib of Adam as any sign of denigration or that she has a secondary place. No, no, on the contrary. It's meant to show the co-equality of Adam and Eve, of the man and the woman, that finally he's found someone who can be truly a second self. Think here of Aristotle. You can really only be friends with someone who can be a second self to you. That's why you can't really be friends with an inferior, in Aristotle.
Well, it's really even more profoundly expressed here that the proper partner for the man, so this building block of society, the family, the proper partner for man has to be his co-equal, and that's the role of the woman. And then here's how this passage closes. That's why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife and the two of them become one flesh. I don't know anywhere, everybody, in the literature of the world where the marriage act and marriage itself is more beautifully expressed than there. The two of them separate, yes indeed, but complementary to one another, each one recognizing the other as a co-equal but yet different partner, and the two become one flesh.
Now, that does mean indeed the body, and we think here of the sexual act, but see flesh in the Hebrew has that sense really of the totality of the self. The two become one. Marriage as the fullest expression of the friendship that forms the foundation of our civil society. All of that and more is packed into this little passage. That's why John Paul II can generate his whole theology of the body from these lines of Genesis. Now, here's what's interesting, as if that's not enough. We turn to the Gospel, Gospel of Mark, and they're interrogating Jesus trying to trip him up, asking about marriage and divorce and can a man divorce his wife and so on. Jesus told them, citing this very passage we've been considering. "From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh".
Now Jesus goes on. "So they are no longer two but one flesh, and therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate". Now look what's added here, what I've called before, borrowing from Aristotle, the transcendent third. Yes man, and women come together in their complementarity, they become one flesh. They form thereby the foundation of civil society, all that's true. But what Jesus adds with great clarity is they're not just brought together out of mutual attraction. God has brought them together. So there's the transcendent third.
Aristotle said a friendship will last, a marriage will last only in the measure that the two partners fall in love, not just with each other, but together fall in love with a transcendent third, with some value, some good that transcends them. It might be that there's two soldiers who love their country together, two philosophers who love the truth together. Or here, two people, husband and wife, love each other, yes, indeed, but primarily together they love God. It's God who's brought them together for his purposes. In the measure that they surrender together to God, their marriage is confirmed. Now, there's one more step, and it's just beautiful how these readings kind of paint the entire picture.
So think now everything we've been saying, but then we add this at the end. "And people were bringing children to him that he might touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he became indignant and said to them, 'Let the children come to me. Do not prevent them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.'" And then it concludes, "He embraced them and blessed them, placing his hands upon them". One of the clearest indicators of the covenant, in the Old Testament, one of the clearest signs that the people of Israel have surrendered properly to God, is that they are fruitful and they multiply. One of the earliest commands that God gives to his people is be fruitful and multiply. Life, life, procreation, propagation of life, the emergence of children, all of that.
Listen, as the proper fruit of this coming together of man and woman under the aegis of God, all of that, the complementarity of male and female, the fruit of all of that are the children. The move of the disciples here is interesting, because in Jesus' times, they weren't romantics about children. Children had no status in the society of Jesus time. They weren't even on the ladder. I think I mentioned that a couple of weeks ago in a sermon. Children were just insignificant. And so as they come to Jesus, the disciples like, "No, no, no. Well, I think he can't be bothered with these nobodies". And Jesus, "No, no, no". He dismisses that, welcomes the children, blesses them.
Well see, he's the God of Israel made flesh, and the God of Israel wanted his people to be fruitful and to multiply. One of the signs, there are many of them actually, everybody, many signs of the breakdown of all of this in our society, but one of them is the absence of children. I know a sermon for another day or a lecture for another day, but the lack of procreation in our Western societies that we're now below replacement level. The breakdown obviously of marriage, breakdown of the family, a tendency to define one's own life on one's own terms.
See, all of that represents the breaking apart of this biblical vision. Revisit that second chapter of Genesis and take a look again, when you have a little time with your Bible, read this passage from Mark, because it's Jesus himself, the God of Israel incarnate, reaffirming precisely what we find in Genesis. It's not good for the man to be alone. That's why the husband clings to his wife and wife to her husband, and that's why this mutual self-gift and love gives rise to children. That's the biblical vision. I know, I know, under assault in many ways, but we biblical people have to stand up and defend this beautiful vision. And God bless you.