The Lord God said: “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him.” -Genesis 2:18
At the dawn of creation, time and time again, God deemed His work “good.” He created time, space, land, vegetation, light, living creatures, and man in his own image. When He completed each work, He saw that it was good. At the end of all His works, He surveyed all of creation: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Something that strikes me is that the very first time that God saw that something was “not good” was after He had created Adam, but before He created Eve. He saw that Adam was alone in the garden: “The Lord God said: ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him’” (Genesis 2:18).
For me, this puts our Gospel reading for this Sunday about divorce (Mark 10:2-16) in its proper context. God created marriage to be good: for true partnership, fruitfulness, and to be a visible sign of God’s faithful love for us. It is “not good” for man to be alone, so separating what God has joined is also “not good.” Jesus called back to God’s creation of man when He explained the reason that He forbids divorce: “But 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.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate (Mark 10:6-9).’” Because marriage is so important, Jesus set a clear command about the sanctity of marriage: it is indissoluble.
The truth is, divorce does happen, and the Catechism teaches us that “the separation of spouses while maintaining the marriage bond can be legitimate in certain cases provided for by canon law” (CCC 2383). But there are very clear cases for divorce (see CCC 2382-86). Jesus reminded us that the reason another human cannot separate man and wife is because marriage is a lasting covenant between a man and a woman that is “it is sealed by God himself” (CCC 1639). Indeed, “God himself is the author of marriage” (Gaudium et Spes, 48). This gives me hope! God is the author and sealer of the sacrament of marriage; He makes it blessed and strong.
Father, thank you for creating the sacrament of marriage. I trust that You are its true author and that because it is Your creation, it is “very good.”