Like a Child
Genesis 2:18-24; Psalm 8; Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16.
“The gospel of the Lord.” The gospel, the good news, of Jesus. It is difficult for many of us to hear these words of Jesus we read today as good news. There are many of us here in worship this morning who have been divorced, and I think it’s safe to say that all of us know and love people, in our families and in our lives, who have been divorced – and it’s easy to hear these words as judgment. And they’ve often been preached as judgment and condemnation. But I believe that there is good news here, good news for all of us, even and perhaps especially for people who have experienced divorce. Let me tell you why.
So first, let’s look at how this passage begins. Some Pharisees came to Jesus, and to test him they asked about the lawfulness of divorce. There are any number of passages where people pose questions to Jesus, not because they want to hear his answer, not because they want a genuine conversation where we are interested in learning one another’s thoughts and feelings, but as a test. To provoke Jesus into saying something that will get him in trouble, one way or another. And Jesus never directly answers these questions posed to him in bad faith. Rather, he consistently dodges the question by reframing it – by revealing the flawed assumptions behind the question.
Why do the Pharisees think Jesus will be tripped up by answering a question about the lawfulness of divorce? Mark doesn’t say, but there are a few possibilities. We know from outside the New Testament that in the days of Jesus there was a serious division among the Pharisees about when it was proper for a man to dismiss his wife, and maybe they wanted to get Jesus to take sides on a divisive issue of the day. Or maybe it was because John the Baptist had gotten into trouble – deadly trouble, it turned out – because he had criticized King Herod for divorcing his wife and marrying his sister-in-law. “Well, Jesus, your cousin John disapproved of the king’s divorce, but don’t you admit that Moses allowed a man to dismiss his wife?” Maybe they wanted to force Jesus to take sides either against John or against Herod.
Whatever the thinking behind the question, the assumption is that the Law allows a man to divorce his wife at any time by writing a decree of divorce – by doing the right paperwork, for any reason at all – but a woman didn’t have the same right against her husband.
Whatever the exact thinking was behind the question, we do know that Jesus saw through the bad faith of his questioners, and rather than answer the question he questioned their assumptions. What makes you think God approves of a system when a man can dismiss his wife simply by writing a decree of divorce, but a woman has to put up with whatever abuse her husband chooses to inflict on her? It is written in Genesis, that human beings, male and female, together, are made in the image and likeness of God.
It is written in Genesis, as we read today, that a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two become one flesh. Yet you have a system where it’s the woman who has to leave her father and mother and become part of her husband’s extended family, almost like one of his cattle or one of his servants, subject to being fired at any time for any reason. That’s not love. That’s not becoming one flesh with one’s partner. That’s a business transaction.
Rather than answer the trick question that has been posed to him, Jesus points out that the whole institution of husband-centered marriage – which is presupposed as normal and natural by everyone in his audience – is not what God intended in the beginning. A lot of this thinking has been dismantled today, but it was around so long that it still pops up. When I work with couples to plan weddings, and we talk about the entrance procession, I always tell brides, You know, we don’t believe any more that you have been your father’s property and he now is going to hand you off to your husband, so you don’t have to have your father walk you down the aisle. But the custom lives on.
And even later, when the testing Pharisees have gone and Jesus is alone with his disciples, I think Jesus is making the same point – that marriage is a relationship of love between equal partners before it’s a business transaction among families. Even when Jesus uses the language of adultery, it’s important to remember that although we usually think of “adultery” as any kind of intimacy that is forbidden and shameful, that’s not what people through most of human history have meant by that word.
You can see this in Martin Luther’s exposition of the Ten Commandments in the Large Catechism. After he talks about the commandment against murder, he goes on to write this:
The following commandments are easily understood from the preceding one, for they all teach us to guard against harming our neighbor in any way. They are admirably arranged. First they deal with the person of our neighbor (“Thou shalt not kill”). Then they go on to speak of the person nearest to them, the most important thing to them after their own life, namely, their spouse, who is one flesh and blood with them. With respect to no other blessing can one do them greater harm than here. Therefore, it is explicitly forbidden here to dishonor another’s marriage partner. (LC 1, 200-201, in BC, 413)
Notice that even for Martin Luther, adultery is about dishonoring another person’s marriage, dishonoring another person’s relationship. The worst thing a man can do to another man is to kill him – and the second worst thing a man can do to another man is to steal his wife. In other words, the person sinned against in adultery is the other woman’s husband. For most of human history, that’s what people meant by adultery – disrespecting the other person’s spouse.
So what’s noteworthy about what Jesus says is not that he’s against adultery, or even that he’s against divorce – it’s about who the victim is in adultery. If Jesus had said, If a man is intimate with a married woman, he commits adultery against her husband – that would have been unremarkable; everybody believed that. What is new is that Jesus raises the possibility of committing adultery against one’s own partner – that was something new for his disciples to wrap their heads around. Because in the world where a woman is her husband’s property and is subject to being dismissed by him as long as he does the right paperwork, it makes no sense that a man could commit adultery against his own wife – or (even if the law allowed it) a woman against her own husband. This only makes sense in the world that Genesis tells us God created: where God saw it is not good for human beings to be alone, where God creates us for love and communion and intimacy with others, where God calls us to love one another as equals, as bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, as partners.
This has been a long explanation, I know – but I think it’s important to see what Jesus is doing in this passage. He is calling into question the whole transactional concept of marriage that his trick questioners presuppose – he is calling us beyond that to a vision of mutuality and equality and partnership that is the foundation of a true relationship of love. But we know – and I think we can assume Jesus also knew – that life is complicated. It would be lovely if a man left his father and mother and clung to his wife and the two became one flesh and lived happily ever after. But that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes it’s one person’s fault, sometimes it’s both parties’ fault, and sometimes it’s nobody’s fault – but even with the best of intentions, sometimes relationships end. And sometimes they need to end – because for whatever reason they have stopped being life-giving, and honesty demands that we acknowledge that and reckon with that reality.
Because when we truly open ourselves in love for someone else – and this is just as true for physical intimacy or life partnership as it is for any of our relationships, in family or at work or in the community or in the church – love means vulnerability. Love means the possibility of rejection. Love means taking a risk that we may get hurt. And sometimes we do get hurt.
Even in the best of marriages, none of us is perfect, and sometimes our partner just doesn’t love us the way we need to be loved and sometimes we don’t love our partner the way they need to be loved. Love – even in the best of relationships – never turns out quite the way we expect. Even with the best of intentions, life never really goes according to plan. Not for any of us, married or not, divorced or not. Never. There is always disappointment and brokenness, when we take the risk of love. Sometimes we are lucky enough to work through that disappointment and hurt, and in the reconciliation and healing, in the giving and the receiving of grace and forgiveness, love gets stronger and deeper. And sometimes relationships die, or become toxic, or just stop being lifegiving. And that’s not always within our control.
The only way to avoid the possibility of hurt is to avoid the risk of love. Like the old Simon & Garfunkel song, “I am a rock. I am an island. For a rock feels no pain. And an island never cries.” It takes a hard heart to never feel hurt or loss. It was because of your hardness of heart, Jesus says, that men turned marriage and love into a business transaction – but in that system the women were even more vulnerable, and Moses put in some paperwork requirements to protect them a little. But don’t confuse that for what God intended by creating us for communion and love. Yet a heart that isn’t too hard for love is a heart that can be broken. A heart that will be broken.
And here is the good news: God loved us enough for God’s own heart to be broken. God loved us enough to enter into our world knowing that human beings would reject that love, would cause him harm, would literally break his heart open – and to show us that the vulnerability of love is nothing to fear, because God can raise up new hope and new life even in the midst of complete and utter failure and brokenness and despair.
Remember where we are in Mark’s gospel. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus has told his disciples what will happen there, and they just can’t process it. Can’t understand it. Can’t understand how the vulnerability of love, the possibility of being hurt by the ones we love, could possibly be a place where new life and peace could be found. And Jesus is relentlessly showing them that the path of love, even with its vulnerabilities, even if we are hurt by the ones we love, even if love fails, love is the still the way that leads to the only life worth living, if only we have the faith to see it through.
And this, I think, is why Jesus ends this passage by again putting a child in the middle of the circle of the disciples, and telling them: The only way to enter the kingdom of God is to enter it like a child. Children have no choice but to trust their parents, their families, their communities. Even when that trust is betrayed, they can’t pretend to be self-sufficient rocks and islands – the only way forward is to love and to trust that somehow, in some way, they will be loved in return. May we – whatever disappointments and failures and hurts we have experienced – also never give up on love. For God has promised that whenever human bonds have been broken, wherever human love has failed and people are lost and in pain, God’s love never fails, God’s love is never deterred by the fear of failure or loss. For it is precisely when all is lost and everything has failed that the hope of resurrection begins.