Love starts in the home

Commentary

How important it is to know how to interpret in its truth the relationship between the order of creation of human nature – with the conjugal and consanguineous bonds of the family – and the order of redemption, which elevates the original nature to the order of grace and intimacy with God, without destroying it, erasing it or replacing it!

Thanks to Jesus Christ and the Gospel, there is neither contraposition nor contradiction between marriage and the family, on the one hand, and the will of God, on the other. This “enmity” or incompatibility would be tantamount to opposing God the Creator with God the Redeemer, as if they were different gods, or had opposing wills, as if they had a finite, fickle, or non-existent fidelity in their love for human beings, while created in his image and likeness and loved in aeternum. How could we explain that the Word becomes incarnate in Jesus “son” of Mary, his “mother,” and lives in a “family” with his adoptive father, St. Joseph?

I recommend meditating on the profound and nuanced text of Pope Francis in the Joy of Love, numbers 14-18, especially the latter. The passage in Luke´s Gospel in which Jesus, when they tell him that his mother and other relatives wish to see him, replies that his mother and brothers are those who hear and fulfill the Word of God, the last thing he intends to say is that the Word of God is opposed to his Mother and relatives. This interpretation is simplistic and false. To listen and fulfill the Word of God, as Jesus Christ himself preached and practiced, is to love God and neighbor, to love each other as he taught us, a love that begins in the family home.

Jesus Christ takes advantage of the occasion to place the mere blood ties, the simple bond of blood, in relation to love, which is always an act and bond of the spirit. When love, in family ties, is substituted by other intentions, which impoverish or corrupt it, a contradiction appears. For example: to understand that the bonds that arise from blood and flesh, separate from personal love or against it, are the most important, those that prevail – even inciting to evil, hatreds, spurious interests, dominations, submissions, and manipulations – over the will of God, which is that we love each other.

Therefore, what is most important is not mere consanguinity but the love with which family ties are lived that makes them so pleasing to God and truly human. It is not flesh without spirit, but the spirit of love incarnated in kinship. First of all, this consideration must be taken into account by parents towards their children, but also by spouses towards each other. It is not possible to invoke a “social and lawful title,” void of personal love and even corrupted by hatreds of the kind: “I am your husband, or I am your wife, or I am your father or mother, or I am your child” as the last, totalizing and definitive reason to impose attitudes, conducts, projects, interests, dominations and submissions that have nothing to do with the freedom, gratuitousness, unconditionality and service that we owe to the wellbeing of our relatives. Because when we love them as much or more than we love ourselves, we fulfill in them the Word of God, and by virtue of that love, we are introduced into the Spirit of God – which is Love –, and we are no longer their spouse, father, mother, child or sibling, just because of a blood tie.

What fulfills in blood and flesh the Word of God the Creator and Redeemer regarding marriage and the family is love. As a human family, it makes us the image and likeness of the Trinity, which is the divine family. Without love, in the eyes of God, simple blood kinship is a mere social and external chain or even a potential scene of domination, abuse, and servitude. Without love, blood ties can become instruments of power and submission to one another and devastate our inner world.