For This Reason
Mark 10:2-16

October 8, 2006


The more Jesus traveled around and healed, the more he taught, the more he was challenged by one group or another. Usually it was the Pharisees or the Sadducees who played the foil to put Jesus on the spot, to discredit him, or at least pushing him into saying something worth one more set of enemies. We can blame those uptight Pharisees, but they are simply asking the questions we would be asking today. Listen to the public discourse on same gender marriage and family values and divorce and couples living together before marriage, and you will know the Pharisees still have willing recruits.

We are having trouble with Jesus. He is not talking to us the way we have come to expect him. He is getting harsher the last two weeks, more narrow and exclusive. We were plucking out eyes and cutting off limbs, and now it seems he is pointing the finger at virtually every family and just about every pew about how we marry and divorce. For this reason it is critical that we slow down and listen.

Our discomfort derives largely from the religious folklore we have allowed to interpret our faith and thus, our concept of God’s relationship towards us. Especially in the United Church and in many other kindred denominations, as well as liberal secular society and its media, literary critic Harold Bloom puts it succinctly and humourously that God really, really likes us and that God is thrilled to be with us on any occasion, and God couldn’t be happier with our moral progress.

Some would say this is cheap grace, a set of ideas totally rejected by another side of Christianity. I lived for 10 years in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Jonathan Edwards was pastor of the First Church of Christ from 1729-1750. He is still considered the greatest North American theologian and students read him more and more. A Puritan who is equally famous for being the prime mover behind the First Great Awakening, his sermon preached in 1741 in Enfield, Connecticut, is still included in most American high school and university textbooks of English literature. The title of the sermon says it all, “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God,” notably featuring God holding a human being over the fire like a spider from a thread of its web. When people heard Edwards preach with such imagery, they sat up and listened and they got religion all right and the churches weren’t big enough to hold the crowds. That other side of Christianity thinks Jonathan was right on, and we wince every time we hear one of its representatives talk.

Mark knows that none of this was innocent. The Pharisees came up to Jesus in order to test and trick him into saying something wrong. Just a bold wide open question, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Jesus knows this is a hot topic - times do not change - and asked for their interpretation of the law. A man is allowed to write a certificate of divorce and to “put her away.” A lovely turn of phrase!

Jesus goes back to the beginning and what he is really doing is insisting upon a higher standard for marriage than men had been allowed to get away with. “For your hardness of heart,” Jesus declares, “Moses wrote you this commandment.” Pharaoh had hardness of heart. That is, Moses knew he couldn’t do anything with you, so he proposed the certificate item just to limit the bleeding.

“For from the beginning, ‘God made them male and female.’” Today, a storm of people want to limit that citation to mean who is allowed to marry, but Jesus meant something a lot deeper and far more critical. God created all of humanity as equals, not as higher and lower species or genders. Then the famous “for this reason” - “a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one. So they are no longer two, but one. What God has joined together, let no one put asunder.” When human beings are equal in the eyes of God, no one is allowed to treat the other as property, no one is empowered to act as the superior. It’s not that two people being married lose their distinctiveness, but they become one in a spiritual way that few other realms of human existence can approach. And being a spiritual, definitely not a physical reality, this is of God’s making, and you don’t mess around with what God has made.

Even more importantly, God has created marriage so that people may be sanctified, become holy in their way of being together, for after all, it really is no good being holy by yourself. “It is not good that a human being should be alone. He needs a partner.” When God makes someone holy, God doesn’t do it in grades or degrees. You are never a little bit holy, and so in marriage there is no human way to split up and divide God’s Oneness in a couple. Jesus has not been explicit here, but everyone then knew and felt the purpose of his words - Jesus was on the side of the weak and the vulnerable. There is no difference in holiness, but Jesus always starts from the position of the weak, not the strong.

Jesus appears to have survived this test, but upon returning to the house, the disciples keep the subject alive and Jesus answers with that harshest of observations that divorcing and remarrying is an act of adultery. It’s like being punched in the stomach. You and I know someone we love who has gone through the brokenness of divorce, and to deny them the possibility of recreating that sanctity, that holiness God holds out to each one of us seems infinitely cruel.

It does not help to explain away Jesus’ words, but all the assumptions of those talking at him are bucking for the status quo, for the rights of those who appear to have the power and not for the vulnerable and powerless. When Jesus says, “and if the wife, divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery,” it is about as ludicrous a statement as could be uttered in that society. No woman had the faintest possibility of effecting her own divorce; she wasn’t holy enough, strong enough, equal enough to do such a thing. Jesus is also is always on the side of unity and community and togetherness, so he is going to insist that women are held to the same standards as men. An absolutely unthinkable idea! For this reason, what Jesus says should never have been meant to be the final word, not with him insisting upon the equal holiness of women and men.

The reality today is still that divorce always hurts. The divorce rate is obscenely high, child support laws are not enforced well enough, spousal abuse is still a denied, but brutally painful reality. We hardly need to say it, the children are the ones who suffer.

This final section of today’s episode is not some misplaced happening tacked on the heavier responses of Jesus. They were bringing children to Jesus that he might touch them. Not everybody saw children as worthless, non-working, income-devouring mouths, yet apparently the disciples, whom we yearn to imitate, did. Jesus put a stop to that. You’ve got to be like a child to enter the kingdom of God, and he embraced them and blessed them. He made them holy. He made the weakest and most vulnerable holy all in one day, first women, and then children. My God, women can be perceived actually divorcing their husbands and children are considered the models of the kingdom, not the useless drains on a family’s income! What has this world come to, they all must have thought?

It is to the world which God calls us all into holiness and sanctification. You can’t deny that a significant part of the world is broken, but God urges you and me towards holiness and oneness with God and with one another, and that’s where our story is fulfilled, not with the brokenness of adultery. A good Thanksgiving note upon which to depart, from Pastor John Robinson of the Pilgrims leaving Leyden, Holland, for the New World in 1620, “God has yet more truth and light to break forth from the Holy Word.”

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan