27th Sunday in Ordinary Time
October 4, 2009
Mark 10:2-16Jesus Meets the Divorce Lawyers
This congregation is trying its best to live faithfully in the light of the "inconvenient truth" of global climate change. We could have ignored it. We could have steered around it. Instead we are choosing to face it head on.
This morning, the Gospel reading presents us with an inconvenient text, a text concerning divorce. I confess right away, I first tried to ignore it, and then to steer around it. Unfortunately, my detour took me smack up against the Book of Job, which is even more inconvenient, so I decided to turn around and face the Gospel reading after all.
The reading, as you have just heard, begins with a trick question put to Jesus by a group of legal experts called Pharisees who aren’t so much interested in getting an answer as they are in getting Jesus into as much trouble as possible.
"Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" they ask. That should give Jesus plenty of rope with which to hang himself.
"Well," Jesus replies, "What does the law of Moses say?"
No problem there. These divorce lawyers know their stuff. "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorcer her." Knowing this will get you past the bar exam, but according to this text, it won’t get you into the kingdom of God.
To understand what’s going on in this little exchange, you need to know that in Jesus’ time, all a man had to do to get divorced was to write up a certificate of divorce, put it in his wife’s hand, and send her packing. And that was the end of that (Deut. 24: 1).
The woman who had borne the man’s children, kept his house, and prepared and served his meals was no longer his wife. In most cases, she had no claim to common property, no right to a portion of his income, no right of inheritance in the event of his death. In the blink of an eye, she could find herself out on the streets. If her own family did not take her back into their household, her options were basically two: she could beg or she could become a prostitute.
And what were the grounds for divorce at the time the Pharisees ask this question of Jesus? Adultery was one, of course, but some rabbis taught that if a husband found his wife to be in any way "objectionable," he could divorce her forthwith. One rabbi famously opined that if a man’s wife burned his supper or broke a favorite dish, he could divorce her.
If you find this hardhearted, you are not alone. So, apparently, did Jesus. Moses allowed divorce as a concession to human hardheartedness, but some men in Jesus’ day had gone way beyond hardhearted. They had taken an exception and made it into a giant loophole. Now his questioners want Jesus to play the same game.
Jesus refuses to play. Instead he goes to the heart of the matter. He speaks not of grounds for divorce, but of the grounds of marriage.
Jesus takes his questioners all the way back to that story about God playing matchmaker at the time of creation. God with a wink in his eye and a carnation in his buttonhole, telling Adam "Go to sleep – this won’t hurt a bit." God taking a rib from Adam’s side so as to assure a good fit later. God sculpting Eve with the same careful touch he used to form Adam from the rich, red earth. Adam waking up with a pain under his left arm and a sight so wonderful, all he can say is:
At last! Here is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!
(I’ve always wanted to preside at a wedding at which the bride enters the church and stands right there, and the groom stands in the balcony by the organ and shouts, "At last, here is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." That beats anything you’ll find recommended in Bride’s Magazine.)
"For this reason," Jesus tells the legalists, "a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh . . . Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."
Jesus moves way beyond the legal question these men have put to him and goes to the heart of their own hardheartedness. "You’re missing the point," he’s telling them. "You’re asking what God thinks about divorce. Why not ask why God gave us marriage in the first place?"
Marriage is God’s gift of flesh united with flesh, of two made one, of covenant formed for good. Some people of Jesus’ time (one should say some men of Jesus’ time) had taken this precious gift of the Creator and turned it into something petty and cruel and hardhearted. "I won’t play that game with you," I hear Jesus saying. "That’s no way to honor God, and no way to follow me."
Having left his adversaries with their mouths hanging open like Japanese lanterns at a wedding reception, Jesus then gets his disciples alone in somebody’s house. They ask him to explain, and he goes even further with them than with the Pharisees.
"Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery."
The astounding thing about this saying is that, by the standards of Jesus’ day, it is legally absurd. In the Palestine of Jesus’ day, a Jewish man could divorce his wife but a wife couldn’t divorce her husband. Divorce was a male thing. Furthermore, a man could not commit adultery against his own wife. Adultery was an offense committed against men only. In this saying Jesus advocates an equality of the sexes unprecedented in rabbinic teaching.
It’s no wonder the early church had such a problem dealing with this saying. Matthew modifies it in his own Gospel. Paul wrestles with it trying to advise Christians who are married to unbelievers. Paul decided that the Christian partner shouldn’t initiate a divorce from the unbelieving spouse, but if the unbelieving spouse insisted, the Christian spouse could go along (I. Cor. 7:15).
Once you start down the Pharisees’ road, there is no limit to the bumps you will encounter. In the early years of my father’s service as a pastor, the Westminster Confession of Faith allowed him to perform a wedding for a divorced person only if that person were the "innocent party" in a case of adultery.
Now, if you yourself have been divorced, or if divorce has ever touched your life, you know that adultery comes in many forms. A career can become a lover more demanding than any flesh-and-blood mistress, and husbands or wives can be unfaithful to their marriage vows without ever leaving home (or for that matter, without ever leaving their computer terminals). Identifying the "innocent party" in divorce is no easy matter.
Eventually the Presbyterian Church U.S. modified the Westminster Confession to read, "It is the divine intention that persons entering the marriage covenant become inseparably united . . . However, the weakness of one or both partners may lead to gross and persistent denial of the marriage vows so that the marriage dies at the heart and the union becomes intolerable . . ." (Chapter XXVI 6.135).
Sometimes a marriage "dies at the heart." It dies of neglect or misuse, or, like the seed that falls on rocky ground, it proposers for a while and then withers for lack of nourishment. Sometimes people bring to marriage baggage from their past that they themselves are not aware of. Over time it drags them into a deep morass. It’s nobody’s fault, but it becomes everybody’s nightmare.
Sometimes we miss the mark. We fall short of God’s bests hopes. When that happens, we do our best to make our marriages whole again. But if we fail, we look for mercy in the face of Jesus. We look for new life, for resurrection. And what do we find?
According to this text, we find Jesus scolding his disciples for keeping little children from coming to him. We find him indignant that his disciples would imagine that he would have no time for children – children who, by the standards of Jesus’ day had no rights, no claims, no entitlements. Children who are, so far as the law goes, nobodies.
We look for mercy in the wake of divorce and what do we find? We find Jesus welcoming these wee nobodies into his presence.
"Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it." And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.
I find it significant that Mark followed Jesus’ teaching about divorce with Jesus’ teaching about what it takes to enter the kingdom of God. It takes people with no claim whatsoever to God’s mercy and welcome. It takes small people who can’t vote, can’t talk, and can’t hold office. And it takes big people who have been brought down to the same size. Big people whose hopes have been shattered, whose lives have been broken, whose marriages have died at the heart, and whose hearts have been broken by sin – their sin and other peoples’ sin.
That God hates divorce is undeniable. That God loves people who get divorced is also undeniable. Both are inconvenient truths from inconvenient texts.
The same God who delights in marriage also delights in welcoming the unqualified into the kingdom Jesus initiates. The invitation is the same to all:
To those who are single: Welcome.
To those who are divorced and divorcing: Welcome.
To gay people: Welcome.
To straight people: Welcome.
Even to lawyers who love to ask trick questions: Welcome.
So long as you leave your qualifications at the door, there is room in God’s kingdom for you.
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