Seeking the Kingdom of God
“Therefore, I tell you”, Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, “do not be anxious about your life. … Which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life?” You don’t have to look very far, or very hard, to see a lot of anxious and worried looks. The temptation to worry is with all. But our Heavenly Father knows all this, knows all our needs. We are of more value to Him than the birds of the air and the rest of creation. “Seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness, and all things shall be yours as well.” Jesus’ teaching here is something we would be well to remind ourselves of, daily.
Seeking the Kingdom of God in our daily lives entails especially looking at the right ordering of our relationships – firstly with God and with others. In simple words, we need to find our true selves. And in this search we remind ourselves that we are made in the image and likeness of God. We are made in the likeness of the Holy Trinity and we are called to live a unity in our personal lives that mirrors the unity of the Trinity. From the Vatican II document ‘Gaudium et Spes’ we read that this likeness we have to the Trinity shows that “if man is the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake, man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself.” Sadly, we are in the midst of a world wide ‘global village’, as some call it, where human relationships are not based on gift of self. We forget Our Lord’s admonition: “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it.”
In a unique way, it is the spousal love of man and woman, given to one another in marriage, which is the paradigmatic case of a total gift of self in our experience. This is why the family forms the very fabric of human society. Where marriage and the family break down, serious ruptures occur in a society. While the problems may have escalated in our times nevertheless we see that the question of divorce has been an issue going back to the time of Moses and perhaps even to the time of the Fall. The Pharisees who question Jesus on the matter had the belief that because Moses had permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce, therefore this was now God’s Law too. But Jesus corrects them on this point, that Moses only allowed this because of their ‘hardness of heart’. He refers back to the ‘beginning of creation’ when God created man male and female. This ‘beginning’ is before the Fall, which is a point or dividing line between two states – that of first innocence and that of a lapsed state, a falling from grace. It is to the first state that Jesus is referring to. Divorce was never a part of God’s plan and Jesus upholds this. A man shall ‘leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one.’ This is God’s doing, God’s plan from the beginning, and ‘what therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.’
To understand what makes for good relationships between people generally, within marriages in particular, we could reflect a little on what the human person is. We are the only creatures on earth made in the image and likeness of God. We are given the commandment to love, emphasised especially by Jesus. We are called always to put God in first place, to love Him above all else and to love our neighbour as ourselves. This implies that we can never employ a principle of utility in our relationships. We can never treat a person as a means to an end, never as a means to pleasure. The maximization of pleasure will always stand in the way of love. Pope St. John Paul II wrote of what he called the ‘personalistic norm’. This norm states that the human person ‘is the kind of good which does not admit of use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end … The person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love.” Nevertheless, marriage relationships, friendship relationships in a wider sense are meant to be enjoyed. Only the commandment to love, always putting God in the place of the first love, leads to the way of living such enjoyment.
But normal friendship relationships outside of marriage are different to those of marriage in a very important sense: When a man and a woman marry, they become one, one flesh, in a bond created by God. They are no longer two, but one. What God has created, Jesus tells us, man must not undo. The conjugal union creates a union which is permanent and of a moral order. One flesh means that the bond is as strong, perhaps we could even say stronger than, those of blood relationship. I cannot undo the bond between myself and my siblings or parents. Nor can one undo the marriage bond. This is God’s plan, from the beginning.
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
These lines of William Wordsworth invite us to reflect on a particular aspect of childhood. We can learn from where we came – the Child is father of the Man. Jesus wants us to receive the Kingdom of God like a child – like the child all of us once were. For to such belongs the Kingdom of God. Similarly, there are special moments when parents can learn from their children – their own flesh and blood. The bond of the Child to the Man – ‘days bound each to each by natural piety’ – being one person, mirrors the marriage bond – two persons but they are one flesh. Mary and Joseph likewise had to learn from their Child Jesus – the Word made Flesh. We ponder these mysteries in our hearts.