Journey's Weekly Homilies

27th Sunday Ordinary Time
10/5/03 
Homily:  Nancy

Gen. 2:18-24
Heb 2:9-11
Mark 10:2-16

Divorce is a painful subject.  It's painful for two people who face the ending of a joined truth that they entered into.  It's painful for all who surround the history of that joined truth.  It's painful for any who are dependent on, or in need of, one of the separated people (as children are, for instance). There is agony and ecstasy in today's passage of scripture for those of us who have faced divorce.  There's ecstasy in the idealistic description of two people becoming one.  There's agony in the truth you face when you can no longer live with the father of your children.  I know this from first hand experience.

It is precisely because divorce is so painful that we who are church need to have something to say.  It is not enough to just avoid the topic, trying to escape our guilt or whatever fear and baggage we carry.  All of us who have faced divorce and carry the woundedness that it always brings…all of us are called to stand in our communities of faith and claim our failures and our stories and allow ourselves to be called to account. 

For all, or most, of our adult lives, or at least from my conscious faith life, we've been taking this passage from scripture literally.  As Robin reminded us last week, there's a lot of other scripture that we say should NOT be taken literally, but this confrontative passage seems to be one that we cannot quite re-interpret.  It is SO clear, so blatant, so unequivocal in its statement.  No matter how we read it, it seems like that Christians just cannot justify divorce, and especially re-marriage after divorce.

It's 2003, and for many decades now, we have (as a people) been making great progress in understanding the anthropological, sociological, and political realities of the actual times of Jesus of Nazareth.  WE KNOW, now, the context of this scripture, and the people who are speaking in this story.  WE KNOW that we've been missing Jesus' WHOLE POINT, all our lives.  We owe it to ourselves and to our faith life to re-examine the power of the literal words and see the story in a big picture of truth.

Unfortunately, this new effort on our part will NOT make divorce OK, or take away the life-long struggle with keeping the promises we make.  To re-examine and come to new understanding of this scripture will NOT mean that our vows to love another person "as long as we live" will be taken away.  A vow is still a vow.  But…we are called to claim the mercy brought from our God by Jesus, a mercy that is NOT small, but outrageously generous…a mercy generous enough to fully encompass whatever has brought two people to a divorce decision.  The truth is that the words of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, are so boundless that they call us to account and THEN gather us all in under that blanket of mercy and forgiveness.  (Lyle told me that he sees divorce for some people as the regaining of a life worth living.  AND, he said, that since he knows how fulfilling and complete one feels in a harmonious relationship, he cannot believe that Jesus would deny a divorced person the right to seek such a life-giving relationship.)

So…let's get down to the work of understanding this "Word of our God."  The story that we hear today is the beginning of what we are asked to deal with for the next couple of weeks.  This chapter 10 of Mark is all about "Social Power and the Family."  One commentator (Meyers) headlines the section on this material as "The Roots of Violence."  He even calls this passage "a critique of patriarchy."  Our brother, Jesus, was a radical prophet, as we know.  He looked into the social system of this time and said that the God he knew would not rejoice in the social violence they had made into law.  Jesus recognizes that the injustice starts with the ways that power is abused within families, and THAT is where liberation must begin.  He sees a reordering of power between husband and wife, children and parents.  He names the wrong and brings the new law of love into the picture.  Peace in the world will begin with peace in our homes.

Today we hear the Pharisees wanting to know if it is lawful for a husband to divorce his wife. Jesus answers with a  question:  "What does Moses say?"  Jesus does NOT say that Moses was wrong.  Jesus says that Moses' law, which allows the man to divorce the woman reveals the ways of humankind, the hardness of the human heart.  The words in the text literally mean, "a heart dried up."  That's what divorce, and all that leads to divorce, does to us: it dries up our hearts.  Jesus underscores the notion that divorce proceeds from the selfish ways of humankind, a way that is up to its neck in patriarchy and power struggle.  Jesus says that God's way, from the beginning, was the creation of people as equals.  (I ask those of you who are married to a person of the same gender to forgive all of this prejudiced language.  I believe the principles apply, no matter the gender, but in our scripture we are stuck with the male/female imagery only, clearly because of history and because of the patriarchical world in which they lived.)

Jesus refuses to enlist in the legal debate over the divorce statute itself.  Instead he questions the way in which the Pharisees apply their judgment of what is right and wrong.   Jesus quotes fro the book of Genesis, which they all know by heart.  He reminds them about God's beginning plan.  Jesus insists, God did not intend patriarchy but created persons as male and female (equal) human beings.  It is not woman who is given in the power of man…but it is man who shall sever connections with his own patriarchal family and 'the two persons shall become one'…"

The Genesis passage is best translated as "the two persons enter into a common human life and social relationship because they are created as equals."   If Jesus had entered into a legalistic argument with them, and tried to overturn the Mosaic law, he would have reduced the whole question to their level of understanding, and they all could have stayed in their comfort zones.  Instead, Jesus drops the term for divorce (apoluse) in favor of a different term meaning "to separate" (chorizeto).  Jesus is therefore protesting the patriarchal society.  He is saying that no man owns a woman like property.  He is crying out against the way in which patriarchal practice drives a wedge into, and divides and destroys, the unity and  equality originally intended by the marriage covenant.  When you understand it in this TRUE sense, the famous phrase rightly belongs in the marriage liturgy: "What God has joined together, let no human being divide."

Suddenly, in the face of this, there is much more at stake than the Pharisees had imagined.  They asked a testing question, and they are tested in their testing.  Jesus confronts them with the primal reality of human createdness, confronts them with God's original intention in creation of male and females as mutual and equal creatures.  Here, in marriage, is the sign of the bondedness of humankind.  Human beings are made to cleave to each other.  God joins people together as mutually dependent partners in humanity.  "What therefore God joins, humans and their ways are not to put asunder."  This does not remove the pain from my divorce.  But insofar as I am able to forgive both myself and my former husband, I build a bridge in my human spirit.  Love can cross that bridge. 

The love that crosses that new bridge within us becomes the balm of healing for all the dividedness of our human family, of our own personal families, of our church family.  The healing balm of forgiveness eases some of the pain of our  "parched hearts."   Our experience, our new understanding, is about the limitations of our all too human flesh, the gnawing sorrow that we are not able to be what we hoped, or to create what we promised.  But we will remember that all things are possible with God.  As a community, we stand together under the experience of brokenness and need, whether its in the form of divorce or some other way.  We all fail one another, we all are faithless, we are all much less than we desired.  We are a company of hearts that are sometimes dried up, unable to pump the life-blood of grace and hope.  But in community, as sisters and brothers, we remind ourselves that all things are possible with God.

We may see ourselves as unworthy to bring ourselves to our brother Jesus, so that his healing hands might touch and bless us.  But Jesus, in our story today, teaches us what we can do.  Turning aside from the Pharisees, Jesus blesses the children.  The children are the powerless, the least among people, the ones without means to pay or secure their own passage.  The children are welcomed into Jesus arms.  WE who are powerless, the people whose broken lives are revealed in the light of these very hard "Words" from our God, we are like the children.  We who stand under the experience of our own brokenness, feel our hearts dried up.  We can ask Jesus, our brother,  to take us  into and under the waters of life and death and bless us.

For our Christ does not put away humankind.  Rather, he joins us, cleaving to us as he wants us to cleave to one another.  The balm of hope exists in our commitment to community.  We stand at this table of equality, holding each other up no matter how divorced from hope we may have been in the past. We, here, will be the face of God to one another, teaching each other to forgive, helping each other re-build, in our hardened hearts, the bridge for love to cross over.