Today's readings: Genesis 2, 18-24; Hebrews 2, 9-11; Mark 10, 2-16.

The radical character of Jesus' teaching on divorce in a society where it was widely accepted is consistent with Jesus' many other radical teachings. Yet the early Church already had problems with this prohibition, as can be seen from Paul's advice to new Christians, who found themselves in mixed marriages, and from the so-called exceptive clauses in Matthew.

Divorce and remarriage, even in our days, remains a complex and difficult pastoral issue which we need to face courageously. It is an issue which requires us to clearly understand what is going on in the depths of our being, at a time when, as Hannah Arendt, a most insightful observer of the human condition, observed: "Commitments in our times are all until further notice." It also demands a sound grasp of the truth about our salvation as conveyed to us in the Scriptures.

Jesus clearly declares today that "if a woman divorces her husband and marries another she is guilty of adultery". Yet in his dealing with the Samaritan woman in John 4, or with the adulterous woman in John 8, his sensitivity is superb.

Humbly enough, we may feel helpless in the face of what is happening around us where relationships are concerned. We need to go to the roots of the problem.

Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish sociologist best known for his analysis of post-modern consumerism, says that uncertainty is not just a temporary nuisance which can be chased away by learning the rules; it is the very soil in which the moral self takes root and grows. Jesus refers the Pharisees back to the Torah, but at the same time he invites them to go beyond the law and discern God's original plan. In the past it was easy for us to assume the cultural models contained in the Gospel and in Tradition, as if they were synonymous with God's plan. But now we struggle to find our way in the aftermath of a fractured relationship between faith and culture.

Marriage, family, love, man, woman are terms that have always existed and we always knew exactly what they signified. But the cultural tsunami gradually gaining momentum in the past two centuries has practically brought with it what Jurgen Habermas calls a crisis of legitimation. We no longer agree on the meaning we attribute to these terms and on what they signify.

Thinking of the new ethical landscape in which we live, there has been a sweeping shift in the character of everyday lives and concerns that has made people more concerned with their own space and less willing to make commitments. We call this privatisation, something which has brought many liberations but which has eroded our capacity to think in terms of common interests.

Ours is an era in which morality rests with the individual, alone again with his or her choices, and no longer able to depend on old certainties. In the city of God, Augustine proposes the view that the struggle of humankind is the struggle to love. For him, there are two kinds of love: love for God, which goes as far as despising oneself, and love of self, which goes as far as despising God.

One of the Second Vatican Council's greatest achievements was to clarify that the truth of Scripture is not a scientific but a salvific one; it is a truth that concerns our salvation.

This marked a Copernican revolution from the time when Scripture was taken literally. We are wrong whenever we take the words of Jesus as binding juridically. Proclamation of the Good News is always on the level of prophecy, and prophecy is never translatable into law.

Indissolubility taken juridically is one thing; however, we need to speak more of the indissolubility that results from an internal calling.