Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (22B), October 7, 2018; The Rev. Susan Ackley
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12 Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds
Mark 10:2-16 Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’
Ah — this Gospel, the “divorce” Gospel. Not the favorite of most preachers, definitely including me.
It’s hits me personally. I was divorced 41 years ago, but the scars, both from a very bad marriage and a clumsy divorce, remain.
More recently in a bizarre coincidence the last time I preached on this text, my daughter was in the midst of a divorce; right now my son is and there are children involved.
So this is in no way a neutral sermon: I have skin in this game.
Before I begin I want to make clear that “marriage” applies in my mind to all marriages and also to committed partnerships.
With this understood, let’s look carefully at the text. The Gospel begins with an odd question. “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”
The question is odd because there wasn’t any question about it. At that time in Israel, a man could write a certificate of dismissal and divorce his wife, and it was ratified by the Law. It’s right there in the Torah (Deut. 24:1-4). In Jesus’ time, there was an active debate among experts in the law about the acceptable grounds for divorce, but as far as I could find, no one was rejecting the possibility of a divorce initiated by husbands. There were ways around it for wives, and there are records that show that Jewish women at that time could and did get divorced in Roman courts.
But even though Jesus’ questioners may not have really cared about divorce, many of us do. For some of us here this morning it may be a heartache we’re living with right now.
I’ve stood in front of I don’t know how many couples, they all dressed up in their fairy tale finery, me all vested, the church filled with flowers and friends, the glow in their faces, the tears in their eyes when they turn to one another and make their vows.
I’ve counseled most of these couples before the wedding. We’ve had four, five, even six premarital meetings to talk about every facet of married life. And my heart always sinks whenever I hear a couple say with complete assurance when some landmine of an issue surfaces—money, or children, or sex — “That’s all right. We’ll get through¡ it. We love each other.”
The good news is that many of them, through grace and perseverance and a little help from their friends, do deal with it, and their marriages grow more mature and stronger, and last until “death do them part”.
But there are the others. Two or 5 or 10 or many years after the wedding, marriages end — they collapse, implode, explode in divorce. That glowing, confident love shining from their faces at the altar has morphed into boredom and indifference, bitterness, hate or, God help us, fear.
How can this gospel today help us to think about divorce? Can Jesus’ words say anything helpful to those of us who are divorced, who are on the brink of divorce, who have been wounded by divorces sometime in their lives, or have people close to them going through it?
In the story, after he’s turned the tables on his questioners, Jesus takes the conversation to a new level, a “God” level.
To the way God intends — no, better — the way Jesus’ God yearns for marriage to be.
To get to the heart of the matter, Jesus brings up the Creation story in Genesis when God gave them the gifts of sexuality and reproduction.
God’s yearning for marriage as expressed in Genesis and here in the Gospel of Mark, is that two independent separate people join together body to body, spirit to spirit, so that the two become “one flesh.”
The joining together of two people in one flesh is the ideal of marriage in both the Jewish and Christian traditions. It is an incredibly noble and beautiful vision of marriage as it might have been in the Garden of Eden. A flight of imagination, a piece of poetry.
Given this vision of marriage, what about divorce?
Here I’m going to jump out from the story itself to the writer of this version of the story, traditionally called “Mark.”
The Gospel of Mark is thought by scholars to be the first of the Gospels, around 70 CE. At that time many if not most Christians were convinced that the end time was coming when the reign of God would be established on earth. They tried to live as much as possible into the ideal of that reign.
In the case of marriage the ideal would be two people joining as “one flesh,” a union never to be broken. It would be a kind of reenacting of the Garden of Eden.
It’s important to notice that 30 or so years later, when the Gospel of Matthew was written, the reign of God had still not come, things on earth including marriage were still flawed and faulty, and so Matthew’s Gospel depicts Jesus as allowing divorce.
Let’s go back to that bit of poetry in Genesis which describes marriage as two people becoming one flesh. “One flesh” — what does that mean? Perfect unity, right?
I can guess what you’re thinking — oh dear! This idea of unity plays out so often in domination of one person by the other. The dominant partner defines what the other person needs to become in order for “unity” to happen. (Reminds me of my first marriage!)
But we can envision “one flesh” more collaboratively, a complex “unity” in which both parties respond to one another, willing to share their feelings, ideas, and longings just as they share their bodies. Willing to reveal themselves to each other, to be vulnerable enough to depend on one another, to encourage each others’ growth, to trust.
This is a vision of marriage as an improvisatory dance in which each partner responds to each other and both respond to the changing circumstances around them.
(Parenthetical remark in the interest of honesty: I’m married, and of course, lots of times it feels more like a slog than a dance. It’s hard, hard work. I think marriage (or committed partnership) is one of the most difficult spiritual paths.)
But what if one or both of the spouses chronically violates this ideal of deep sharing by being dismissive, or cruel, or unfaithful, or violent?
What if a marriage or partnership causes deep hurt for one or both of the spouses? Is this of God? Is it in any sense the will of God or Higher Power or whatever you call the Divine–for you, for any on us, each one of us God’s beloved child, to go on being hurt and hurt and hurt? I cannot believe that in any way this is God’s yearning for any of us. I do believe that divorce is sometimes the only right solution to end a destructive relationship.
Where is God in divorce?
An odd question, isn’t it?
But in all his life and all his teaching, Jesus shows us a Divine Presence, a loving force which embraces us most especially in the times when we are struggling, confused, when our hearts are broken.
These are the times when we need especially to turn to the God who loves us, for the strength and healing to get us through.
These are the times when we need to remember over and over these words of Jesus in the Gospel—“I come so you might have love and have it more abundantly.”