AUGUST 14, 2026 FATHER MICHAEL COUTTS
Both Ezekiel and Jesus speak about commitment.
Ezekiel was reminding the people of Israel, God has taken you out of the exodus, taken you out through the exodus experience from Egypt. God has been faithful to you by leading you by a cloud of fire during the night and a pillar of cloud during the day.
He has fed you with water from the rock. He has fed you with manna. He has helped you to defeat your enemies. God has been faithful to you, but you, people of Israel, haven’t been faithful. But God will not renege on his faithful, and Ezekiel ends with a sense of hope. God will take you back.
God will take you back and make you God’s own people, a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a nation set apart.
When we come to the Gospel, it’s a story of another relationship, of another commitment, a covenant between man and woman.
And you notice the phrase that Jesus uses: “from the beginning,” and that is the real origin of literally anything you and I do. We have to see: what was it from the beginning?
From the beginning, the covenant between man and wife was one of joy, of happiness, of pleasure. From the beginning it was one of commitment, a lifelong commitment to fidelity.
From the beginning, it was a commitment to be open to family, to be open to children, to open to the basic unit of our society around us.
So, what went wrong? What went wrong was precisely the fact that we are human. We are fragile. We are weak. We cannot carry on with the stamina that we began with, and so, as a result, our mind wanders. Our eye wanders, and as a result we stray. And that is the reason why we have these commandments.
We have a reality that says one in every three marriages break up. What they don’t say is two out of every three marriages actually succeed. And that is the reason why societies have succeeded, societies have grown, societies have built.
So, what is the cause of it all? The cause is basically our human nature. We are lazy. We fail to communicate. We bottle things within ourselves. More men than women, they bottle things. Women like to open it up and realize what the issue is and deal with it, but men won’t do that.
You require commitment from the part of both people. Communications break down. Laziness crops up, and we’re not willing to make an effort. If we are not willing to make an effort, that commitment cannot stand.
And so, we have the scribes and the Pharisees coming to Jesus and saying, if Moses allowed this, what is your take on it?
We cannot, in 2026, try to understand the conditions, the traditions and the customs that were in the times of Moses.
It was a very misogynistic society. A man only committed adultery if he broke up a family, like in the case of David sleeping with Bathsheba and killing Uriah the Hittite. That was adultery. But otherwise, it was not considered to be adultery.
Whereas for a woman, no matter what she did, if the man committed adultery with her, she was the one responsible, and that is why they had to make this law from Moses to say we have to protect the society, which is the basic, integral part of our society today.
You will find that when families are the basic unit that are successful, that are wholesome, that are firm, the society flows beautifully. There is peace. There is harmony. There’s lack of chaos.
We often condemn the United States. Look at the amount of violence and look at the amount of problems that are there. What we have to realize is they have 300 million people there, whereas here in Canada, we are only 40 million. And comparably, we might be worse off than them when we do not take care of our own families.
Jesus will tell us that from the beginning, that is where we have to go to. It is from the beginning that we had decided, or God had decided, that this husband and this wife were there for love, for joy, for pleasure, for happiness. And if we keep that in mind, then everything will fall into place.
If we keep in mind that from the beginning, this commitment is not for 10 years or 20 years or 15 years, it is for life. The story of marriage has to be a love story, not a life sentence.
And that’s where the problem lies, is we begin to look at it and judge it from the standards we get from television, from TV, from soap operas, where divorce and infidelity are a part of the program. And if you don’t have that, it does not make it interesting. We let it fall.
As a result, we accept the standards of society. We accept the standards of our family not from what God ordered it for, but from the society, from the media that we watch, from the TV that we watch, from the news that we hear.
What we have to realize is that there is a relationship between husband and wife that has begun from time, from the time of Adam and Eve, where God has put them together. And from there, God has been an integral part of that life and that relationship.
God has been a part of that relationship, a relationship with all the others that you and I have, the relationship that we have in our faith community around us. And because of that, God has given us the gift, the gift of the Spirit and the sacrament of marriage.
The gift of the Spirit, which gives us wisdom, knowledge and understanding. The point is, we have all these gifts to use them to bind us together in marriage. But what do we do? We squander them.
And that is why we have this beautiful character of Maximilian Kolbe as an inspiration for us. He was committed to his vocation as a conventional Franciscan.
At the age of 21, he had a doctorate in philosophy. At the age of 28, he had a doctorate in theology. And in spite of all this intelligence, all he used it was to proclaim the Good News, not only here, but in India and in Japan.
Finally, he offered his life in place of another inmate in the Auschwitz prison, and he died there on the 14th of August. He is celebrated today as a martyr, not just as a confessor.
God bless you all.
