A Sermon for 19th Sunday after Pentecost
Preached on October 4 at Our Savior's Lutheran Church
Mark 10:2-16
Divorce. Doesn’t that sound like the topic of a great sermon? I’ll admit it, I was tempted to avoid this Gospel reading and preach, instead, on Psalm 8 about God’s splendid creation and perhaps even talk about super-moon lunar eclipse we had last Sunday and how that show’s God’s handiwork.
I mean, why would I want to talk about divorce? I don’t think there is a person here whose life hasn’t been affected by divorce—whether it is your own divorce or that of your parents, children, siblings, or friends. The possibility that I could offend you with whatever I say about divorce is strong.
However, challenges are good and this text from Mark is, indeed, challenging. I think it is a good idea to wrestle with texts that are hard to understand or hard to accept or both.The hope is that perhaps we’ll find some new, helpful insight. It takes more more effort but then isn’t the possibility of enriching our faith worth it?
In today’s text Jesus is responding to another trap laid by the religious authorities. As we struggle with Jesus' surprisingly hard words about divorce and remarriage, let's keep in mind the context. In the passage right before it (Mark 9:38-50) Jesus said we should be cutting off our hand or foot, or tearing out our eye, if it makes us "stumble." And in the passage right after it, the rich man asks Jesus if he’s done everything necessary to inherit the kingdom of God and Jesus shocks him by telling him to sell everything he’s got and give it to the poor. I mean, come on! Jesus is talking really tough in this section of Mark. Who can be saved?
Now the crowds have gathered and the religious leaders try to set Jesus up with a trick question. His answer, one way or the other, is going to offend someone. That’s why it’s a set up. Although it seems that divorce itself was a given, there were teachers who allowed it under more conditions than others did. We have to go back to Deuteronomy 24:1-4 to understand where the Pharisees are coming from when they ask Jesus whether it's lawful for a man to divorce his wife. When he asks them what Moses said, he’s asking them to cite the law. They get this so they quote from Deuteronomy. But why would they ask Jesus if they already know what the law says and can quote it? It seems that they’re looking for Jesus’ interpretation of the Law and isn’t interpretation the whole thing? And the very thing that has people arguing about religion back then as we do today. How do we interpret scripture?
If we read the Deuteronomy text, we're immediately struck by the difference between the patriarchal culture of the ancient Middle East and the one we live in today, where women are no longer considered property and rarely if ever referred to as “defiled" and it's not acceptable for a man simply to get rid of a wife if he finds something objectionable about her (Deuteronomy 24:1-2). That seems pretty unfair, doesn’t it? The man could divorce his wife for any reason at all. “Honey, the dinner doesn’t taste good. Let’s divorce!” Can you imagine that kind of culture?
Jesus acknowledges that the Mosaic Law permitted divorce, but only because of the "hardness of heart" of the people. But he then puts Scripture in conversation with Scripture, holding up the ideal of God's intention for partnership as expressed in Genesis—two people in faithful, lifelong, intimate relationship that should not be severed.
In this patriarchal Jewish society where husbands had all the power and they alone had the prerogative of divorcing their wives, a prohibition of divorce, it seems, is about safeguarding the disadvantaged person. Marriages were business deals. It was never about choosing a spouse based on romance like modern marriages. No, marriages then were about making a political and financial affiliation. So if a man were to find a better deal later on, like a women with bigger tracks of land, he could just divorce the first wife and move on to the next. But what of the first wife? She would be left out in the cold with no opportunity to make her own living and little chance of remarriage since she’d been defiled. It was practically like leaving her for dead.
Now that was legal according to Jewish law at the time but Jesus brings a higher consideration. What about the vulnerable one? Divorce is not an abstract action—real people are hurt.
Marriage today and marriage in ancient society can hardly be compared because they are so different. But we still have the same word to describe when the marriage ends: divorce. So it is tempting to take this teaching of Jesus at face value and say that Jesus prohibits divorce. All divorce. Now and evermore. It’s clear because you can quote this verse from the Gospel. So if you are in a second or third marriage, you are committing adultery and should be shamed by the church. And this has been done for a long time.
There is often a lot of pain after a divorce. I’ve seen it and I’m sure you have too. So the church heaping more stigma onto the divorced person doesn’t seem to be consistent with Jesus’ loving message of grace, does it?
If Jesus is so concerned about the vulnerable people and how we should not victimize them, then would he really endorse the shaming of people whose marriages have ended for one reason or another? And wouldn’t he be pleased, for example, if a victim of domestic abuse got out of a destructive relationship for her own safety? And wouldn’t he be happy for the person who had languished in a loveless marriage to have found love the second time around? All good questions to explore in a Bible study. A little more difficult to preach.
With biblical interpretation we tend to like to cherry pick which teachings we want to uphold literally and which ones we don’t. As I mentioned, this passage about divorce falls between the one about cutting off your limbs to prevent sin and giving away every single thing you have to follow Jesus. So unless you’ve done all of those things properly, you probably don’t have any business judging someone who has divorced.
But with all these impossibly hard demands Jesus brings forth, what’s a person to do? I guess we’ll have to recognize we cannot fulfill the law’s demands on our own and we’ll have to reach out for the help of grace. God alone can save us. It is passages like these that help us get the humility to accept such grace.
Which leads us to the second part of this passage. At first, it may seem disconnected from the first, when Jesus once again uses children as an illustration of how to receive the reign of God. We remember that only a few verses earlier Jesus urged his disciples to become the servant of all, and to receive even little children, who had no standing in the world, as they would receive him (Mark 9:36-37).
In this week's story, we can imagine parents bringing their children for a blessing. Like women, children in this society did not have power or status but clearly these parents love their children and want them blessed anyway. Since kids were involved, there may have been a lot of hullabaloo
like recess. Maybe that was grating on the disciples nerves or maybe they were just grumpy after all that talk about divorce. For whatever reason, they spoke sternly to the kids. That's when Jesus enlightens them once more. It seems like they needed that a lot. Here the "lowly" children receive God's reign as the unearned, "pure gift" of God's grace, while grown-ups don’t seem to get it so easily.
So what’s my point? I don’t really know if I know, other than I’ve tackled a really tricky text in a sermon and that it probably brings up more questions than answers. There is a lot going on in this text. Among other things, it seems Jesus was trying to help us understand our need to care for the vulnerable. And he was trying to help us see ourselves as vulnerable—like children—in need of God’s unconditional love and grace. And I hope that my treatment of this passage has helped you see how important but also how difficult biblical interpretation can be.
I always laugh at the book of Jonah because it ends so abruptly. Do you know what the last line of that book is? “And also many cattle.” Since I can’t quite find the exact words to end this sermon, I will triumphantly end it like Jonah. “And also many cattle.” Amen.
