Memorial of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Priest and Martyr

Taken together, the first reading and the Gospel are linked by the image of marriage. But something else stands out to me—a point I don’t think we often consider. The Lord says that Moses allowed the people to write a bill of divorce because of the hardness of their hearts.

That is important to understand. Scripture itself records Moses issuing, on God’s behalf, a law for his people that does not completely conform to what God wills for them.

This reveals one of the essential themes of the Old Testament: God reveals himself progressively. We see that in the first reading, where God speaks about his relationship with Israel. When he first encounters Israel, portrayed as a child, he does not fix everything or offer everything at once. He keeps coming back, gradually introducing her to the fullness of all that he will offer. He remains faithful to her throughout, always approaching her in a way she can understand at that moment.

That is how God reveals himself in history. After the fall in the Garden of Eden, we lost our relationship with him—or at least the fullness of that relationship. So he comes to us little by little: first through the call of Abraham, then through the call of Israel itself, and then through the giving of the law under Moses.

As we see here, the law given under Moses is not a perfect law meant to last for all eternity. It is a shadow of the fullness of the law, because the people were simply not ready for the fullness of all that God had to say. They would have found it not only too great a burden, but simply too much even to hear. They could not yet imagine the kind of world that Christ would reveal.

So God keeps working with them, slowly drawing them along until he reveals the fullness of the truth and calls us back to our original holiness, our original relationship with the Father.

In Christianity, then, we no longer have progressive revelation. God has spoken all that he is going to speak. We have the fullness of the moral law and the fullness of God’s revelation of his very self—his nature. All of these things we now have.

That is why the Christian life can sometimes seem significantly more difficult than life under the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, you could have hundreds of wives if you wanted to—Solomon did. I’m not saying that was a good idea; it did not work out very well for him. But he could. Divorce was permitted, along with all these other things.

In Christianity, all of that is gone because it was not good for us. It did not reflect the image God intended from the beginning. Now he has given that image to us.

Rather than seeing the Christian life only as a heavy burden—for it is a burden in one sense, and it is impossible for us to live it out perfectly—we should also see it as a great treasure. We have the fullness of all that God wishes to speak to us. We have the fullness of the truth.

That is something to treasure in our hearts and to strive for more and more every day. We are going to fail, sometimes magnificently, but that is okay, because God has also revealed his great mercy toward us. One of the essential messages running throughout Scripture is that he keeps showing us mercy.

But it does us no good to hide the fact that he has revealed the fullness of the truth—to try to obscure it and constantly lower the bar. The bar is set infinitely high, and none of us will reach it. But that is where it is, and we should be proud of that standard, treasure it, and keep striving.

We can always depend upon God’s mercy. Everyone in this world can. But the bar remains where it truly is, and so we keep striving again and again.

Let us never be afraid to speak the fullness of the truth and to show people what the standard really is, even though we know that we ourselves fail. We can trust that God will forgive us. We can trust that he loves us enough to keep working with us and drawing us toward life with him.

But it is up to us to go out and proclaim that boldly to all people—not watering it down, not pretending it does not say what it says, but continuing to present the truth to them, knowing that God will give us the grace to draw ever closer to him and ultimately to live with him.