yes or no

YES OR NO?
Homily for Friday of the 7th Wk in Ordinary Time,
24 May 2024, Mk 10:1-12

Today’s Gospel is bound to go viral again in the social media because it is about a hot issue that is presently being debated and has already undergone a third reading and voting by our legislators in the Philippine Congress—DIVORCE. It is an issue that is about as old as humanity itself. Mark’s Gospel was written around 1,960 years ago, and he is referring to Jesus commenting on the law of Moses, which was written about 1,500 years earlier than Jesus’ time!
The question that is posed to Jesus is plain and simple: “Is divorce in accordance with the Law of Moses?” YES OR NO? And Jesus answers, not with a plain YES or NO. His answer is a YES, BUT…which twists it into a NO.
Let’s start with the YES. Yes indeed, if you look at marriage as just a legal contract between a man and a woman. Like all legally binding human contracts, its validity ends the moment the terms of agreement between the two parties are violated or no longer in place.
Notice that Jesus adds a parenthetical remark to his YES. He says divorce was made into a law by Moses because of the people’s “hardness of heart.” And our second reading today seems to be affirming that remark. We heard St James say, “Do not swear, either by heaven or by the earth or with any other oath…”. I think this fondness for swearing like little kids who say “Peks man, cross my heart, mamatay man ako…” is what Jesus calls hardness of heart in the Gospel—the tendency to make promises we cannot keep. The composer Burt Bacharach once wrote a song that became popular in the 60s, entitled “Promises, promises.” In a tone of exasperation, he says, “Promises, promises I am through with promises, promises…”.
The apostle makes it sound so easy. He says, “Just let your YES mean YES, and your NO mean NO, that you may not incur condemnation.” The trouble precisely is, very often, we say YES when we mean NO, and NO when we mean YES, especially when we are