Receive
Mark 10:2-16
Click here to view the full sermon video for October 3, 2021, entitled "Receive."
A little over eighteen years ago, our family was settling into the manse that belonged to the first church I served in Tennessee. There will still boxes from the move that we had yet to unpack when I got a voice message on our home phone. It was a younger man in the congregation whom I had briefly met on the Sunday the church voted to call me as their pastor.
That morning, he and his wife apologized for having to dash off, but one of their children had taken a spill that created a dental emergency. Now he was on the phone explaining that he needed to talk with me. He and his wife were getting a divorce, and he needed help. It’s not as though I didn’t know about divorce. As a child of the 80’s, I had plenty of friends whose parents had separated, divorced and remarried. What I was unprepared for, was the role I would be expected to play as a pastor, offering social and spiritual commentary on the matter.
I confess that I wasn’t too comfortable with it then, and I’m not very comfortable with it now.
In fact, for the last eighteen years I have avoided this and similar exchanges in the gospel in which Jesus is asked to weigh in on the difficult matter of divorce. For one thing, I’ve watched first-hand as this text was cited for justifying the pain caused to people who were told by the Roman church that they could not re-marry in the church because of a prior divorce. In Tennessee, I listened to the very real distress of people who had left their fundamentalist upbringing only to be told by family members that they were going to hell because they had divorced. Institutional Christianity has a pretty rotten track record when it comes to the way it treats those who have experienced the pain of watching their marriage come to an end. We have often contributed to, if not created outright the social stigma that has often been hung on divorcees. All because of this exchange that Jesus has with those who we’re told are trying to test him.
If we step back from the hurt this passage has caused and pay attention to what’s being said, what we find is that Jesus is far less concerned with the morality of divorce itself, as he is the injustice of how it’s practiced in his tradition. After all, the question posed to him isn’t, “Is it lawful for two people to end their marriage?” The question posed is, “is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” And right there we begin to get the sense that there is an unequal power dynamic at work here. The truth is that the litmus test of the question has less to do with divorce itself, and more to do with two rival rabbinic schools that were at odds with each other.
Both acknowledged and allowed for the process of divorce based on a precedent created by Moses in Deuteronomy in which a man who finds “something objectionable” about his wife writes her a certificate of divorce. According to one rabbinic school, that phrase should only be narrowly read as referring to adultery. But according to another rabbinic school, it could be read far more broadly to include any trivial thing a man might find objectionable about a woman. Nowadays, our understanding of marriage has expanded beyond the binary combination of a man and woman, but for the purposes of the test put to Jesus, that binary is very much a part of what Jesus is responding to. That’s because, as you may have noticed, all the power in this transaction - whether it’s narrowly or broadly defined - falls to the man. There is no question about the legality of a woman divorcing her husband. Women didn’t have the power to divorce their husbands. The problematic way in which divorce was practiced reflected the problematic way that marriage itself was conceived. Because one is always a reflection of the other. They go hand in hand. While human love is a constant, it was often a secondary consideration when it came to marriage. Marriages were arranged to align families with common economic interests, as a matter of social standing and advancement. The language surrounding marriage viewed a woman as the property of her husband. And like any good, if she was found or considered to be defective in some way, she could be discarded. That may sound like something foreign to us, but there are still parts of this world where marriages are arranged and women are treated as second class citizens who exist solely to serve the interests, desires and needs of men. Back in college I lived for a semester in the dormer apartment atop a widow’s house in Pittsburgh. One Saturday I had a date with one of my classmates, and I was pretty nervous about it. This amused my landlady. I remember how speechless I was when she remarked, “I always thought this was a man’s world. It never occurred to me that one would be so nervous to go on a date.” We aren’t that far removed, and sometimes not removed at all, from the kind of gendered attitudes that tip the balance of power toward men and away from women. A balance that Jesus makes clear does harm to men as well as women. Because it sanctions a hardness of heart that puts women at risk and cuts men off from their own humanity.
What Jesus then points out is that by doing so, we are never fully allowed to live into the creative intent of God. Male and female are made equally in God’s image. They are made to be equals with one another; for one another. Not for one to dictate the terms by which another is allowed to live, love and thrive in the world. When pressed on the matter by his disciples Jesus put husband and wife on equal footing. What holds for a woman is the same for a man. And the truth of it is painful. Because divorce is painful. Anyone who’s gone through one can tell you that.
I didn’t really know what to say to that man who shared with me two minutes into pastoral ministry that he and his wife were getting a divorce. I wasn’t sure what he needed. But I knew what he didn’t need. He didn’t need a person of faith to shame him for what was happening. Because what was happening is that his marriage had died. And now he had to make the funeral arrangements and grieve what had been lost, which also meant helping his kids grieve what they had lost.
When a marriage dies it doesn’t just affect the couple that is married. Even in the best of circumstances, when everyone understands that a divorce is the healthiest way forward and children are involved, it impacts them as well. All too frequently their lives become a battlefield in a proxy war between two wounded parents. Some people even avoid ending a marriage that needs to end for fear of what it will do to their children. But the truth of the matter is that it can be just as damaging for children to be exposed to an unhealthy marriage as it is for them to endure a painful divorce.
I don’t think it’s an accident that we encounter Jesus blessing children on the heels of his hard talk about divorce. And when his disciples try to exclude these children, try to keep them from bothering their teacher, he sets them straight. Children aren’t an afterthought. They may be small, and easy to dismiss. But not unlike the problematic dynamic of a man who can too easily dismiss his wife, adults who too easily minimize and dismiss children they find objectionable risk missing the kingdom altogether. They risk missing it not because children are somehow adorable. They can be. They can also be difficult and demanding. They’re humans under construction. No, we will never enter into what God is doing, what God is up to in the world if we don’t receive and take into consideration the ones who are the most vulnerable among us; those who have no choice but to bear the brunt of our own hurts and hard heartedness, the ones who rely on us in the same way that we rely on God. To separate ourselves from the one, is to cut ourselves off from the other.
In the end that is what this is all about. Even when a marriage dies and a couple divorces, we are not so easily separated from one another; whether it is two who are made one flesh, or the children produced by such unions. The way forward is to receive the blessing that Jesus offers to us when we wound one another and find ourselves at our most vulnerable, binding up our broken hearts and raising us up to a new life that is made whole in him.