Trinity 18
Sermon preached by the Revd Anna Matthews
‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.’
Are we all feeling suitably uncomfortable? Every once in a while Jesus says something so radical that we are shocked out of our collusion with the idea that Christianity is there to make us feel good. Sell all that you have and give the money to the poor. Let the dead bury their own dead. Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. And today, this stark teaching on divorce.
It’s uncomfortable because most of us have some experience of divorce. Perhaps our own. Perhaps that of our parents or children, or close friends or family members. We know that it’s a complicated, messy subject, that it can leave a trail of hurt and devastation in its wake; that sometimes it can bring freedom and new life; that there is more to be said than a simple denunciation.
The Pharisees knew this. They ask Jesus a question to test him, and to bring this subject up is a deliberate attempt to trap him into saying something dangerous to his own safety. Jesus has travelled into the region of Judea beyond the Jordan, which was ruled over by Herod Antipas, who not long before had had John the Baptist beheaded. And the reason for Herod’s dislike of John? John had spoken up against Herod marrying Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife. ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife’ is not an innocent question, but an attempt to secure for Jesus the same fate as John.
Divorce was quite common in both Jewish and Roman society. Among the rabbis there was a dispute about when it was permitted – Deuteronomy chapter 24 permits a man to divorce his wife, but doesn’t specify the grounds. Rabbi Shammai limited divorce to situations of adultery, whereas among the school of Rabbi Hillel a man could divorce his wife for something as minor as burning the dinner. And it was only men who could initiate divorce: the woman had no rights here, being seen instead as property to be disposed of. There was no recognition within the law at all for a situation where a man committed adultery. A man could commit adultery against another man by sleeping with his wife (because she is his property). And a woman could commit adultery by being unfaithful to her husband, but there was no recognition of a situation in which a husband is unfaithful to his wife. All this, of course, left women in a very vulnerable position, with no financial independence or security of their own.
So one of the things Jesus is doing in his response to the Pharisees is putting men and women on an equal footing. ‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.’ For the first time in Jewish teaching, men are put under the same obligation as women to marital fidelity. You can’t just walk away from your wife if she’s a terrible cook, or because you’ve got bored, or because you’ve found someone else more attractive.
To be sure, it’s an equality in a rather exacting standard, but this develops Jesus’ point. The Pharisees knew that divorce was permitted under the law. But Jesus takes them back not to Moses but to Genesis. In creation, the union of man and woman in one flesh was bound up with the gift of procreation. Here, humanity, made in the image of God, was given a way of sharing in the gift of creation as a free outpouring of divine love through the fruit of mutual human love bringing forth children.
This, says Jesus, is one of God’s purposes in marriage – and the church has understood it as one of the goods of marriage throughout its history, all the while recognising that not all marriages can or will bring forth children. And they are no less marriages for that.
The Pharisees have asked Jesus what’s permitted. He responds with what’s commanded. And Moses, he says, allows divorce ‘because of your hardness of heart’. In other words, divorce is an accommodation to human weakness and fallibility. What is given as a good gift of God is also a hard gift which we can’t and don’t always live up to. Moses’ permitting of divorce is not a recognition that divorce is a good thing in and of itself, but a way of containing the fallout from marriages that have gone wrong.
Where does that leave us? In creation, Jesus talks of God joining together a couple than no one can put asunder. In the time after creation, which is also the time after the fall, Moses recognises that marriages fail. And we live in yet another time, not simply in terms of historical remove from Moses but in the time of the new creation which Jesus’ death and resurrection opens up.
This is what frames Jesus’ ethical teaching. It’s the kingdom that is breaking into the world in him, a kingdom in which we are made participants, and which gives shape to our living and loving. For Jesus, this is a kingdom that goes beyond our conventional understandings of marriage and family life – he talks with approval of those who make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom, and himself lived a celibate life. He remakes ties of kinship by recognising as family not those to whom he is related by blood but those who hear the word of God and do it. He teaches that in heaven we neither marry nor are given in marriage.
We do not yet inhabit the kingdom, though its life is open to us, and the church’s life is supposed to be a sign and foretaste of it – a glimpse of what the kingdom looks like. We are in the between time – the time between Christ’s resurrection and the final consummation of all things in his kingdom. And that means we look backwards and forwards to know how we are to live. We acknowledge the good gifts of God in creation, among which we recognise marriage. The permanent, faithful, stable union of two partners within marriage we see as a gift of grace, itself a sign of God’s love for his people. We also recognise that sometimes marriages go wrong – as the bible itself does: Jesus in Matthew and St Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians both already admit exceptions to the stark teaching of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel we’ve heard today. And we recognise that what flows from Jesus’ resurrection and will reach its fulfilment in the kingdom is God’s new creation. For some that will mean new life is breathed into a relationship that has become tired and moribund: resurrection within marriage. For some it will mean that the hurts and wounds of a relationship gone wrong are carried up by Jesus onto the cross and into heaven where they are healed and transfigured, opening up a new life beyond the ruins of the old. For some it will lead to the turning away from those habits that even within marriage deny its good – from selfishness or possessiveness or infidelity. For some it will mean recognising fault for hurts done and vows broken, yet finding that Christ’s forgiveness stirs up new life. For some it will lead out of a marriage that is toxic or abusive because that itself denies the goodness of God’s gift, and new life comes from being freed from it.
The church is a sign of the kingdom when it makes room for all this – for the equality Jesus teaches between men and women; for marriage as a gift of God; for new life to take shape in all our varied lives, whether single or happily married, divorced or unhappily married, widowed or wanting to be married, or in a relationship that the church has not yet learnt officially to bless though God’s blessing is evident in it. Is it a bit messy? Yes. But we worship a Saviour who comes into our muddle and draws close to us in it, who eats with all sorts and conditions of people, and who today invites us all, together, to come to his table to eat the bread of the kingdom and to be renewed as a sign of his new creation.