Friday of the
Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time
(Ezekiel 19:59-63; Matthew 19:3-12)
The woman is no longer young. She has never married and, no doubt, wonders
if she ever will. She asks for a book on
sexual ethics to guide her. She says
that most of what she sees pertains to married couples or to youth who one day will
marry. She implies that the Church has
abandoned people in her position. Even
in the gospel today Jesus does not seem to address the possibility that one may
not marry because there never was an opportunity to do so.
The apostle Paul does take up the issue in the First Letter
to the Corinthians where he says that that “it is a good thing” that the
unmarried and the widowed remain as they are if they can exercise control over
their passions. He reasons that the
unmarried may concern themselves exclusively with pleasing the Lord where the
married have various interests competing for their attention.
But Jesus is actually not far from Paul as he advises that
those who can accept what he teaches about forsaking marriage for the sake of
the Kingdom should do so. Furthermore, those
who lack opportunity to marry need not lament over their situation but should consider
it carefully. They will probably discern,
as professed celibates readily do, that being unmarried offers manifold
possibilities. They will have more
opportunities to serve the common good, to befriend different kinds of people,
and to learn about the world.
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