Text: Mark 10:2-16 Revised Standard Version (RSV)
2 And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away.” 5 But Jesus said to them, “For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife,[a] 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”
10 And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
Jesus Blesses Little Children
13 And they were bringing children to him, that he might touch them; and the disciples rebuked them. 14 But when Jesus saw it he was indignant, and said to them, “Let the children come to me, do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God. 15 Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” 16 And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands upon them.
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
“The very altar sheds tears when a man divorces the wife of his youth.”[1]
Oh, boy, here we go again: Divorce. The “D-Word.” This is probably one of the hardest, if not the hardest, of the hard sayings of Jesus.
And it really is a hard saying. I have never met or even heard of a person who said, “Yeah, I’m getting married; but hey, if it doesn’t work out, I can always get a divorce.” Not one time have I heard that. Every couple I’ve married, and every one of my friends and relatives who have gotten married have without exception entered into the marriage covenant with the best intentions and the strongest of commitments to their partner.
But even with the best intentions, despite the best efforts put forth by each of the partners, sometimes a marriage just doesn’t work out. People do change. People do sometimes grow apart. Sometimes there are “irreconcilable differences.” Sometimes it has nothing whatsoever to do with the love the wife and husband feel for each other, or even with their sense of commitment – for example, I have heard of marriages failing over the death of a child, and the couple eventually just can’t live together anymore, because every day, every single day, it feels like a knife is being twisted in their guts. And finally, they just have to part company. Sometimes they start over with another partner. Sometimes they don’t. But they’re divorced – so are they to be condemned for it? Well, there are people who would read this passage and say, “Yes.”
Well, if I were a divorced person and wandered into this church – or any other church – and heard this Gospel lesson – I might just get up, march out, and never come back. There are thousands upon thousands of people out there who have done just that. If you’re a man or woman who’s felt that searing, wrenching pain of divorce, you can’t help but take these words personally when you hear them. It’s hard to believe that these words came from Jesus. They are not at all the kinds of words we have come to expect from the Lord of Love. It sounds as though Jesus, through the intervening twenty centuries, is talking directly to you, Divorced Person, and not in a nice way! It certainly seems, on the face of it, that this lesson is uncompromising to the point of offensive harshness; there doesn’t seem to be any room for compromise. And we don’t have to look too far to find churches and other (supposed) Christians who are all too happy to keep rubbing the noses of such people in their pain. So they leave the church, feeling let down and even betrayed. The church, the one place where they came expecting forgiveness, understanding, and healing, turned out to be the place where their pain was deepened. And so they turn their backs on the church and walk away. And who can blame them?
Just what are we to do with this passage? How do we reconcile the words I just read with what we have come to know and believe about Jesus?
Well, that requires us to delve into the history and the culture of Jesus’ day.
First, as this lesson opens, we find Jesus and his disciples once again far from home. They are in the region of Judea, that part of the world ruled at the time by Herod Antipas. We’ve all heard of him! He was as reprehensible a low-life as it’s possible to find.
Among the long list of his offenses was that he had not only divorced his wife, but had then married his niece, Herodias, who had been married to his brother, yet another Herod, Herod Philip! (You will also remember Herodias as the woman for whom Herod Antipas ordered the execution of John the Baptist.)
So Jesus and the disciples find themselves today on Herod’s home turf. We don’t know exactly where this exchange took place – for all we know, they could have been standing within sight of Herod’s palace. Anyway, they’re literally at Ground Zero of the debate about divorce that was still raging ten years later over Herod’s antics.
But in actuality, divorce had been a burning question for a long time in Rabbinic circles – Herod’s colossal flouting of the Law had just served to turn up the heat on the argument. In fact, this may not have been the first time that Jesus had been asked to weigh in on the subject of divorce – in Matthew 5:31-32 we read words similar to what Mark records in today’s lesson.
And so, the Pharisees who now confronted him might have been hoping that Jesus would say something that contradicted what he’d said before. Or maybe they hoped that he’d say something that would get him in trouble with Herod (or even worse, with Herodias), and they would see that troublesome rabbi thrown into the same cell his cousin John had been in, to await the same fate. Or maybe they hoped they would hear Jesus contradict the Law of Moses, and then they could charge him with heresy. If any of those three possibilities happened, it would spell curtains for him. It was a sure bet, or so they must have thought.
A lot hung on Jesus’ answer. This really was a life-or-death issue back then. That might be hard for us today to understand, but there was nothing in their culture that was higher than the ideal of marriage. Unfortunately, the reality of marriage fell woefully short of the ideal.
A bit of explanation is necessary here. 1500 years before this encounter took place, the law of Jewish divorce was first written down in the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 24, verse 1: “When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a bill of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, and she departs out of his house” (RSV).
Over the centuries, this pretty simple divorce decree got wordier and more legalistic – but the end result was the same: The man put this piece of paper into the woman’s hand, and shoved her out the door, with pretty much nothing but the clothes on her back.
I’m sure you have already noticed the most glaring thing about this process: That it was completely and totally one-sided. It favored the man. Even the concept of women’s rights was some 1400 years in the future.
There were two schools of thought regarding divorce. The stricter view was held by the followers of the rabbi Shammai, who said that there was one – and only one – legitimate reason to divorce one’s wife, and that was adultery. Nothing else counted. The second, much more lenient-seeming view, the school of Hallel, said that a man could divorce his wife for any reason whatsoever. Like burning the dinner. Or not being “attractive enough” – whatever that means.
As it usually happens, the looser interpretation came to prevail; and by the time of Jesus, divorces of convenience had become tragically common. Many women of Jesus’ day refused to marry anybody at all because marriage was so insecure.
Now bear in mind that a woman in that culture and in that time was literally property – first of her father, and then of her husband. She had no worth or value outside of that. What was she to do then? According to tradition, she could go back home to her parents. But many parents wouldn’t dream of allowing their disgraced daughter back under their roof. Tradition also said that she was free to marry someone else – but that also rarely happened, because now she was “damaged goods.”
So many women, facing starvation, did the only thing left to them and added themselves to the number of “fallen women” loitering at the gates to the city. This really was a fate worse than death; and if was so for them, it was even worse for any children they might have had; if a woman had zero worth, a child was worth less than zero. According to the laws of the day, they stayed with the father. But I wonder how much that happened in practice; and even if the children did stay with their father, I shudder to think of the environment they were forced to grow up in – I mean, if their father didn’t even want their mother, how much could he want them? And if he threw them aside, where could they go?
Such was the situation in Jesus’ day.
So along come these smug Pharisees, with a test. A test – that’s the key word in today’s passage. And, as it turns out, the Pharisees weren’t interested in the least about testing Jesus on the subject of divorce – their goal was to test him on the law. Though they asked the question, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”, they already knew that it was – but as we’ve seen, what they really were after was a way to test this Jesus, to pin him down regarding the conditions under which divorce was legal.
They did not get what they wanted. Jesus, as he always did, turned the tables on them and in so doing, taught them and the whole world a valuable and timeless lesson on how to live. “It is because of your hardness of heart, gentlemen, that this has become the scandal it is.”
The heart of the issue had nothing to do with the law, but with relationships. It is not just God’s hope, but God’s plan that our relationships are more than legal matters. All of our relationships are meant to be relationships of mutual dependence, mutual support, and mutual benefit. This law the Pharisees keep quoting goes completely against God’s plan for our relationships. The law is meant to protect the vulnerable, the hurting, the defenseless, those who are on the margins; and every time we use it for another purpose we are twisting it from the Creator’s plan. We violate the spirit of the law even while we adhere to the letter of the law.
So the response of Jesus was not, you see, addressed directly to people who were divorced, not then, not now. It was addressed, as we’ve seen, to people who would either use the pain of others for their own ends, or who were so callous and self-centered that they didn’t care about what pain their actions caused others. He knew, as we all do, that there are situations where the best possible outcome for two people is to call it a day and part company. Jesus came to show us the love of God; he came to show us how much God cares for us, his children. Do you think that this loving, caring God wants people to stay in relationships that are unhealthy and damaging? Of course not! Does this mean that people who have had to go through the pain of divorce are somehow “damaged goods” in the eyes of God? Certainly not! Does this mean that people who have had to go through this particular “valley of the shadow of death” – for the end of a relationship is as much a death as the physical death of a loved one – have somehow forfeited God’s forgiveness? Absurd! The Jesus who ate with tax collectors and sinners, who brought God’s grace to a Samaritan woman whose daughter was ill, would never reject people whose relationship had come to an end! If anything, these are the people to whom his forgiving and compassionate heart would have gone out. Remember: Jesus came to this earth as a human being, so that he could know exactly the life we know, with all its joys and its pains, and so that he could bridge the gap between God and humanity, in order that we might be made whole and saved – even from ourselves and certainly from our broken relationships.
Jesus isn’t speaking to individuals at all. Instead, he’s making a statement about the kind of community we will be. Are we to be dominated by harsh and inflexible rules which do not allow for understanding and forgiveness? Jesus invites us instead to imagine what it would be like to live in communities centered in and on relationships baseed on love and mutual dependence, fostered by respect and dignity, and pursued for the sake of the health of the community and the protection of the vulnerable. In other words, Jesus invites us to imagine living in the Kingdom of God here and now.
The point of this story is not the argument about divorce, but when Jesus takes a small child and places that child on his knee and says in effect, “Listen up, people! Enough of your hairsplitting! Here’s the unvarnished truth: Whenever you honor and welcome a child, you’re welcoming me, and even more, you’re living as God intends. That is what it’s all about!”
We sometimes forget that the early church was not populated by the “movers and shakers” of the day, but by the broken, the vulnerable, and those who were at risk. That is something we forget to our peril.
The church never was, and is not now, some kind of “winner’s circle” for those who have somehow “made it” and can now draw a line between themselves and the great unwashed multitudes “out there.” The church is a place for all those who have been broken by life; a place for folks who have been rejected by the powerful; it is the place where they can experience God through the crucified Jesus. And every one of us is at one time or another, a member of that multitudinous group. This is where we meet Jesus as the One who meets us in our vulnerability, who heals us, and blesses us.
Let us never make the same mistake the Pharisees made. Let us instead remember our own brokenness so we can be open to the brokenness and need of those around us.
For this is the place, and there is the Table, where all our welcome!
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
[1] Quoted in Barclay, William, The Gospel of Mark, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY, 2001, p. 276