Seperation vs Divorce

Grace and peace to you from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Jesus, in our gospel today, speaks of marriage and he says the often-quoted words at weddings and often-despised words at divorce hearings, “What God has joined together, let no one separate.”

For many, these words do not feel like a message of grace and peace from our Lord and Savior. Rather, it is experienced as finger pointing, guilt-laying, and ultimately condemnation against someone who perhaps was only trying to escape a relationship where they or their children were experiencing tremendous brokenness... even abuse.

Christ calls the church to care for the refugee, to care for the wounded, to care for those who have been mistreated by the world… and yet in today’s lesson Christ comes across as judging the very ones we are called to serve. This can leave us in a theological rollercoaster loop that we’d rather just close our eyes on, try to ignore, and get through it.

I remember an incident some years ago that occurred after I preached on this very lesson. After the worship service was over, a first-time visitor to the congregation came up to me. She shared with me that, as I began reading these words from Mark, she began to look for a way to quietly make her exit without making a scene. But she couldn’t. Not without people noticing, at least. She was stuck.

Imagine, sitting in church, and fearing that the words about to come from the pulpit will be pointed at you to condemn you for trying to escape a situation where you were a victim. How horrific. And I have encountered many others with similar stories.

So before anything else, let me offer this word. If you are one who has experienced the brokenness of divorce, you will not hear a word of condemnation against you today. Why not? Doesn’t Jesus speak ill of divorce in our text today? Yes… he does. But to quote from the movie the Princess Bride, “You keep using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means.”

So how can Jesus saying a word against divorce in his time not mean what we think it means in our time? Perhaps if we just looked at these few verses and these few verses alone, we could think that. But the fullness of Christ’s concern around marriage is not summed up in his words, “What God has joined together, let no one separate.” Christ is not telling us to remain in abusive or deeply broken relationships. Quite the opposite, in fact. Christ wants our relationships to offer healing and wholeness.

But to understand this, to really get at what Jesus is saying here, we need to dig into what marriage actually looked like in Jesus’ time and we need to understand what Jesus has been saying leading up to and continuing after our gospel lesson for today.

First, what did marriage look like in Jesus’ time?

I will tell you what it was not look like. It was not a boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love with one another, boy and girl choose to get married and then live happily ever after. No. Having choice in who you got married to, especially if you were a woman, was a rarity.

If you have ever experienced the musical Fiddler on the Roof, you might remember Yenta the Matchmaker. Yenta arrives at the home of Golde and Tevya, a very traditional Jewish family in Russia, and old Yenta shares with Golde, the mother of the household, that Yenta has made the perfect match for Golde’s eldest daughter, Tzeitel. The beautiful young woman has caught the eye of Lazar Wolf, the aging butcher and widower in town.

Golde runs and tells her husband, Tevya, that he must go and see the butcher that very evening… that the butcher has news for him… an opportunity that he wishes to discuss. Tevya assumes it must be that the butcher wants to buy his cow from him, so Tevya goes to see the butcher, ready to haggle and make a deal. While the audience is on the joke that Tevya thinks he’s selling a cow when he’s really discussing terms for marrying off his daughter, the reality was not that far off from his false assumptions.

Eventually, Tevya and the butcher come to a term of agreement and then run to the bar to celebrate this new marriage… and they drink and they sing and they toast one another, “to life!” and they do all of this without ever saying a word to the young woman who has just been promised to marry someone more than twice her age.

Marriage was not a decision for the couple to make… it was an agreement between the heads of their families. It was not joining born out of love… but most often out of financial practicality. Marriage meant financial stability for the woman. It also meant that her family was no longer responsible for her after they paid the husband a dowry of some kind. And marriage meant, for that woman, that as long as she was married, she would almost certainly be guaranteed a shelter over her head, food in her belly, and clothing on her back. Marriage meant access to the bare essentials for survival. Sometimes love was involved, but it certainly was not needed. For the husband, marriage meant that he finally had someone who could be the mother of his heirs, mother to a labor force for their farm or trade, and yes, marriage meant having someone to be a keeper of the household.

In cases of divorce, a man would still have his heirs… he would still have his children if he chose to keep them. In many cases, a man could find another wife. A few hundred years before Christ, it was commonly accepted to see men with many wives. Deaths on the field of battle or on the hunt often resulted in more women than men in tribes. Thus, for a man to be married again and again was not as much of an issue.

In fact, during the time of Moses, a man could become quote, “tired” of his current wife and simply set her to the side and marry another. The first wife was still married to him… but found herself on the street with no access to food, shelter, or support of any kind. And if she asked for help, people could point to her husband and say, “You’re married, you should just talk to your husband and ask for forgiveness for whatever you did wrong. Then you won’t need to beg.”

That’s why, in our Gospel lesson today, we hear Jesus saying those words that it was, “Because of your hardness of heart that Moses wrote the commandment around divorce.” Women were, unofficially, being put to the side and cast out of the household. For all intents and purposes, divorce was happening… just not legally. But if we dig a little more into what Moses actually declares around divorce… Moses says, in essence, that divorce is allowed but that men were COMMANDED to write a note of dismissal if they took that route.

And while simply being able to write a note of dismissal for really any reason they wanted might seem harsh to us… the reality, again, was that the woman was being put on the street either way. The SEPARATION was occurring with or without a written divorce note. That is the hardness of heart that Jesus is talking about.

But that note of dismissal, clutched in the hands of the new ex-wife, meant that when people would start to point her back toward her husband and say “just make up with him and ask for his forgiveness” she could hand them the note and say that the word was final. She was without husband… she wasn’t just in his bad graces… the divorce was final. It was done with. He was done with her. Her husband no longer took responsibility for her.

That note of dismissal… that note of divorce meant that the woman who found herself separated from her husband could at least have SOME possibility of help… SOME possibility of a new start. So when the commandment was given from Moses that the husband was allowed to officially divorce his wife but that he was COMMANDED to write the note of dismissal… it was a commandment born of a desire to offer some care to women who were being placed on the street or in difficult positions regardless of what was official and what was not. This gives you some idea of what marriage and divorce looked like in Jesus’ time. It is still tip of the iceberg, but what’s important to recognize is that both the marriage process and divorce process were significantly lopsided in favor of men. Women had very little to no say in who they married. And they could be discarded out of the marriage and onto the street for nearly any reason the man wished. Divorce rarely meant a woman was escaping an abusive relationship. Rather, divorce was the epitome of a husband’s power to dismiss his wife because she displeased him in some way. And such dismissal meant a casting out of the woman from a place of potential stability into poverty and significant struggle.

That brings us to the texts surrounding our Gospel lesson today. Always always always read what comes before and what comes after a reading in scripture. Always always always hold scripture in comparison to itself. And remember that the life of Christ crucified and risen for the sins of the world is the lens through which we should gaze at all scripture.

Both a little before our lesson today and actually included at the end of our text today, we hear Jesus talking about children. In Mark chapter 9, we overheard the disciples arguing about who was the greatest. And in the midst of their arguments of who will have the most power among the disciples when the Kingdom of God reigns supreme, Jesus picks up a child in their midst and says, “Whoever welcomes one such as this, welcomes me. And whoever welcomes me, welcomes the one who sent me.”

And then today at the end of our Gospel lesson today, we see children again coming to the forefront as Jesus overrides the disciples’ attempts to keep the children at bay while the adults did the “important stuff.” Jesus is indignant that the children are being held away from him and he speaks out to make sure it is known that the children have a place with him.

Now what do these two stories about children have to do with divorce? Quite a bit, actually. They are reminders that Christ’s chief concern in his ministry is to care for those whom the world is ready to dismiss out of hand. Because, while these children ARE LITERALLY CHILDREN, they are also representative of ALL whom are vulnerable and are being hurt in this world. Christ’s concern is precisely for those whom are caught up in abusive, broken situations.

As we remind ourselves that Christ’s ministry is to the poor, those who are in pain, those who are dismissed, those who are experiencing incredible brokenness… as we remind ourselves of who Christ most indignantly cares for… and when we also consider what both marriage and divorce looked like in the ancient world… we can look at this gospel lesson with a different heart of understanding.

Christ is not telling the abused that they should beg for forgiveness from their abusers and stay in broken relationships. When Christ says, “What God has joined together, let no one separate” Christ is calling out the abuser in a relationship and saying that they should never have created the brokenness to begin with.

Because, if you note, while the pharisees came to Jesus with a question about whether or not a man can divorce his wife. In the Greek, the word used by the pharisees is ἀπολύωwhich means to dismiss, divorce. But when Jesus responds he we hear the Greek word for chorizo or, as it’s translated here, “separate” which means to become isolated from one another. While the pharisees ask about legality, Jesus speaks about relationships.

Jesus’ answer speaks about people becoming isolated from one another. By the time a marriage gets to the point of divorce, the divorce itself is only a legal formality… separation… isolating from one another has already occurred long before that. Additionally, isolation from one another is not something that is reserved to marriages. We can isolate ourselves in our friendships and non-friendships as well.

The hope of God is that all of our relationships whether romantic or not would be wholesome relationships. That we would care for one another. Love one another. Offer grace and forgiveness to one another. Build one another up as a body would hope to work together.

But we also are reminded that immediately prior to Jesus’ words of how the two become one flesh… Jesus spoke of how if the hand causes you to sin, to cut it off. If the eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.

The reality is that there IS brokenness in the world… and there IS brokenness in our relationships. And while Christ offers the encouragement that we might never isolate ourselves one from another, that separation does occur… and at times cutting off is even necessary for the sake of the whole. Sin exists in our world. That is the reality.

And yet along with the reality of sin is also the reality of Christ’s love. Sin. Brokenness. Hate for one another. These are not the center of our faith. Christ’s love for us and our love for one another is. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “We too belong to those whom Jesus loved, and loves, and will love, that Jesus’ love is not a private affair but at the center of the world.”

In all things, we might ask ourselves “How is Jesus’ love evident in our daily life?” How might we experience and offer Christ’s love in marriage? In divorce? In friendship? With a stranger?

How might we pull away from isolating ourselves from one another and enter into relationships of healing and hope even as we look to Christ for the brokenness that still remains?

Remember that there are times that Christ calls us to cut off the flesh that is too broken to mend. But remember also that Christ’s hope would be that we would never have to get to that point in the first place. And yet Christ died for our brokenness. Let us go and live into the love of Christ.

Peace be with you. Amen.