SERMON NOTES FOR 10.4.09
For all the arguing we do in the church about sexuality, you would think that Jesus spent all his time talking about it. Actually, today’s gospel is one of the few times he addresses questions of sexuality. But he does it in a way that throws a bombshell into our culture, where so many Christians have been divorced and remarried. Looking at what is going on in this gospel helps us figure out how to approach social issues, and it helps us learn how to do Biblical interpretation.
I burned dinner the other night. In Jesus’ time, this could have been grounds for divorce.
That is, according to one school of thought (the conservative view – follows the letter of the law in Deuteronomy 24:1). The other school of thought said that divorce was allowed only for adultery (modifies the literal interpretation of Scripture, therefore this is the liberal view).
The Pharisees really aren’t interested in Jesus’ opinion on divorce. What the Pharisees are interested in is catching Jesus expressing an opinion. Whatever he answers – it’s sure to make enemies. Jesus is now on the road to Jerusalem – on the way to the cross. All that’s left is for his enemies to come up with an excuse for the cross.
Set this story in context and see the clever way Jesus avoids the trap. The Pharisees ask about divorce and Jesus turns the question around and talks about marriage instead. He explains the ideal of God’s hope for human marriage: faithful, monogamous, lifelong commitment. Yet the fact is that that ideal did not persist for long given the realities of how humans relate to each other – polygamy and divorce were common by the time of the Old Testament patriarchs and matriarchs.
Jesus understands this reality, and says the reason for the law in Deuteronomy is hardness of heart – human sin – and watch what Jesus does here. He appeals to an older, broader Scripture – the creation stories in Genesis 1 & 2. He puts scripture in conversation with scripture. In a conflict in interpretation between two Scriptures, Jesus says the broader ones carry more weight. The way Jesus reads it, scripture is far more than a narrow book of laws and regulations; scripture is a narrative of God’s true, lived relationship with people who are continually imperfect, continually falling short of the ideal for which God has created them.
To understand why Jesus would have answered the question the way he did, we need to ask ourselves: What was the context of divorce in Jesus’ time? Only men could decide to divorce – women had no such option. Men could divorce on a whim, and send their wives away. Children were left behind as property of the father– mothers had no rights. Women whose birth families wouldn’t take them back were left to begging or prostitution to keep themselves alive. Divorce was therefore an injustice perpetrated against the weak by the powerful. Jesus speaks against this injustice by appealing to the broader purposes of God: respect, equality, love that honors the other above oneself, a marriage covenant that means a lifetime commitment.
Therefore, this story gives us a picture of Jesus making the first move in Bible interpretation: understand the context of the time.
The second move in Biblical interpretation is to understand our own context and how the Scripture might apply. In our time, divorce is all too common, and divorce happens for a variety of reasons. There are divorces that happen for good reasons, such as abuse or infidelity that can’t be repaired or differences that are truly irreconcilable. And there are divorces that happen for not-so-good reasons, partly because people don’t take the commitment seriously when they make it. The course of an all-too-typical American romance is what I call a “Cinderella” story: we feel romantic, like it is a quarter to midnight and we’re dancing at the ball with the prince or with Cinderella. But the minute that feeling of romance fades, the minute we’re confronted with the daily reality of sharing your life with someone else, we think that something is wrong. If we’re not careful, we read that loss of the romantic, “Cinderella” feeling as a loss of love.
Which begs the question: what is love, really? The Christian answer is, love is not a feeling but an action – day in and day out. In the movie Fiddler on the Roof: Tevye asks his wife, “Do you love me?” – and she answers, “For 25 years, I’ve washed your clothes, cared for your children, etc. – if that’s not love, what is? Well, yes, that IS what love is! Love is a series of actions, day in and day out, that put the welfare of the other person in front of your own.
Understanding more about what love is helps us understand marriage. Christian marriage is a covenant, not a contract. A contract is a legal thing, and it is null and void if one provision is not met. A person enters into a contract for his or her own benefit. And if marriage were a contract, it would mean when we lose that pleasant infatuated feeling, we might as well leave. From a legal sense, our society sees marriage as a contract.
But from a Christian standpoint, marriage is not a contract but a covenant. A covenant is unconditional, entered for the other’s benefit. In a covenant, we commit to love the other more than we love ourselves. This is the covenant God has made with us (which the Scriptures call a marriage covenant!); this is why Jesus lived and died for us; this is the love he asks us for in marriage – a love that puts the other first.
Does this mean that divorce is not allowed for Christians? No – Christian tradition is about release from bondage to sin – not trapping people in lifelong bondage to sin. Here are the Episcopal church requirements:
CANON 19: Sec. 1. When marital unity is imperiled by dissension, it shall be the duty, if possible, of either or both parties, before taking legal action, to lay the matter before a Member of the Clergy; it shall be the duty of such Member of the Clergy to act first to protect and promote the physical and emotional safety of those involved and only then, if it be possible, to labor that the parties may be reconciled.
We also recognize the validity of remarriage after divorce; one overarching theme of Christian tradition is the possibility of forgiveness and grace. If a divorced person comes to me wanting to be remarried in the church, my responsibility is to make sure they have learned from their previous mistakes, provided for former spouses and children, and healed enough to make a serious recommitment; then I can remarry them with permission of the bishop.
Christian marriage commitment does not require a person to put up with a lifetime of abuse–physical, verbal, addictions, infidelity; and it allows forgiveness, healing. But it does require a high standard of grace, forgiveness and commitment. Dear Abby’s question: “Are you better off with him or without him?” is not a high enough standard: a covenant relationship requires us to ask: is this relationship fulfilling God’s purpose for us as human beings?
So … what is God’s purpose for us as human beings? Look at how Jesus interprets Scripture here. Faced with a text that some people of his time interpret literally, with devastating consequences for the weak and powerless in society – Jesus appeals to an older and broader Biblical tradition. Jesus here treats Scripture not as a collection of hard-and-fast rules to be taken literally, but as a narrative of God’s relationships with human beings and a revelation of God’s desire for how humans should live. He looks God’s desire in creation: God looks at creation and says it is good (Gen. 1). But immediately: God looks at the human creature and sees that something is not good – not good for the earthling to be alone. (Gen. 2).
To grow in full humanness, human beings must grow in relationship. Learning to love another person, over a long period of time, with the opportunity to experience each other’s flaws, to be in conflict and to reconcile, to compromise and to learn to put the other’s welfare before our own – this is the single most difficult challenge that any of us will ever face – and it is the single most important thing that any of us can learn to do as Christians. There is a good reason that the letter to the Ephesians describes God’s relationship with us as a marital relationship. The love we experience in a lifelong, monogamous, covenantal commitment to another human being is the closest personal experience many of us will ever have with the kind of love God offers us. It is certainly not true that each person must be married (Jesus was single). But we must live in covenant community, and we must struggle together to overcome our sinfulness and brokenness – our hardness of heart – to become the full human beings God created and willed us to be.
In the case of divorce: is forgiveness available? Of course – this is the good news that Jesus brings to us. Is new life, new hope, new beginning possible? Yes, God can bring joy and hope out of despair and failure (the message of the cross!), and we rejoice in the healing that remarriage after divorce can bring.
Interpreting the Bible on Social Issues
- Understand the original context
- Understand our own context and how the principles might apply
- Discover what our own hardness of heart inclines us to believe
- Consider whether there is a broader purpose or design revealed in Scripture
- Give enormous respect to the place of Scripture and its authority
- Spirit-driven interpretation of Scripture is only undertaken with respect for the text, respect for differing opinions, and a long process of consensus-building on the part of the whole church – Christ’s body on earth
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