October 6, 2024, Rules Are for Cheaters, Mark 10:1-16 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell
To listen to the sermon, click the link above. The text is below.
I think probably we have all known people with broken marriages – maybe our own marriage, maybe the marriage of a good friend or of our parents – but we’ve all known someone whose marriage became a source of pain instead of joy. There are times when divorce seems to be the only way that there can be healing for the people trapped in a place where one or both of them is being hurt. There are other times when the decision to stay in a marriage seems to have resulted in much more harm than good. That’s not a theological judgment, just an observation from the lives of people I’ve known.
We often think of divorce as one of the signs of the dysfunction of our modern times, but it’s not a new-fangled thing. Here come the Pharisees in first century Israel in the gospel today, eager to trip Jesus up with a tricky question about divorce. “Is it legal?” they asked Jesus. “Is it against the law for a man to divorce his wife? Or not?’ And they cite an even more ancient authority. Going all the way back to the 14th century b.c., they appeal to Moses, the one through whom God originally gave the Law. “Moses said that if a man wants to divorce his wife he can write a certificate of dismissal and send her away.”
And that was true. Deuteronomy 24:1 says if a man’s wife “finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her,” he could send her away. And the Rabbis who interpreted the law were very generous in saying what was a valid reason for the husband’s displeasure – everything from gross indecency, to burning his dinner, to just wanting a younger wife, was valid grounds for divorce, so that Philo of Alexandria and Josephus, who wrote in the first century, both summarized this law as saying that basically a man could divorce his wife for any reason at all. And, of course, it was assumed by all the experts that divorce could only be initiated by the man, not the woman.
But then the Pharisees came to Jesus. And the ball was in his court. The Pharisees were looking for a yes or a no. Is divorce legal or is it not? Do you, Jesus, abide by the law of Moses or do you not? And Jesus, as he so often did, takes the conversation someplace else entirely. Not, like the Rabbis, figuring out which kinds of husbandly displeasure would qualify for Moses’ certificate of divorce and which did not. But why did Moses allow husbands to write a certificate of divorce in the first place? What is behind that? And, bottom line, how does it fit in with God’s original plan for marriage and for human beings in general.
“The certificate of divorce is there in the law because of your hardness of heart,” Jesus said. “But that wasn’t part of God’s plan for his children in the first place.” We heard it today in the reading from Genesis. God created man and woman as suitable partners for each other. The companionship of one person for another was God’s good gift, a way of making human life complete and fulfilled. Married love was intended from the beginning to grow and endure and bear fruit. But human sin, hardness of heart, a failure of love and faithfulness on one side or on both sides, sometimes breaks that God-given covenant. That is the essence of adultery.
And there are two things Jesus is saying here that I wanted to look at. First of all, Jesus does a very subversive cultural thing. The traditional view of divorce, handed down from the Rabbis who wrote the commentaries telling how the law of Moses was to be understood and practiced, was entirely about the rights of the man. A husband had the legal right to sign a certificate of divorce. He could send his wife away because she did something truly terrible, or because she burned his dinner, or because she got old. It worked one way only. But hear what Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” And he said, “A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
Living in the midst of a patriarchal society at a time when women’s lives were pretty much lived at the mercy of men, Jesus makes the radical claim that the marriage relationship was created as a partnership, where each partner has equal rights and each partner has equal responsibility. That, he told them, was God’s design for marriage from the beginning. Human sin can corrupt and kill that bond. But God never intended to provide a clause for the convenience of men. Sometimes a marriage relationship dies. When that happens there can be grace for going forward. There can be forgiveness. There can be new mercies and there can be new beginnings. But love and faithfulness and commitment were never meant to be taken lightly, by men or women.
The deeper lesson here, though, is that laws and rules and judgment are never able to accomplish the perfect goodness of God. Laws set limits on the harm we hard-hearted creatures do to each other. Rules curtail the freedom we sometimes use to satisfy our selfish desires at the expense of others. Judgment, at its best, provides consequences and a deterrent for evil and injustice and cruelty. But the law was never a source of life. “If a law had been given that could give life,” Paul wrote to the Galatians, “Then righteousness would indeed be by the law.” But Jesus came with a better way.
The living, beating heart of the law is, and was, always and only love. Love was God’s will and plan from before creation. Love is who God is. Love is why Jesus came. Love is the whole meaning of our lives. The entire law, Paul wrote – all the hundreds of commandments and restrictions and injunctions – they can all be summed up in one word, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love never wrongs or hurts another person, therefore love fulfills the whole law. For their part, law and rules have no meaning, no use, if they aren’t in the service of love – love of God, love of one another. Our hardness of heart, our selfishness, or our foolishness, they can destroy relationships; they can cause us to hurt one another terribly, but when they do, there is no hope for healing to be had in the law. We can even use the law as a weapon, to inflict harm on one another for our own gain, like Moses’ certificate of divorce, like the victims of crime who try to find peace through vengeance or retribution. But only love gives life. Only love covers the multitudes of our sins.
There are 613 laws in the law of Moses. And that law is rightly honored as a gift from God and as a revelation of God’s holiness and character. But not one, not all, of the 613 laws can give life or heal the ravages of sin. Life comes by the one law Jesus gave us, to love one another as he has loved us. And this is how God loves us. God does not send us away like a wife who has fallen out of favor with her husband. God’s love endures. God doesn’t give up on us because we are sinners – God doesn’t reject us because we burn the dinner – God doesn’t get tired of us because we grow old and gray. Our vows and promises to one another so often fail, no matter how hard we try. But God’s love is always and forever faithful. +
St. Philip's Episcopal Church 