Pentecost 18, Proper 22, Year B

Genesis 2:18-24
Hebrews 2:9-18
Mark 10:2-9

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sam teased me a few days ago: “I’m sure glad that I don’t have to preach on Sunday’s gospel.” Somehow in thirteen years of preaching most Sundays, I’ve been spared today’s gospel. My luck ran out this week. Jesus’ teaching about divorce is one of those ‘hard sayings,’ and it’s daunting.

We all know that ‘gospel’ means ‘good news.’ Where’s the good news in today’s gospel? Is there any? And today’s gospel gets even worse when we consider that in the verses immediately following Jesus says that anyone who divorces and then remarries commits adultery. Where’s the good news in that? Many here are divorced. Many here are re-married. All of us here dearly love and admire people who have been divorced and remarried. We see divorced people having better, more holy lives than when they were married, and we see re-marriages giving people more happiness, leading people to more Christ-like lives. So what’s going on here? How can we make sense of it? Where’s the good news?

We all agree with Jesus that divorce is horrible. It causes an enormous amount of pain, not only for spouses, but also for children, extended family, friends, neighbors. This morning, why dredge up all that suffering? Why risk hurting anyone? Because for all of us it’s an issue how to respond to it. Because God doesn’t want those going through divorces to lose faith in him, or in themselves, and because God wants the rest of us to respond to it with more love, more compassion, more empathy.

In today’s gospel, the Pharisees come to Jesus to test him. They want to expose him as a false teacher. They don’t want to learn from him. They say that they want to know what is lawful. They know that Deuteronomy clearly states that a man has the prerogative to divorce his wife if she doesn’t find favor in his eyes, if she’s done something objectionable. (Dt 24:1) To us, it’s absurdly unfair that only the husband has the prerogative of divorce. But that was not the issue in Jesus’ day. The issue in Jesus’ day was: ‘what’s sufficiently objectionable?’

There were two schools of thought. The Shammai party said only infidelity was cause for divorce. The more traditional, conservative Hillel party allowed for much more discretion by the husband. If, for example, a wife cooked a bad meal, her husband could divorce her.

Jesus doesn’t answer the Pharisee’s question on its terms. He always rises above human divisions. He’s not a party guy. If anyone ever tells you, “Jesus would be a Democrat” or “Jesus would be a Republican,” they need some more time with their bible. Jesus doesn’t ever allow himself to be defined by our terms or fit into our boxes, our ideologies. So often his sayings alienate everyone; so often they challenge us; so often they make us look at things in a bigger way.

The Pharisees in questioning Jesus are interested in what’s lawful, what’s permissible, what can they get away with. What’s his opinion about the law? Jesus doesn’t answer them directly. He asks, “What does God command? What’s God’s will?” We see that the Pharisees are interested in their rights and that Jesus is interested in God’s desire for us. What’s allowed versus what’s God’s intent.

Jesus says that we see God’s intent in creation. He quotes Genesis, our Old Testament reading, that a man and a woman become one flesh. Jesus says that God wants marriage to be a lifelong union. That’s our standard. That’s our ideal.

There’s one other thing to note about the context of Jesus arguing with the Pharisees. Jesus has been traveling up to Jerusalem where he will be crucified. Today’s gospel comes just after he has predicted his passion and resurrection. Today’s gospel comes just before another prediction of his passion and resurrection. He’s associating marriage with the way of the cross. Marriage is full of joy, but joy comes through sacrifice.

The cross is the way to successful relationships. It’s about sacrificing, putting the other first, living for more than ourselves, not making everything about ourselves. It’s a counter-cultural message. Our culture approaches marriage and relationships as something to enrich our own lives, as a way to have self-fulfillment, and that may happen, but only by dying to ourselves, by putting the other first.

Now, of course, we frequently do not achieve our Lord’s ideals for us. We don’t live as God intends for us. Jesus knows that marriages fail, that they can become degrading, that some need to end. Human failure, however, should not define our goals and our values. Jesus sets a high bar for us. He wants to exalt us. But our failure and our frailties don’t diminish his love for us.

One of the painful differences about divorce as opposed to other failures is that it’s so public. We can much more easily hid our other failures. Our gospel for next week, the next section of Mark’s gospel, Jesus tells a man that if he wants to have eternal life, then he needs to sell all that he has and give it to the poor. (Mk 10:21) Who lives up to that? Not many of us. Our culture often does not even count greed to be a failure. It’s much easier to disguise what we do with money.

Jesus asks much from us. How well do we love our enemies? When someone strikes us on one side of the face, do we turn to him the other cheek? Jesus associates getting angry at someone or insulting someone with murder. (Mt 5:21-22) He says that we commit adultery not only in re-marriage, but every time we look at a person lustfully. (Mt 5:27) Should we hold the failure of a marriage as greater than these? Jesus holds us to a very high standards, and none of us meets them.

Here’s the good news: Jesus says, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mk 2:17) Jesus expects much, and he forgives much. We all have things in our past that grieve us, but we don’t have to be defined by them. Jesus wants us to live exalted lives, and he overflows with mercy. Jesus loves us and doesn’t turn away from us, even when we turn from him. Marital separation hurts, and the good news is that Jesus is there for those who hurt and in Jesus we can be renewed and start again.

I don’t see how today’s gospel can been taken as an absolute statement of Church policy. While S. Paul argues against divorce, he also recognizes that sometimes Christians had little choice but to get divorced. (1 Corinthians 7:10-16) This suggests to us how inappropriate it is for us to make judgments about the circumstances of other peoples’ marriages. Our godly response is to love one another, not to judge one another. Divorce calls for more love, less judgment.

We might also remember that Jesus promised that he would divide up families “for his sake and the gospel’s.” He said, “I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother. . . a man’s foes will be those of his own household.” (Mt 10:35-36 cf. Mk 13:12-13) Christian family values! Jesus knows that we have to make painful decisions, to choose between bad options what best serves God, and sometimes that means dividing up families. That’s awful, painful. And sometimes we make mistakes.

But God is merciful, always merciful. And that’s the key to reading scripture. The way we most clearly see the good news of today’s gospel is to begin with God’s love and mercy. To assume it. To trust it. To know that it’s always out front.

In the ancient world, women rarely owned property. Their only guarantee of support was marriage. Indeed, the charming story of Ruth in the Old Testament is about a virtuous woman, Ruth, getting a second husband after her first husband dies. She needs another husband so that she won’t die. When we read Ruth, we’re struck by the injustice, the cruelty, of the whole social, economic system. Women and children were at the bottom of the heap, the most vulnerable people in society.

When Jesus tells the Pharisees that God intends marriage to be permanent, he’s once again putting himself on the side of the weak and vulnerable. If a man could divorce his wife, and she had no relations to care for her, her life would probably be short and utterly miserable. Today’s gospel has much to do with the strong, the powerful, the privileged accepting their responsibility to the weak, the powerless, the un-privileged; it has to do with care and safety of the vulnerable.

God cares for every human being, for all of the human family. He wants us to have a big vision of what constitutes a family. He knows that we’re all brothers and sisters. He wants the members of his family to care for one another, to have strong relationships, full of trust, commitment, sacrifice, love, humility, mercy.

Mark tells of the time Jesus’ mother and brothers came looking for him in a crowd of people. (Mk3:31-35) His mother and brothers called to him, and the people sitting next to Jesus told him that his mother and brothers were looking for him. And Jesus asked the crowd, “Who are my mother and brothers?” And looking around at them, as he would look around at all of us this morning, Jesus said, “Here are my mother and brothers!”

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.