Sermon — October 3, 2021
The Rev. Greg Johnston
So, first: Deep breath. We’ve made it through the hectic month of September, and fortunately the lectionary’s been pitching softballs to ease us back into church this fall. Last week we had plucking out eyes and cutting off limbs; this week we get to talk about divorce. Who knows what uplifting delights next week could bring? (Actually, I do; it’s the one about how you should go and sell all your stuff and give the money to the poor, because it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. But we’ll get to that next week.)
Divorce is a tricky one to talk about, mostly because there’s no one experience of it. A divorce can be among the most devastating experiences of a person’s life, for one or both partners, and for some or all of their children, if they have some. A divorce can also be a life-saving experience, figuratively and sometimes literally, the final thing that frees someone from an abusive or just a toxic relationship. A divorce can be just the beginning of a much longer story of change in a person’s life; it can mark the brutal end of something, and it can mark, sometimes, the beginning of something new and good. And of course, one divorce, the end of one marriage, can be all these things, to the same person.
Some of you have met all four of my parents, so you know that this isn’t an abstract thing for me, any more than it is for many of you, who may have been divorced or remarried, or whose parents may have been divorced or remarried. It’s hard to talk about, but it’s important. Because it’s real.
Some of you have come from churches with different perspectives on divorce, so if you’re not aware, the Episcopal Church’s position is pretty clear. The first duty of a member of the clergy when a marriage is in distress, according to canon law, is “to protect and promote the physical and emotional safety of those involved and only then… to labor that the parties may be reconciled.” (Constitution and Canons I.19.1) Safety is the most important value. Then reconciliation. But we recognize that reconciliation is not always possible, and divorce and remarriage are allowed and common, with a slightly different marriage prep process from the one for a first marriage, but nothing like a process of annulment.
The reason that talking about divorce in church is hard, though, is not so much that divorce is hard, which it is. It’s not that the Church’s official policy is unclear; it’s not. It’s that what Jesus has to say about divorce in this morning’s is hard. Our compassionate Messiah tells us that remarriage is adultery, and then he has the gall to tell us we’re being hard-hearted?
I personally think it’s usually worth digging into passages like these to try to understand what’s going on, rather than just writing them off. I don’t mean to explain away what Jesus says, and I don’t mean to try to convince you to swallow a bitter pill. But I think that the more context we can give to difficult words like these, the better; the more we understand what Jesus’ words would’ve meant in the year 31, the more meaning they have might for us in 2021.
“Is it lawful,” the Pharisees ask him—trying once again to trick him into making some kind of gaffe— “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” (Mark 10:2) They ask a question about the law, and Jesus answers by deferring to the law, and to the great lawgiver: “What did Moses command you?” (Mark 10:3) And when they answer with a summary of the law that Moses gives in Deuteronomy to regulate divorce, Jesus is disdainful. This was only necessary, he says, because of the hardness of your hearts; but before Moses allowed divorce, Adam and Eve were one flesh. “What God has joined together,” he summarizes, in a verse that’s made its way into the marriage liturgy, “let no one put asunder.” (Mark 10:9)
So first off, let’s be precise. The Pharisees are exactly right. This isn’t just an old-fashioned, gender-exclusive translation. Moses allowed a man to divorce his wife; there’s no provision in Old Testament law for a woman to divorce her husband, nor do the rabbis imagine such a thing. There’s some evidence that unusually powerful or prominent women, like members of the ruling Herodian dynasty, could sometimes divorce their husbands. There’s literally one ancient document dug up in the Judean Desert that might be read as a woman initiating a divorce. But divorce was, on the whole, a completely one-sided affair. A man could write a divorce certificate, a get, and divorce his wife, and that was it. (By the way, did anyone listen to This American Life last week?)
Now this doesn’t mean that a divorced woman would be cast destitute into the streets, to be fair. She would’ve had a dowry she had brought to the marriage, and it would return to her. Perhaps she could’ve married again. But still, it was a patriarchal society. Discussions of divorce in the centuries around Jesus can sound somewhat shocking to modern ears. One of the more infamous examples comes from Mishnah Gittin, a collection of early rabbinic teachings and laws dealing with divorce. At one point, it records three different schools of thought on the interpretation of a single verse, Deuteronomy 24:1. The verse begins, “Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she finds no favor in his eyes because he finds something objectionable about her, and so he writes her a certificate of divorce…” (And then it goes on to lay out some of the process.) It’s likely this or a related verse that Jesus and the Pharisees are thinking about when Jesus asks what Moses taught. Now, the Mishnah first lists the opinion of one school of rabbinic thought, from a few decades or so before Jesus: “The House of Shammai say, ‘A man should divorce his wife only because he has found grounds for it in unchastity, since it is said, Because he has found in her indecency in anything.’” The House of Hillel, usually the less restrictive school of thought, reply, “Even if she spoiled his dish, since it is said, Because he has found in her indecency in anything.” And a few generations later, nearly a century after Jesus’ day, the great Rabbi Akiba replies, “Even if he found someone else prettier than she, since it is said, ‘And it shall be if she find no favor in his eyes.’” (m. Git. 9:10)
So this is what political scientists call the “Overton window,” the spectrum of acceptable ideas within which Jesus was operating. A man could divorce his wife, and the debate was whether he could only do it if she was unfaithful, or if he could do it because she’d burned dinner, or even just if he saw someone more attractive whom he’d rather marry. A woman could perhaps divorce her husband, if she were a powerful aristocrat who could afford to annoy the devout, but that was about it.
But this, Jesus says, is not the way things were supposed to be.
That is, perhaps, the only real conclusion we can draw from what Jesus says. He zooms out from this debate over the particular language of Deuteronomy 24:1, over when exactly a man could write a certificate of divorce, to make that one observation: this isn’t the way things were supposed to be. Moses has to accommodate messy realities of human lives, but Jesus wants to rewind to an earlier time. He goes back, in fact, to the Garden of Eden, to the days before that first original sin, to a time, in other words, when life wasn’t quite so messy after all. At the beginning of creation, Adam and Eve were joined together and mode “one flesh.” And there’s a lot of truth in that observation. In marriage, two people “are no longer two, but one flesh.” (Mark 10:8) Their lives are joined together. And the undoing of that bond is inevitably a messy and a painful thing, whatever millennium you’re in. It’s like being cut open and, maybe, sewn back together.
So no, Jesus says, this isn’t the way that the world is supposed to be. This isn’t the way that marriage is supposed to be. I’ve never met a couple who said in pre-martial counseling that they planned for their marriage to end in divorce. I probably wouldn’t go through with it if they did. The death of a relationship is inevitably a mess, whether you are one of the partners in it, or a child of it, or simply a friend or family member watching things fall apart.
And yet God is present in the messiest of situations. That’s not to say that we should simply endure the suffering and stay together no matter what. Not at all. What I mean is that God is able, believe it or not, to bring forth new things of beauty from the deepest places of despair. God has already descended with us into the depths of despair. God was “made lower than the angels,” Hebrews says, God “tasted death” itself (Hebrews 2:9) and brought forth life. The God who is “always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve,” (Collect for Proper 22, BCP p. 234) can redeem and will redeem the messiest and most difficult parts of our lives, can transform and will transform even “the suffering of death” into “glory and honor.” (Hebrews 2:9)
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, and yet it is, and God is here. I don’t know who I’d be today were it not for my secondhand experience of divorce. I wouldn’t have the same values, the same priorities, the same neuroses that I do today. Have I sometimes wished that Jesus’ word were law, and there were no divorce? Sure. Am I also glad, seeing what new life can come from that death, that there is? I think so. Does that mean it was all worth it in the end? Who can do that kind of math? We can try to argue back and forth about the particulars of the law. We can try to shift it one way or the other, make it stricter or looser, protect one party or the other. But in the end, all that we have is our imperfect and messy lives, and all we can know is that while isn’t the way things were supposed to be, it’s the way that they are; and the way things are can be as beautiful as it is ugly. All I know is that “God, for whom and through whom all things exist,” (Hebrews 2:10), is “bringing” us God’s “many children to glory,” one way or another. Amen.