“What has excited God…” by: Dr. Christine Hober of the Catholic Church, discovered in the often negatively-interpreted image of the yoke is a positive, everyday picture for the marriage, which bears even today.
“What has excited God”: a word faithful Translation of a well-known Bible passage, opened a new perspective on marriage.
It is a beautiful summer day in the Eifel. Since our children are out of the house, we use some of the weekend, and there from everyday life in the city, relax and leave the Desk work behind us. Our Alternative to the gym or Spa at the hotel with boxwood hedges lined Lawn with lush perennial beds, and Mature fruit trees, our fitness trainers are lawn mower, saw and trimmer.
My husband and I are moving a large Plane with branches and green cut across the Meadow. We got up quite a sweat. Instinctively, the comparison with a team of oxen is me, edited together in a field. The idea of our almost 29 year marriage with the antiquated image of two draught animals, which are stretched under a yoke, or a harness, and together, a load pull, like me, somehow…
What has excited God together
The archaic image of the most pair-wise cooperation of draft animals under a yoke can be found already in the Old Testament, there it is in the rule for load, submission, work, or even foreign rule. It was only much later, the yoke is a Synonym for marriage, and other forms of partnership bonds. The so-called yoke of marriage has been and is still interpreted rather negatively.
In the New Testament Jesus used in his statements to the marriage of this archetypal agrarian image. In the confrontation with the Pharisees about divorce, he says: “At the beginning of the creation, but God created them male and female. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and the two shall be one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. But what God joins together, man must not divide,“ it says in the gospel of mark (10,6-9). “What God has joined together…” is literally translated: “what has excited God” – not necessarily a romantic image, signed by Jesus of marriage, but a realistic and possibly even a everyday.
Because it is not so that we will have to see in marriage or in other partnership in some days or even weeks under the us-imposed yoke in one direction and go? It comes to voltages, when the two are clamped together, is nothing out of the ordinary. Tensions endure, it is true, if maybe the time or the will to go to these tensions on the ground, to get them out of the way.
But what can help us, the Partner, the marriage or partnership, or a difficult life situation bearable? Because in the case that one would like to break out of the two is suddenly blocked, or even, is not only the two team in danger, but also – figuratively speaking – in the editable field. The field is our life with the wide range of relationships in which we are living: children, family, work, leisure, social ties, and economic obligations.
The own selfishness to overcome
In the confrontation with Jesus the Pharisees a simple solution: If a marriage should work, you just use the possibility of divorce. They refer to an old Testament regulation, which goes back to Moses: “Moses allowed a certificate of divorce be issued and to dismiss the woman from the marriage.” Jesus argues, however, from a completely different angle: “Just because you’re so hard-hearted, he has given you this commandment” (Mk 10,4-5).
Jesus appealed to it, to examine themselves and their own hardness of heart, which is, ultimately, realize nothing other than your own selfishness, and to overcome. Because, if one wants to be blocked or break, not more work the Team of the marriage or partnership. In the Team are both in need of each other. This may often be hard work, which forces you to jump over the own shadow and to reconcile. However, as a Team, which looks in one direction and in a direction, you can look at some point on a farm, has brought forth many fruits.
Christine Hober, Dr. of theology, working as a lecturer and author. She lives in Bonn, is married and has two children.
Editorial responsibility: Martin Cords, Catholic radio representative, and Alfred Herrmann