Friday before the Sunday before Lent

What God has joined together, let no one separate.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus and his disciples go to the district of Judaea across the Jordan. This is the territory of Herod Antipas, the Herod who had imprisoned and then executed John the Baptist for having the temerity to say that he, Herod, should not have divorced his first wife and then married Herodias. Herodias herself had in fact divorced Herod’s brother Philip to make the second marriage possible.

The Pharisees, to test Jesus ask him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” They knew that Jesus was, similar to John the Baptist, likely to take a strict line, and that an unguarded word from him, suitably reported back to Herod, might do the trick. They would be able to sit back and watch Herod do their dirty work for them as he applied the same beheading priniciple to Jesus as he had to his cousin, John. This was, as Mark says, a trick question, trying to trap Jesus — not trying to trap him with ‘theological heresy’ or any such thing, but with the more obvious snare of political trouble.

Jesus, as ever, answers with a question, “What did Moses say?” “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce his wife,” replied the pharisees.

But it is the spirit of the law, not the letter, in which the word of God is found. How often in modern Christian culture, are the scriptures treated as a text book? If the bible says it, then that must be it, there’s nothing more to it. But Jesus say “No.” Go deeper. The ancient Israelite scriptures do indeed, if read at their face value, make allowance for a man to issue a certificate of divorce to his wife. But, Jesus says, this was because of the hardness of the human heart. In seeking the moral path in life, look not to the law, says Jesus, but to poetry. It is the poetry of the ancient creation account that Jesus turns to on the question of divorce. “From the beginning of creation,” he says, “God made them male and female.”

This is an interesting move for many reasons, one of them being that, in creating, God continually separates and makes two out of what once was one. God tears apart creation to form the heavens and the earth; the land is pulled up out of the sea; and woman is taken from the side of man. Sometimes separation is required in order for all things to be married together.

We do indeed live in a time of separation. I need a little time to think it over; I need a little space just on my own; I need a little time to find my freedom. Relationships of all kinds have moments where things might go one way or the other and often space or separation of somekind can be helpful for us to find ourselves again so that we can be at peace with ourselves when we turn back from separation to that relationship, to unification. “I’m sorry, I now understand how much of my own flaws I was projecting onto you,” and so on.

Sometimes, however, these moments of separation become permanent no matter how much we seek peace with ourselves. Perhaps there is a power dynamic in which the person with power simply isn’t willing to show the humility of Christ in that situation; perhaps one or both parties are living with too much trauma for them to find the peace needed to turn back to reunion; or it might well be because a separation has been forced upon us and prevents that reunion. The struggles of war; the economy; or the shadow of death itself. Promises, promises, turned to dust.

This side of death, we live with separation from those we love and we often live with separation from the intimacy of God. But, in God’s economy, separation is gathered into unity, life is formed from the dust.

Jesus, in today’s reading, says, “But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

The mystery of this is that the man and the woman are Christ and the Church. We are all the woman in this poem, the woman who Christ joins himself to to become one flesh, one life. God in Christ, separates himself, leaving his heavenly father, so that he might join himself to us. In our mouring and in our own separation, Christ has joined us so as to include us in the life of the Triune God, that unity in distinction. Separation is sometimes needed for permanent and complete unity.

In receiving Christ in the broken bread, we receive that future redemption of our lives, and the gathering up of what has been separated, that pied beauty.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.