When Jesus was Asked about Divorce

 

Mark 10:2-16

Proper 22 / Year B

This morning we read of yet another instance when a group of Pharisees approach Jesus with a question intending to test and to trap him.  They wonder what he thinks about the legality of divorce.  This is not just a theoretical concern, but a hot-button topic of the day, every bit as divisive as issues we wrangle over in our country in our time. 

On one side you have the school of Hillel, a learned Pharisee.  He interprets the law on divorce very liberally, even frivolously.  If your wife displeases you, or if you find another woman more appealing, go ahead and get a divorce.  On the other side is rabbi Shammia who holds to a very restrictive view – divorce is permission only in the instance of infidelity.

All of it is squabbling about a particular passage in the Book of Deuteronomy, chapter 24:1-4.  Surprisingly, this is one of only a few times the Law of Moses addresses divorce.  It allows for the husband to give a certificate of release to his wife if she displeases him.  In context, it goes on to address the possibility she remarries and her new husband dies or divorces her, then the first husband is not allowed to remarry her.  In his teaching, Jesus raises the possibility of a wife divorcing her husband, but this was only possible for gentiles.  The Jewish law provided a wife with no powers in this matter.

Well, all of the cultural debate is about how to interpret this law and the Pharisees want to know whose side he is on, theirs or the rabbis.  Notice how Jesus’ respond shifts the conversation from how to interpret the Law to God’s original intent for marriage.  And to explore this he turns to a passage from Genesis we read moments ago. 

After all God’s activity at the beginning of creation, after each day God looks at it and says it is ‘good.’  Now, for the first time, God sees something not good – the man is alone.  God deems he needs a suitable helper.  So God parades all the animals before the man who then gives a name to each of them, thus drawing humanity into God’s creative process.  Yet no suitable helper is found.  So God causes the man to sleep, removes one of his ribs, and fashions a woman.  The man takes one look at the woman and knows he has found the partner he needs.  He is no longer alone.  The moral of the story is a man should leave his father and mother and cling to his wife and two are to become as one.  Jesus says this mutuality is God’s original intent.

Hold this thought for a moment and let me say a word about the Hebrew word translated here as ‘helper’.  Some translations render it ‘help-mate.’  Either way, it has led a belief woman are somehow inferior to men, or at least subjugated to them.  Take out your prayer book and open it to page 659.  Read Psalm 54:4:

Behold, God is my helper;

    It is the Lord who sustains my life. 

The Hebrew word translated here as ‘helper’ is the same Hebrew word used in Genesis.  No one would ever suggest since God is our helper God is inferior to us or subjugated to us.  My basic point in this aside is we need to do a lot more theological work if we are going to truly understand what is means the woman is the man’s helper.

Well, back to the sermon.  After Jesus sets out God’s original intent for marriage, he turns his attention to the laws on divorce.  They are there, Jesus says, because we live in a broken world.  They are in place to address the messiness of the post-fall reality where what God intends for marriage does not always pan out.

One of the blessings of working in the church is I have gotten to meet and know dozens of couples whose marriages beautifully reflect God’s original intent.  There is nothing like meeting a couple in their 70s or 80s or beyond who after years of marriage are still living as ‘one flesh.’  They witness to what Christ’ love for the Church looks like.

And then there are people whose marriage did not maintain this threshold and ended.  People like me.  The end of my marriage has in no way diminished my affirmation of the biblical witness to marriage.  I know firsthand, as many of you do, the tremendous pain and deep anguish which occurs when this relationship is broken.  This pain and anguish in no way says marriage is a disposable relationship.  It in no way suggests we stay marriage is to last only as long as it feels good and then cash it in when something perceived to be better comes along.  The pain and the anguish testify to the sacredness and the holiness of the marriage relationship.  When it ends the brokenness cries out, “This is not what God intends.” 

I know personally why the Christian Church declares marriage should not be entered into lightly, or unadvisedly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God.  When two people come together and hold this as their aim, the marriage relationship brings unimaginable blessing.  When it is severed, the marital relationship participates in the brokenness God did not write into the fabric of creation.  It is a brokenness introduced into reality by we humans because, well, we are human.  And because we are human, we fall and we fail.  This in no way changes God’s love for us, a love we see most clearly as God’s original intent for all creation is known and proclaimed in thought, word, and deed.