Sermons
Trinity 17
Jesus is recorded as saying the most alarming things in the gospels, his perspective is often so far off the imagination of the disciples let alone his opponents that his pronouncements are frequently met with utter incomprehension, or hostility. And what Mark has him saying in today’s gospel about marriage and divorce would have been particularly surprising for his hearers. Not only does he radically contradict the Jewish practice - as sanctioned by Deuteronomy - of permitting divorce, but he looks at the question from an extraordinary vantage point above time as it were. He looks back to the beginnings of the world as recorded in Genesis, and he looks forward to the kingdom which will be the summit and completion of the creation. And it is only in dimly trying to imagine this vantage point that his harsh words might make sense for us and not end up as a quite impossible and unforgiving edict of a God who has lost touch with his creatures. We need first though to think a bit about how we might approach this sort of text.
The first and simplest way is to take the words as ‘gospel’, that Mark is recording a well-remembered incident in which Jesus lays down for all time the divine standard to be imposed on all marriages, whatever their state of well-being. This method saves time but not blushes, for there is much more to this incident than appears on the surface.
To get beneath that surface we need to consider some of the oddities of the text and some of the context in which it came to be formulated.
Oddities first. It is most unlikely that a group of Pharisees would have asked Jesus this question, for it was not a question up for debate. The law and practice of the Jewish people had been to allow a man to divorce his wife for various reasons (never the other way round unlike the Romans who seem to have been much more civilised in this and other respects). The only debate in Jewish circles about divorce was the severity of the offence that justified a man taking the action of divorce. Therewere two particular schools of Rabbinnic thought in this area; the school of Rabbi Shammai were forgiving of a second-rate wife up to the point of adultery beyond which the man could act, whereas the rather more pre-historic group that settled around the teachings of Rabbi Hillel thought that cooking a poor dinner was good enough reason to serve a writ of divorce, the phrase is ‘if she spoil a dish for him, that will be sufficient reason for divorce’- how many of us would still be married in that case I wonder? In both schools of thought the woman had no say or representation and indeed the offence of adultery was committed against a married man only, there was no offence of adultery with which a philandering husband could be charged so long as he stuck to unmarried women. As so often with Mark, the telling of the story is very plain, and by the time Matthew wrote up his version, an exception to Jesus’ strict ruling was already in place. It is very likely that Mark is the originator of the question put to Jesus, a suggestion which greatly compromises the rest of the narrative. And given the legal situation, another oddity is that Jesus seems to speak of the possibility of a woman divorcing her husband - an outlet as we have seen, not available to Jewish women at the time. Because of these and other textual anomalies this story has to be approached with great caution, it certainly cannot be read as the giving of an immutable divine law, particularly given Jesus’ remarkably welcoming attitude to the woman caught in adultery, and others in un-orthodox relationships.
Secondly, context. In Jesus’ day and culture marriage was largely understood as a contract drawn up between the bride’s father and the groom’s family, many marriages were arranged, and the marriage ceremony involved the signing of legal documents and the physical giving away of the bride with whatever dowry she might bring. The concept of romantic love would have often been absent at the start of a marriage, and little thought would have been given to the psychological compatibility of the happy or unhappy couple. No wonder divorce was accepted as customary. And this legal context makes unhappy reading for those inclined to celibacy (not mentioned), and those inclined to homosexuality (unmentionable). Of course, Roman culture took a rather broader view again.
So given the strangeness of this story and given its very distant historical context what can these harsh words in the mouth of Jesus mean for us today?
First - and Mark records this authentic note that runs through Jesus’ teaching - Jesus points behind the law and beyond the everyday, towards the primacy of God. He answers the hostile legalistic question by looking back to a time before the law, the time of innocence conjured up by the marvellous stories of Genesis, a vision in which the creation is enjoyed in its beauty and innocence and simplicity by an archetypal and imaginary couple of human beings who are unaware of a division between God’s will for his creation and their own actions, a paradisal garden free from contradiction. And Jesus also points in the other direction of time to an end state of fruitfulness when the creation will be transformed into the kingdom where God is known fully and contradiction will once more be impossible.
The trouble, of course, is that we live after the end of Eden and before the completion of the kingdom and we live the lives of normal sinful failing human beings. We live lives in which marriages come to a natural end, a natural death, not through unusual weakness on either side, or through couples entering into marriage with the wrong intentions. Everyone gets married for life, but if the life that is enjoyed between a couple ebbs away over time we have to face the real question of whether artificially supporting that life in a persistent vegetative state is really a response to a creative and ever active God, a God who in Jesus comes to the world so that people may have life in abundance, a God of surprises.
And the Church of England has, I believe been remarkably wise in showing a vulnerability to the promptings of the God of surprises in the way it has approached the question of the re-marriage of divorcees. The church believes in life-long marriage between one man and one woman, but it also recognises that between the paradise of Eden and the paradise of the kingdom we have to seek the way of love in the midst of our failings. We continue to hold before couples who are preparing for marriage the ideals that Mark has placed in the mouth of Jesus, but we also hold out the vision that between the paradise of Eden and the paradise of the kingdom, God will not abandon us to a living death. Marriage has always got to be about life, it should never become a life-sentence. And God is always around the next corner beckoning us on and the deep underlying theme of all Jesus’ teaching is that God calls us to give thanks with joy for creation and for the possibilities of joining in with God’s works of bringing love into being. With that theme in our minds we should face death, both physical and emotional, with honesty and with hope.
But remember, if your wife or husband cooks you a bad dinner tonight, the law will no longer allow you to sue for divorce.