Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost: October 6, 2024

The Rev. Nat Johnson

Job 1:1; 2:1-10 | Psalm 26 | Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12 | Mark 10:2-16 (Track 1)

I must admit that the gospel reading today hits too close to home for me. To say that it has been a struggle to write a sermon this week is an understatement. Jesus’ words cut deep, rub salt in an open wound – they feel like a sucker punch to the gut. But statistics indicate that over 50% of marriages in the United States end in divorce, and so I suspect I’m not the only one who feels the weight of this passage. When we are confronted with Jesus’ difficult sayings, the temptation is always to figure out a way to soften the blow, to remove the sharp edges of his words and make them easier to swallow.

For this particular passage, we might work hard to name the reality of marriage in Jesus’ day and how it differed from what it is today. Jesus spoke these words in a context in which women had little autonomy, when they were regarded as the property of their fathers or husbands. Marriage was about the transfer of property and the creation of economic security through strategic alliance. To divorce a woman would leave her bereft of the social and financial means of support. Contemporary interpreters are quick to point out that in this passage, Jesus is concerned about the well-being of the vulnerable woman, that he turns the patriarchal assumptions about male privilege on its head and challenges the proof-texting loopholes of the Mosaic law that leave women without support and protection.

The reality of marriage today, particularly in our context, is much different. People don’t tend to get married for the same reasons. In our faith tradition, our theology of marriage has evolved from contractual to covenantal. At the heart of our understanding of marriage is the belief that God intends it to be for mutual joy, for the help and comfort given to one another in times of prosperity and times of adversity. And, if it’s God’s will, to have children. We see marriage as one – and only one – of the ways to experience God’s grace and fidelity, to receive a taste of the coming banquet when God will gather all of God’s people in the new creation. In our tradition, the covenant of marriage is egalitarian, mutual, and based on love.

In naming these differences, we may be tempted to suggest that Jesus’ words have no bearing on marriages in our present context. But I wonder if this, too, isn’t just another attempt to soften the blow of Jesus’ words. I wonder if it isn’t just another attempt – much like the Pharisees in our lesson – to find a loophole to justify our own decisions or experiences. It seems to me that there is no easy way to set this passage aside, no easy way to get around the harshness of Jesus’ words, no easy way to lighten the weight of their burden. And so, we are called this morning to wrestle faithfully with the difficult words Jesus speaks.

There are some important clues in the text that will aid us in this endeavor. First, it is important to note that Mark tells us the religious leaders do not come to Jesus to ask an innocent question – they have come to test him. In Jesus’ day, as in our own, divorce was common. Their question was not really about the permissibility of divorce in general, but about the proper circumstances that would make divorce acceptable. Two primary schools of thought existed in Judaism – the more conservative suggested that only sexual impropriety was grounds for dismissing one’s wife, and the more liberal suggested that a man had the inalienable right to dismiss his wife for any reason of displeasure. In asking Jesus this question, the Pharisees were attempting to pit him against the prevailing traditions and discredit his authority and standing with the people among whom he’d been ministering.

The Pharisees stand as a warning to us today – a warning to guard our hearts from hardening, to protect our hearts from the traps of legalism. They stand as a warning against posturing in self-righteousness and judgment. Each of us, at some point in our lives, has likely fallen into this trap, allowed our interpretations of what’s right and what’s wrong to trump our compassion. Yes, it is true that what we believe about God’s law, how we interpret God’s law, is important. There is a morality wrapped up in our beliefs that require conviction and fidelity, but when we become so focused on the rigid application of such moralizing, we fall into the same pattern of behavior that the Pharisees did in our story, seeking only to find the loopholes that protect our rights and privileges and autonomy.

Second, we must also note that Jesus pivots and turns their attention away from the question of the legality and permissibility of divorce. When he asks them, what Moses said, they respond by pointing out that the great prophet had written a law that permitted a man to divorce his wife – they quote a verse found in the book of Deuteronomy but Jesus challenges them by suggesting the law was written as a concession for a practice already happening. Again, the law that they cited was about protecting the vulnerable rather than protecting the privilege of the man. In their hardness of heart, they ignored the spirit of the law in order to cling to its loopholes. Jesus directs their attention to the beginning, to the way their tradition understood marriage as embedded in God’s intention for creation. This is, by all accounts, about God’s will, not about God’s law.

We would do well to name here that it is possible that Jesus’ appeal to the creation story is not simply to lift up an idealized model of marriage. At the heart of Genesis 2 is the proclamation that to be human is to be in relationship. The only time in either creation account that God is said to name something not good is for the human to be alone. Isolation, aloneness, is not part of God’s intention for the human race. Relationship is core to what it means to be human. For some, relationship ends up taking the shape of marriage, for others, it takes the shape of intentional community. Over and over in the gospels we witness Jesus restoring people to community and relationship, liberating them from marginalization and isolation. When Jesus points back to the beginning in his answer to the Pharisees, he is naming the relational nature of human beings and exposing that the hardness of heart they suffer from tears asunder what God has joined in creation.

Third, we must also recognize that the passage we’re given this morning does not end at verse 12 with Jesus’ prohibition against divorce. Instead, it ends with Jesus’ invitation to embrace the most vulnerable, to receive the blessing of the coming kingdom as little children. It is to these that the kingdom of heaven belongs, Jesus tells his disciples.

Learning to receive the blessing of the coming kingdom can be difficult for us. Jesus’ invitation is not about letting go of the complexities of our faith or of our lives in order to become more simple-minded and carefree. Jesus’ invitation is about learning to yearn for the blessing that only he can offer us; it is about learning how to trust in his fidelity and steadfast love, and to open ourselves to his embrace.

I don’t know that any of this solves the problems of our gospel reading today or relieves the discomfort that many of us feel. But perhaps that’s the point, perhaps that’s not what Jesus is asking us to do. For those of us who have been wounded by divorce, for those of us who – either directly or indirectly – know about the pain and the messiness of broken relationships, perhaps this last point is the invitation. In the gospel according to Mark, the laying on of hands is always a gesture of healing, and so when he tells us that Jesus took the little children in his arms, touched them, and blessed them, I see in this action an invitation to healing. Here is Jesus’ desire for us, here is Jesus’ compassion and care – he bids us to come to him, to receive from him a healing touch, to find restoration and wholeness. Whatever brokenness you carry with you today, Jesus wants to offer you his hand.