Preached at Gentle Spirit Christian Church, Atlanta, Ga.
Reading: Mark 10:2-16
Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”
“What did Moses command you?” he replied.
They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.”
“It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied. “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this. He answered, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.”
People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them. (Mark 10:2-16 NIV)
From there he went to the area of Judea across the Jordan. A crowd of people, as was so often the case, went along, and he, as he so often did, taught them. Pharisees came up, intending to give him a hard time. They asked, “Is it legal for a man to divorce his wife?”
Jesus said, “What did Moses command?”
They answered, “Moses gave permission to fill out a certificate of dismissal and divorce her.”
Jesus said, “Moses wrote this command only as a concession to your hardhearted ways. In the original creation, God made male and female to be together. Because of this, a man leaves father and mother, and in marriage he becomes one flesh with a woman—no longer two individuals, but forming a new unity. Because God created this organic union of the two sexes, no one should desecrate his art by cutting them apart.”
When they were back home, the disciples brought it up again. Jesus gave it to them straight: “A man who divorces his wife so he can marry someone else commits adultery against her. And a woman who divorces her husband so she can marry someone else commits adultery.”
The people brought children to Jesus, hoping he might touch them. The disciples shooed them off. But Jesus was irate and let them know it: “Don’t push these children away. Don’t ever get between them and me. These children are at the very center of life in the kingdom. Mark this: Unless you accept God’s kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you’ll never get in.” Then, gathering the children up in his arms, he laid his hands of blessing on them. (Mark 10:2-16 MSG)
Once again we have a scene where the Pharisees are testing Jesus. And it’s a challenging one to contemplate as a modern person, because it seems to convey that God disapproves of divorce — which is something a lot of people today, Christian and otherwise, still do pretty regularly.
But what’s really going on here?
For starters, about seven chapters earlier, Jesus has already thrown cold water on the accepted notion of family.
He was surrounded by the crowd when he was given the message, “Your mother and brothers and sisters are outside looking for you.”
Jesus responded, “Who do you think are my mother and brothers?” Looking around, taking in everyone seated around him, he said, “Right here, right in front of you — my mother and my brothers. Obedience is thicker than blood. The person who obeys God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” (Mark 3:32-35)
With this, he’s already issued yet another one of his challenges to the accepted order of things. So now the Pharisees are pressure-testing that by posing a question designed to test his understanding of Mosaic law, as expressed in Deuteronomy.
If a man marries a woman and then it happens that he no longer likes her because he has found something wrong with her, he may give her divorce papers, put them in her hand, and send her off. After she leaves, if she becomes another man’s wife and he also comes to hate her and this second husband also gives her divorce papers, puts them in her hand, and sends her off, or if he should die, then the first husband who divorced her can’t marry her again. She has made herself ritually unclean, and her remarriage would be an abomination in the Presence of God and defile the land with sin, this land that God, your God, is giving you as an inheritance. (Deuteronomy 24:1-4)
This is the scripture — and the resulting understanding of the law — that the Pharisees think they’re drawing Jesus back to when they ask him whether divorce is legal. But here we hear him doing them one better and goes beyond Deuteronomy — all the way to Creation itself, in referring to God’s joining of a man and woman who leave their families of birth and cleave to each other.
# # #
Later, when he’s alone with the disciples and they bring up the question again, Jesus revisits the idea of divorce as adultery — but by bringing the woman’s perspective into the equation. In doing this, he’s addressing the decidedly un-feminist perspective expressed in Deuteronomy where the prohibition against remarriage is expressed solely in terms of the twice-married wife having defiled herself.
It’s a bit of a callback to his initial retort to the Pharisees earlier in the day, where he replied to their question about divorce and the law by referencing the certificate of divorce that Mosaic law permits a man to issue to his wife. Because in that moment he had gone on to say, “Moses wrote this command only as a concession to your hardhearted ways.”
Those hardhearted ways being that without such a certificate, a woman in that societal context could appear not to be part of a household — in other words, an outcast. She’s already left her parents’ household, and without a divorce certificate it’s not clear why she’s not part of any household. Add a child to the mix, and the situation is magnified.
So the divorce certificate is for her protection, and here we have Jesus intimating that Moses had to write that into the law because without it, men couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing.
With the disciples he’s also bringing that original notion of adultery into the picture — but by saying that a spouse who divorces in order to remarry is committing adultery.
It’s the timing that makes the divorce sinful. Because if you’re divorcing your current spouse because you’ve already got your eye on another, are you not in denial of “God’s art,” as Jesus expresses in today’s Gospel reading?
If our God is a God of love, then does it not make sense that God’s art is how that love can join two people together? And is this not yet another example of how God does God’s best work through our hearts? Which all goes sideways when we let our heads get in the way.
But are our heads getting in the way if that spouse is abusive? Of course not. Are our heads getting in the way if staying with that person exposes us to real risk? No way. In fact, our love of another can sometimes obscure our own self-love to such an extent that if our heads can help us sort it out, then that’s God’s will too. Because our self-love is also a gift from God.
So I don’t take this passage to mean you can’t ever get divorced — or even that you can’t ever get remarried. I think it’s about how we’re called to be honest with ourselves — and with those in our midst, and ultimately with God — about our true motivations.
I’m bringing a similar lens to the passage in Deuteronomy. If you’re remarrying someone you were already married to, why did you divorce them in the first place?
Again, I take the fundamental calling here to be honesty. Because dishonesty is hardhearted; it’s done in defiance of love. Honesty is based on and builds trust, and trust is related to love: Sometimes we trust because we love, and often our love grows because we trust.
If marriage is a covenant, that trust is what holds it together. No law can do better than that. A relationship between two people is about intimacy, and intimacy is fundamentally about sharing. And that sharing is at its best when there’s trust.
There’s a scene in the movie “Good Will Hunting” that I love for how it expresses in a grounded and lighthearted way what that can look like. The main character, Will, is in a session with his therapist Sean, who has just shared with Will that his wife used to fart on him in her sleep.
Sean : [in Sean’s office] One night it was so loud, it woke the dog up.
[BOTH LAUGHING]
Sean : She woke up and gone, like, “Was that you ?” I said, “Yeah.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her. Oh, God.
Will : She woke herself up ?
[LAUGHING]
Sean : Yes. Oh, Christ. But, Will, she’s been dead two years and that’s the s**t I remember. It’s wonderful stuff, you know ? Little things like that. Yeah, but those are the things I miss the most. Those little idiosyncrasies that only I knew about. That’s what made her my wife. Boy, and she had the goods on me too. She knew all my little peccadillos. People call these things “imperfections,” but they’re not. That’s the good stuff. And then we get to choose who we let into our weird little worlds. You’re not perfect, sport. And let me save you the suspense. This girl you met, she isn’t perfect either. But the question is whether or not you’re perfect for each other. That’s the whole deal. That’s what intimacy is all about.
# # #
When we marry someone, we’re entering into a covenant. It’s a covenant that says we’re going to let our hearts lead the way, and that we’re going to keep our heads from getting in the way. And because of our relationship with God, this should be second nature.
But it’s work. It’s work because we’re not marrying God, we’re marrying another imperfect human being. Entering into and honoring that covenant is what sanctifies it. Not whatever our society seems to think at the time is the proper definition of marriage.
After all, we’ve just seen how in Jesus’ time, marriage was an intensely patriarchal institution — and this is without even getting into all the ways that marriage for centuries could be about anything but love — how it could be anything but sanctified in all the ways I’ve just said.
And here we are as LGBTQ+ people, fresh from a years-long culture war where suddenly the “sanctity” of marriage was what we were accused of threatening as we demanded our equality in this still-important societal institution. “Sanctity,” of course, being code for “heterosexuality.”
And what we’ve proven in the years since marriage equality began its march across the globe is that we’re leading with our hearts — and that our covenants are no less deep than those of anyone else. We’ve also shown that we can get divorced, which I suppose is its own equality.
With our growing equality, with every passing day, society is seeing more and more that we’re really not that different. We can be just as wonderful, boring, petty, dishonest, loving and trusting as the next person.
# # #
So what does this mean for all the new ways that people are forming romantic relationships? How long will it be before our society is asked to confront, for instance, the question of polyamory and whether it should have a legal status equal to marriage?
And what do we think is God’s perspective on this? Also, how would Jesus have answered this question? I think he already has.
I think if you believe in a God for whom time and space don’t work the same way as they do for you and me, then you can trust that we already have all the answers we need — and if we can’t quite hear how God is calling us to love and trust and understand, that’s when it’s time to pray.
As for me, I take inspiration from these words of Jesus:
Don’t suppose for a minute that I have come to demolish the Scriptures — either God’s Law or the Prophets. I’m not here to demolish but to complete. I am going to put it all together, pull it all together in a vast panorama. God’s Law is more real and lasting than the stars in the sky and the ground at your feet. Long after stars burn out and earth wears out, God’s Law will be alive and working. (Matthew 5:17-18)
An adult convert to Christianity who somehow managed to grow up largely unchurched in the South but was always a spiritual seeker, Lance Helms (he/him) was baptized at age 28 and since 2006 has been a member of Gentle Spirit Christian Church of Atlanta.