The
27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 4th 2009 – ‘Big
Questions’
It feels like a long time. I think it’s been more than a month since I preached on a Sunday morning, and wouldn’t you know it, my first Sunday back in the saddle, and do I get some nice fluffy parable? No, I get Jesus talking about divorce! And if that weren’t bad enough, when I look at the first reading we’re starting out in Job, which might be a great alternative to Jesus and divorce, but not if your wife’s a biblical scholar specialising in Job! Put the two together and the Letter to the Hebrews starts looking pretty good, but I can’t go there. I heard someone the other day say that if you’re going to read this gospel passage in church you have to preach on it, and I agree.
Why? Because this is a difficult reading. Why? Because I’ve only ever heard one sermon on this gospel reading, and that time the preacher simply got up and said ‘Jesus got it wrong’. Why? Because for me it’s an especially difficult reading, but I’m not the only one that’s true for. I have to preach on this passage because quite frankly if we’re going to read passages like this in church, and open up that can of worms, then it’s my responsibility to see that we don’t just leave them hanging. So I’m going to preach on it, or perhaps more accurately, I’m going to preach around it.
And the ‘around
it’ is very important here. Jesus, as we know, is speaking in 1st
century
The law of Moses is pretty definitive: a man – never a woman – a man could simply write a letter dismissing his wife like an employee. The grounds for this were wide open, but usually it was because the wife couldn’t do what wives were first and foremost expected to do, which was bear him children. Under those circumstances, the law said, the husband could divorce her.
So that’s the context of the conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees, but it’s complicated even further because by the 1st century Greek law had also become a factor and in that system wives could also divorce their husbands.
Of course in all this we use words like marriage and divorce and so on, all of which have specific meanings to us in this time and place that simply aren’t the same as in that time and place. Marriage as we know it is a fairly modern arrangement, where the important things in most cases are ethereal concepts like love and attraction and compatibility. For most of history though marriage had nothing to do with love, it was about business. Marriages were often the same as company mergers, bringing families together for political and economic advantage. They were child-rearing arrangements, designed to ensure the continuation of the male line. And they were property arrangements, where women were simply assets or liabilities belonging to their husbands. This isn’t marriage as we normally know it.
Even today though the concept of ‘marriage’ isn’t as clear cut as we might like to think. One of the meetings I spent a week at in August was an international consultation among Anglican liturgists about marriage which began and ended with the same question: is there any such thing as Christian marriage? Trust me, it’s a much harder question than it sounds. None of which, I hasten to say, is an attempt to ignore the reading we have in front of us. Yes, marriage means different things now than it did then. But this reading isn’t about marriage, it’s about divorce.
“Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
“Because of your hardness of heart.” Matthew’s gospel is much nicer about this reading. Even Paul, with whom I have many issues, isn’t as hard-headed about divorce as Jesus is in Mark. Here it is straight down the line – what God has joined together, let no one separate, period. If only it were that simple.
As is so often the case, Jesus never directly answers the question the Pharisees put to him. ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’ The correct answer is obviously ‘yes, under certain circumstances’. That’s what the law said after all. Jesus, though, doesn’t look to the law, Jesus looks to the beginning.
“From the beginning of creation.” There’s a lot in Jesus’ answer – too much for just one sermon. He takes us back to the Genesis creation story and the making of humanity in God’s image. Lurking in the background are the words in Genesis 2, one of the alternative readings for today, where God says ‘it is not good for the man to be alone’. This is about relationships, and being one. It’s about sex, and we shouldn’t try to ignore that – this reading raises some important questions about sex in a culture where it has become as devalued as our own. This is definitely about exploitation, in fact many people will tell this is all about exploitation and the way men have sometimes treated women, and that certainly fits in with the last part of the reading. All this and more is in these verses, but what we mustn’t ignore is that also here, explicit in Jesus’ words, is the message that this is not what God intended, this is not what God wants.
In the beginning, God created us man and woman. In the beginning, God brought human beings together in relationship. In the beginning, God did not intend us to be alone. In the beginning, this was what God wanted: mutual respect and devotion, true relationships, lived in community. God wanted these things. God did not want wars and conflicts and communities turning against each other and bitterness between people and husband’s and wives working against instead of for each other. God doesn’t want these things, and neither do we.
I often hear conversations about the state of marriage today and how little value people seem to put on it, and I always make the same point which is that in twenty years of marrying people I have never met a couple who didn’t honestly intend their marriage to last forever, but here’s the point, they’re all human beings. We make mistakes. We break our promises. We get things wrong. We reach our limits. We are all human. And God knows that.
This is the point
I want to make about divorce – it’s not the perfect outcome of any relationship
and it’s not what God wants, but it happens. I don’t want God or the church to
tell me that my divorce was OK, but I do want them to understand. I want to
know that it’s understood that I’m human and I make mistakes and I get things
wrong and I reach my limits, and no, that’s not the best outcome or the perfect
situation, but that’s the way it is, and God knows that. That, after all, is
the message of the Gospel – the
There are some challenges in this reading, absolutely, and not just to husbands and wives. This is a challenge to every relationship, including ours as the Body of Christ. And this reading doesn’t answer all my questions, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that.
One of the questions priests are asked at their ordination is ‘do you believe that the Bible contains everything necessary for salvation?’ I’ve been questioned about that, and I’ve questioned it myself. But I said it and I even believe it, mostly because I’m convinced that there’s actually very little that is necessary for salvation. What I don’t say, and would struggle to believe, is that the Bible has an answer for every question.
This gospel reading leaves me with questions – hard questions, big questions, questions that I might rather ignore, but can’t. At the risk of crossing into my wife’s territory, I might suggest that it’s like Job, and the many questions he puts forcefully to God, questions that when God finally shows up remain unanswered, yet, according to what God says in the end, questions that Job was right to ask.
I’m not offering you all the answers this morning, and I’m not trying to explain away the difficult message Jesus leaves us with, but I am encouraging us all to keep asking questions, to keep struggling with these and the many other points about God and the Bible and our faith that sometimes just don’t quite gel with our own experience. Keep asking the questions, forcefully if you like, without being shy about it, because that’s what children do.
“Whoever does not receive the