Better Late Than Never...

I preached this sermon two weeks ago but didn't have the chance to post it until today! The gospel appointed was from Mark, when the Pharisees ask Jesus whether it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife. Jesus responds by recounting the story of Adam and Eve, who were made for each other for the purpose of being together forever. He goes on to say that divorcing and re-marrying is the same thing as committing adultery. Tough words from Jesus, and ones that I certainly didn't want to preach on! I tackled the subject, however, and it turned out to be on the hardest sermons I've ever had to prepare! Anyway, here's the finished product...

You can read the whole sermon after the jump!

Divorce, Marriage, and the Kingdom of God

 

Allow me to start with a confession: Today’s gospel reading counts among those few passages that markedly raise my anxiety level when I know that I am preaching. There aren’t many of them throughout the gospels—those passages that make us take pause when we hear them, readdress what we think we know about our faith, about Jesus. Is this reading true, we wonder? And if it is, what does it mean about Jesus? What does it mean about me, my faith, my life, my past?

When I was in seminary and readings like this came up in the lectionary, it suddenly felt like everyone in my entire dorm was writing a sermon. We called them “seminarian Sundays,” when the rector decided to take the weekend off and have the intern preach.

Very few people—even people who study the Bible for a living—actually like these passages.

Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, Jesus says. And the same goes for a wife that divorces her husband. Jesus is making quite a statement here, and I can’t help but wonder: does he really mean what I think he means? And if so, do I have to agree with him in order to be a good Christian?

In today’s gospel text we find Jesus, once again, approached by the Pharisees, out to test him on the details of Jewish law. This time, they have decided to ask him a question that will surely stump him, or at least endanger his popularity—a question that has no good answer to speak of.

Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?

If scripture about divorce is uncomfortable for us to read, rest assured that it was just as uncomfortable for people in Jesus’ time. And the Pharisees knew that no matter how Jesus responded to their question, he would offend someone.

In other words, they were setting him up.

If he stuck to the laws of Moses and said that it was lawful for a man to seek a divorce (and do note that the question was about MEN asking for divorce, not women), he would alienate all those people who witnessed the ravages of divorce in first century Palestine—all the women and children who were vulnerable to being thrown out of their homes and left without anything as their husbands sought out wives who could bear them a son, or whose family was higher on the social or economic ladder. If Jesus defied the laws of Moses, however, and said that it was not okay to seek a divorce, the Pharisees and others would claim that he was ignoring the faith of their fathers, the law that Moses had given to their people. He was trapped.

It is important to remember that Jesus’ time was very different from our own. While we understand marriage as a free commitment between two loving people, intent on spending their lives together, witnessing their love to the world, we have to recognize that this a fairly modern invention. In Jesus’ time, marriage was not primarily about love and it was very often not free. Marriage was an arrangement made between two families. Parent’s negotiated the marriages of their children with the interest of status and class in mind—women were often married very young, usually in their early teens, and were under enormous pressure to begin producing children right away.

Likewise, our understanding of divorce is much different than it was in Jesus’ time. While we know divorce to a difficult, sometimes tragic, event that affects entire families and is arrived at after considerable thought, effort, and counsel, first century divorce was just as business-like as marriage was. It was also callous and unbalanced. When a man divorced his wife, she was left alone without any source of income and few prospects for future marriage—often homeless, having to resort to begging on the streets in order to feed her family. It was a system that protected men and left women and children vulnerable.

So, Jesus: can a man divorce his wife?

Jesus responds quickly and forcefully, like he usually does. But instead of answering their question, he turns it upside down. Yes, you know that Moses told you that you can divorce, he says. But instead of talking about divorce, I’m going to talk about marriage. Instead of focusing on the negative, I am going to give you a vision of the positive. He tells them that Moses permitted divorce because of humanity’s “hardness of heart,” a stark term that is used to describe sin. Then, he invites the crowd to return to a time before sin, to the garden of Eden that we heard about in today’s Old Testament reading, a time when the first human beings looked each other, gasped, and thought: finally, a person to spend my life with, a creature like me, made for me to be with, to cleave to until we become one.

For Jesus, this is an image of the kingdom of God—a time and a place where the world will be restored to the way that God intended in creation. Instead of allowing the Pharisee’s to focus on what is minimal—what is permitted in religious law—he asks them to imagine what is optimal, the possibility for our lives when the kingdom comes. He is not talking about divorce or marriage; literally, he is talking about the redemption of humanity, the restoration of all of creation. 

As I often do, I find myself reluctantly identifying with the Pharisees, who are so often cast as villains in the gospels. The Pharisees, feeling their faith threatened by this strange and popular teacher named Jesus, find themselves challenged to the very core of their beliefs, the way that they look at the world and at their relationship to God. Jesus takes their blinders off—reminding them, none too gently, that they are not seeing the big picture.

Theirs is faith seeking loopholes; his is faith chasing a vision. Theirs is concrete; his, imaginative. Theirs, looking for what they can get away with; his, looking for their fullest potential.

By returning back to the Garden of Eden—back to humanity’s short history without sin—Jesus challenges the culture that he is living in. In describing Eden, he describes the kingdom of God. In the Kingdom of God, he seems to say, women and children will not be vulnerable to arbitrary upheaval. These people, oppressed by society, discarded and left without rights, will receive the kingdom. The least of these will lead the rest, the first will be last.

I understand why the Pharisees were so hung up on Jesus. His message, about the kingdom and the first and last, was not only troubling, but it completely altered everything that they understood about their world. He made the picture bigger—he widened the lens. I know that I, too, can sometimes focus on the minimal, like the Pharisees did. I can sometimes only see what is permitted instead of what is desired.

That is the great message, I think, about this passage. God’s picture is always bigger than ours. God’s plan is always leading us—all of us—toward wholeness and completion, toward the Kingdom of God.

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, and blessed them.