Divorce = Adultery?

Here's a sermon I preached today at my field parish - it got lots of good feedback, so I thought I'd share it around.  Enjoy!

Mark 10:2-16

Some Pharisees came, and to test Jesus, they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”  He answered them, “What did Moses command you?”  They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.”  But Jesus said unto them, “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.’  Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter.  He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another she commits adultery.”

People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them.  But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.  Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  And he took them up into his arms, laid his hands on them and blessed them.

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Those Pharisees are up to something, aren't they?  The first line tells us all we need to know: “some Pharisees came, and to test Jesus…”  If you take a look around the book of Mark, the only other character trying to ‘test’ Jesus is Satan!  When the Pharisees show up, then, it’s a cue for us to pay attention.  So what’s their game?  Why would they choose divorce as a subject to get Jesus in trouble?

It’s certainly not because divorce is a hotly contested topic in the ancient world – as the Pharisees’ answer to Jesus shows, it was a widely accepted practice all the way back to the time of Moses.  In first century Judaism, the debate had largely come to center around just how permissible divorce could be: one rabbi held that it was only a last resort in extreme cases, while another school claimed a man could divorce his wife just for burning his dinner!  Either way though, whatever Jesus said would have been well within the thinking of the times – so it’s not theology they’re after.

I think that this year especially, when we’re looking at an upcoming presidential election, we’re all very aware of how much more weight is hung on every word of an influential voice.  By this time in his ministry, lots of people are paying attention to what Jesus has to say – whether they agree with him or not.  And in first century Palestine, divorce was about as political as you could get:  King Herod had recently divorced his wife and sent her back to her homeland just so he could marry his brother’s wife instead.  Her people were nonplussed, and a war ensued.  Herod, then, was not particularly enthusiastic to hear criticism of his marital practices – remember John the Baptist? He lost his head over this very matter.  Prophets and politics are often a poor mix.  So it looks like the Pharisees – far from trying to settle what for them is largely an issue of details – are trying to get Jesus to say something that might make the king mad.

I think they got a lot more than they bargained for.

Jesus turned their question right back on them.  “What does Moses say?”  They are only too ready to launch into their version: “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate…”  But Jesus doesn’t have certificates in mind.  He’s not interested in descending into the finer points of how we might excuse the various circumstances of our lives.  Jesus isn’t having a pastoral moment here.  He goes to the source.  Where the Pharisees start with “Moses allows”, Jesus comes back with “God made!”  The Pharisees want Jesus to play by their rules – they want him to say something that – were any one of them to say it, it wouldn’t matter a bit.  But if Jesus were to say something critical of divorce, that would get him into serious trouble.  Well Jesus is going to get in trouble alright, but that comes later.  What Jesus does is issue a blanket condemnation of divorce that leaves no man justified.  I imagine that many in the crowd were just as shaken by his words then as we are today.  Marriage has never been easy, and divorce is a reality that all of us live with to some degree.  So to boldly stand out and say: Divorce = Adultery?  It’s shocking.  Jesus just condemned half of our population as adulterers!

If we’re confused here – if we don’t understand God and find ourselves a little shaken by this, let me just point out that spiritually, that’s a pretty healthy place.  If God was always easy to be around, he wouldn’t have to begin most of his conversations with “Fear not.”  So let’s sit with this discomfort together for a bit, let’s examine where it comes from.  I’ve listened to so many sermons that try to defang what Jesus just did – to take the sting out of it and make it sit a little more comfortably – but I think that to do that is to miss the point.  It’s supposed to sting.  Jesus defines adultery pretty broadly in other places – it’s what happens when we look at another with lust in our eye.  And it’s not too many more verses after this that Jesus sends a rich man away with the words “sell all you have and give it to the poor.”  And just a few verses before our story, Jesus is regaling the disciples with the disturbing advice to cut off their feet and gouge out their eyes rather than continue to sin.  Jesus is trying to break through some defenses here, and they’re clearly some very strong ones.  I think if we’re trying to contextualize or explain away Jesus’ words to the point that they no longer convict us, we’re in the same camp as the Pharisees when they try to pin down the exact point of acceptability for their behavior.  It’s a kind of spiritual ethos of “How much can I get away with?” Or, perhaps more accurately, “How much effort is this whole faith thing going to take?”  There’s a reason that the icon for our faith is an instrument of capital punishment – it is only in dying that we find new life.

OK, so we’re all adulterers, or callous rich people storing up wealth at the expense of the poor, or at least people who would like to walk without crutches and maintain our 3-D vision.  What then?  What does Jesus have for us if he’s going to take us down so low?

By way of an answer, let me ask:  What are we so afraid of?  Nobody likes to have this pointed out, but yes – we all are sinners, the world is a broken place.  Even God’s son has a family tree riddled with adultery and cruelty and willful pride: heck, even Mary and Joseph came within a hair’s breadth of splitting up themselves! I don’t think anyone in this room who has had their lives rocked by divorce would think to themselves “hey, this must have been what God had in mind when the world was made!”  It’s not; we’re missing the mark – that’s the definition of sin after all: missing the mark.  It’s no secret when we look around us that we’re not really living in the paradise that God intends for the world to be, and this is true particularly with the institution of marriage.  The church teaches that marriage is one of the few things we have left from before the fall – Adam and Eve were married in the garden before they were cast out.  Traditionally, in fact, the marriage ceremony of the church is considered not so much a sacrament as a blessing and affirmation of something that God has brought about.  Marriage is something that is designed into the very fabric of creation: when two people come together in such a way that they multiply love and demonstrate steadfast commitment and mutual blessing, they are expressing a part of the very character of God.  Even if the fall had never happened, we would still have marriage – the church, however, would be unnecessary!  Our religious practices, our prayers and fasting and pilgrimage, serve to recreate for us a space where we can remember that the world is created for good. We come to this place to remind ourselves every week that God is working – in more ways than we can possibly imagine – to redeem the world, to bring into being a world of abundant blessing and love that we were all created for.  So when Jesus gives his answer to the Pharisees, he reminds us all that divorce is part of the brokenness of our world.  To bring questions about excusing it or managing it well to our faith is to miss the point.  He doesn’t want the Pharisees to ask ‘is it legal to divorce?’ so much as ‘how do we have a great marriage?’  Our faith is not about what we can get away with as much as what we’re striving toward.  We’re not there yet, so we stick together and keep plugging on.

We’re sinners.  Does that mean God doesn’t like us?  The Pharisees were living in a time when Rome’s brutish power was grinding their beloved nation into a land of poverty and suffering.  The Pharisees saw this as God’s punishment – clearly God is angry with Israel and using Rome to mete out his discipline.  So what should we do?  Get back in line of course!  Their big goal in life was to keep the law in an effort to bring back God’s favor and restore Israel to its former glory.  If we’re sinners, doesn’t that mean that God is angry? I think that more likely it means we’re angry with ourselves, and we project that back onto God.  Think about it: who do you suppose Jesus had dinner with that night?  I’d put my money on tax collectors and sinners.  If he’s angry about their behavior, he sure seems to have an amiable way of expressing it.

Jesus did get pretty angry in our story today, though: people were bringing children to be blessed, and the disciples were turning them away.  Jesus got indignant when he saw this – because it hasn’t been all that long ago – in the previous chapter of the story – that Jesus picked up a child and told his disciples “anyone who welcomes a child, welcomes me”, and here they are turning children away.  I think what Jesus did next is the object lesson for all of us afraid of an angry God: he said “this is how you enter the kingdom of God:” and he picked up a child, embraced her, and blessed her.  That is our God.