There are so, so many Gospel passages that are just plain difficult. There are reasons they are difficult. One reason is that the stories are 2000 years old. One reason is that we read them in little snippets, and so we don’t get their overall context. And I’m sure there are other reasons, but the last reason that I want to flag is that they are difficult because we may not like what we hear. This is different than saying we may not like what they say (which may also be true), but we don’t like what we hear.
So, clearly we can’t do much about the Gospel being 2000 years old, except to recognize that not everything is timeless. Perhaps intention is timeless, but we need to know what the intention is….
But we can put this passage in context which helps with intention. This portion of the Gospel of Mark has the Pharisees testing Jesus; spoiler alert: they don’t want him to pass the test. This is one of several tests. This is not Jesus deciding, “I’m going to put forth a new teaching about divorce and adultery.” Jesus is responding to questions that are designed to trip him up, and he is doing so out of his own tradition of his own time. Divorce is hard, I suspect that was the same then as now. Divorce at that time, however, took rights away from women, so that they became less human. A divorced woman couldn’t own land and became undesirable in marriage, in other words they lost all status and became a non-entity. Remember marriage was always arranged; the idea of marrying for love is a fairly new concept in the world’s history. In Jewish law, a woman could not divorce her husband, only in Roman law; and, the person to whom “let no one separate” is referring to is, of course, the husband, and only the husband. The husband was the only one who could dissolve a marriage in Jewish law.
We don’t like what we hear. Do I like this reading? Not particularly. Does it make me uncomfortable? Only slightly, because as a divorced person I could say that I resemble that remark. Recently I have been reading letters I have from my father to his best friend from high school, letters written in the late 1950s, and early 1960s. One letter I read recently details a nurse acquaintance, who was estranged from her family and religion because she was divorced. This was a reminder to me of how recently things were very different. I think the intention has not changed. However, I don’t think that because I have been divorced that I am somehow or other trying to change Jesus’ intention with this passage. From what seems to be the intention of all of scripture, I think God wants all to flourish and also I can’t help but think that even Jesus is constrained by his own time and place. But remember this is the same Jesus who welcomed women among his disciples; who stood by a women about to be stoned; who spoke words of Life to a woman at the well. Constrained he may be, but the rest of his actions suggest he is not quoting the law back to his questioners in exactly the way they want to hear it….he wants women to flourish too.
As if often the case, one way to make sense of scripture, is to look at the other scripture passages we have in our lectionary for this Sunday. The reading from Genesis feels like the first chapter (literally) of how we get around even to talking about divorce. We have one of the mythic stories of creation (there are two), as an explanation for how we have a husband and wife, and that is because we have a man and a woman. Woman is made of the same “stuff” as man, and so is no less than man.
Our psalm today actually rejoices in the goodness of humanity. This rejoicing view doesn’t really fit with the view in the news media lately, however, there is something golden and lovely about considering humanity not as scum, but as something about which God is pleased. God chooses to have a relationship with humanity, something that God views as something good in creation.
The New Testament reading is from Hebrews, which is more like a sermon (granted a very long sermon), than an epistle. Today we have the opening chapters of the Book of Hebrews. In this passage, the author introduces the idea that Jesus is unique, the supreme voice and Word of God, both the beginning and the end of all. In Jesus, we see the fullness of God and in Jesus’s work, we see God expressed. I say that again, in Jesus’s work, we see God expressed.
So if we pull this all together, I see the following— from the beginning of mythic time, man and woman have been in relationship with God. Humanity is rich, because of humanity’s relationship with God. And Jesus best shows us God expressed, in his life, for Jesus shows us the way of life. We are to live like Jesus. Clearly, Jesus wasn’t married, for not everyone should be. I can picture Jesus in our day and age answering the Pharisee’s question with “just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.”
Jesus is most concerned with the following: Does your action hurt someone? First and foremost we are called to care for each other. God has called us to care for each other….To care for the planet… To care for the children that come to know Jesus, to care for those who might come to know Jesus, to care for the children in a divorce so that they are not chattel, to care for each other who have a hurting inner child, so that no one stays in a marriage to suffer abuse in any form—physically, emotionally, mentally. We are to love our neighbor, even if our neighbor is our spouse. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is end a relationship. I can’t get around that we are called to love, and that permeates not just our relationships with neighbor, but our most intimate relationships. Because although some marriages are heaven sent, marriages shouldn’t be hell on earth either. We are called to a sort of love that is not just casual, but present in our most important relationships as well and everything in between. We are to love as if our life depended on it. That is how Jesus loved and that is how we are to love if we are to follow Jesus.
Whatever we do – whatever actions we take – whatever actions we feel we must take, even an action that ends a relationship – the message of Jesus, the message IN Jesus, is that we are to do so with the intention of minimizing the damage and of helping human flourishing. As best we can do, as the grace of God HELPS us to do, this always is to be our aim: to act in a way that helps this creation become as God intends; to become the city of God.
Track 2
Genesis 2:18-24 Psalm 8 Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12 Mark 10:2-16