Jesus points to the Beginning

            John Paul II begins his analysis of the creation narrative by citing Jesus as the one who refers to the “beginning” as his point of reference in his response to the Pharisees who question him about divorce and remarriage.

            And the Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said,‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one.’ So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined let no man put asunder.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?” He said to them, “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.”[1]

Jesus explicitly disapproves of what Moses had permitted in the desert wanderings and gives the reason why Moses himself did this—because of their “hardness of heart.” From the outset, a key element is revealed in John Paul II’s theological anthropology, that of the heart. It is the “hardness of heart” of the Jews in the desert wanderings that creates problems for Moses. The harden heart in the Old Testament refers to obstinacy and stubbornness on account of selfish interest. It was the hardness of heart that lead Israel to reject the message of Jesus especially with regards to questions concerning an adequate anthropology.[2]

            This is the reason Jesus’ response centers on the appeal to man’s original innocence in the beginning, when God first created him, male and female, because before the fall man’s heart was without sin. Therefore, it is a historical question, albeit, one of theological prehistory, referring to a reality that once was part of the very being of man, namely his state of “original innocence.”[3] A proper understanding of the “theology of the body” is intimately connected to the original innocence of man as well as to the inevitable fall, the former being the very reflection of the image of God and the latter an expression of a failure to live in that image and likeness, what is referred to as the “man of lust.”[4] “Historical man is so to speak, rooted in his revealed theological prehistory,”[5] teaches the Holy Father, and that rootedness explains the source of historical sinfulness in reference to pre-historical innocence. “If sin signifies in every historical man a state of lost grace, then it also contains a reference to that grace, which was precisely of original innocence.”[6]

Article by Fr. Alejandro Valladres, Archdiocese of Mobile