Divorce and Remarriage

The whole issue of marriage is very topical these days as various parliaments in Australia are giving consideration to the issue of Marriage Equality — but that is a topic for another day.

We in the church have been grappling with the issue of divorce and remarriage for much longer, haven’t we'?  First of all it was an issue for general society and then for the church in particular. 

As I think about my own history with this issue I am reminded that as a young person, whose father was a minister in the church, I saw my dad move from a general opposition to the idea of divorce, to an accepting understanding of it – all in the context of the issue of divorce entering into the lives of his children.  My brother was first divorced and then remarried and is now divorced again.  One of my sisters married a divorce man, and then my other sister was divorced and is now remarried.  By entering into my close family experience, the opinion of my whole family about this issue shifted.

Perhaps this has happened in your family.  When we are confronted with difficult issues in real life — not as a theoretical reality — we often end up with different views in the matter.

THE TEXT - Mark 10:1-12

In this story, the discussion that follows between Jesus and the Pharisees it appears at first glance that Jesus utterly forbids divorce.  Jesus said that Moses only allowed divorce because of the hardness of men’s hearts.  He went back further to the beginning of the Bible, to Genesis, where it is written that man and woman "shall become one flesh," and "They are no longer two but one. What God has joined together let no man put asunder.”

From this, some churches have totally forbidden their members to undertake divorce.  Others have tried to side step it by the device of "annulment" instead of divorce.  Other churches accept divorce as an unfortunate but necessary option where a marriage has irretrievably broken down.

If Jesus utterly forbids divorce, on what grounds can our church tolerate divorce and remarry divorcee’s?  I will attempt to make this clearer in what follows.

THE SITUATION IN JESUS’ DAY

I invite you to keep in mind two things when this passage from Mark’s Gospel is read.

First, it’s a man’s game.  The conversation started with the Pharisees asking if it were lawful for a

man to divorce his wife. It was a question about men’s rights.  In that era in Jewish culture, divorce was largely the prerogative of men, not women.

As far as I am aware there were only three grounds on which a woman could divorce her husband:

1.     lf a Jewish man wanted to leave the holy land and go an live in a pagan country, she could refuse and seek divorce.

2.     If the man embraced another religion, the wife could divorce him.

3.     The third ground for divorce l think was if the man committed blasphemy.

On the other hand, men had numerous grounds.  Women had no right of reply. If a man found anything "unseemly" in his wife, all he had to do was to write out a statement of divorce, listing the grounds, get it witnessed by another man, and then send the wife away.  This put a woman in a perilous situation.  She was disgraced in the community; her family were not likely to take her back.  lf she could not quickly find another husband, her options were either to become a servant, a beggar, or turn to prostitution to keep alive. So when Jesus speaks about divorce in his social environment; it should be heard as a vigorous protest against a grave social injustice.

Secondly, back to basics. Jesus immediately drives the Pharisees back to basics.  They wanted to have a discussion about their rights under the regulations of Moses; their right to divorce a woman.  Jesus pushes them back to Genesis and the basic intention of God: From the beginning a woman and man were intended to stay together in mutual respect, trust and love.  Basically marriage was meant to be a life-long commitment.

Jesus takes us away from the compromises and confusions that happen when relationships do not work well, and he moves us back to God.  That is the only valid starting point as far as Christ was concerned. 

What does God see as the best possible way of life?

Togetherness: an ever-growing love through a life of mutual cherishing. That is the goal.

SO WHAT IS OUT OF PLACE HERE?

This text is a bit like the story of Jesus refusing to heal the story in Mark 7 where Jesus refuses the request of a Gentile woman to heal her daughter.  There Jesus speaks in uncharacteristically racist language.

Here Jesus speaks in uncharacteristically legalistic language.  His words seem to echo what you would have expected the Pharisees to say; but do they?

There is a yawning gulf between Jesus and legalistic religion.  The Pharisees came asking ‘Under what circumstances is it right for a man to divorce his wife’?"

Like their imitators in today’s world, these Pharisees just wanted to be in the right - always.  They expected to get from Jesus a list of conditions under which they could divorce their wives and feel very righteous about it.  That was their thing; the thing that gave them a buzz. They had to be in the right.  It was not only in matters of divorce that they saw things this way.  It applied to every other moral and religious issue.  They were fanatical about justifying themselves.  Therefore they were continually looking for ‘mitigating circumstances’ – excuses that were deduced from the laws of Moses that allowed them to maintain their high and mighty self-righteousness.

There we have it.

In a society where marriage was in a mess, and where men were divorcing their wives for trivial reasons, these paragons of virtue wanted to talk about rights. Jesus stumped them by in effect retorting:  "It is never right to divorce your wife."

The only thing that God intends and the only thing in God’s eyes that can bear the load of being called "right," is a life-long relationship of committed love.  Such can only happen in an environment of shared grace, where forgiveness and respect is ever present.

So, Jesus is not so much forbidding divorce as driving us to recognize our inability to fulfill the perfect law of God, and then offering us grace.  Grace is the remarkable alternative to legalistic self-righteousness.  In matters of marriage and divorce, as in all other ethical issues, we fail often, yet can gladly avail ourselves of the liberating grace of God, through Christ Jesus our Saviour.

Let me quote from one of my favourite New Testament scholars Eduard Schweizer:

"A legalistic requirement forbidding divorce does not help...but also a freedom in which a man can avoid the confession of guilt is even less beneficial.”

He then goes on to say:

“Divorce can be a sign of repentance by which two people face up to their failure. It can be a confession that they have not succeeded in living according to God’s will.  Divorce can therefore set one free to experience the mercy of God."

SUMMING UP

I believe that at one level, Jesus was confronting the male arrogance which had made divorce primarily a male privilege.  He was angry with their treatment of women.  His words about divorce and the hardness of men’s hearts are fundamentally a social justice protest.  Jesus was not putting a ban on divorce.  He was putting a ban on self-righteousness.

At a basic level, all of us has have committed adultery.  That is, we have watered down the perfect, beautiful, loving will of God on a dozen different moral issues.  Every one of us has compromised thousands of times.  Only when we stop trying to put ourselves in the right, when we cease asking "when is it lawful to do less than the best?" do we open up our minds and hearts the renovating mercy of God.  Then we are enabled to get on with life, gratefully and gracefully.

   

This is the Good News.   

The Authority of the Bible

A few Sundays ago I was preaching on Divorce and remarriage, and was confronted by the words of Jesus that said in effect that divorce was never right, and yet in most western Christian communities it has almost disappeared as an issue.  

Now if any of you are a bit like me, and have moved from being quite legalistic about divorce and remarriage into a position of understanding and permitting it, I wonder if you, too, have struggled with a wondering if you have done a bad thing to the Bible by disregarding something that Jesus seems to have said very specifically.

This strikes at our sense of the authority of the Bible and raises a question for us — "How can we

do what seems to be the opposite and not undermine the authority of the Bible?"

I have struggled with this question, mainly because l have never clearly thought through a framework for understanding what authority the Bible has.  For most of us there are two central planks in the

authority of the Bible - God wrote it, and it is infallibly correct. Anyone who disregards the text or its plain meaning is undermining its authority.

My seminary training taught me a different view of the text, but it didn't give me an alternative

understanding of the authority of the text; and just recently someone wrote something that makes so much sense about it that I want to share it with you before l unpick this issue of divorce and remarriage.

Clearly, the text of the Bible was written by men (there is some suspicion that Priscilla may have

written Hebrews, l think), but as an easy example, when Paul wrote the letter to the Galatians he

was not writing Holy Scripture.  He was writing a letter to some friends to help them as a

community of Christians.  For him The Psalms and the Prophets were the Scriptures. 

Similarly, when King David and others wrote the Psalms, they were not writing Scripture. For

them, only the first five books of the bible were Scripture.

The process by which these texts were elevated to sacred texts was progressive and took a long

time.  In the case of what we call the Old Testament, at first there was just the Torah -— Genesis to

Deuteronomy — then they added the Psalms and some of the Prophets and finally some of the

later prophets and the writings like Job and Esther.  This took about 600 years and even then

some people want to leave bits out that others wanted in.

In the case of the New Testament the decision to include post-Jesus writings to the Old Testament

didn't happen for several hundred years, and it all took three or four goes at deciding on the in-group of texts, and then Luther and others wanted to get rid of James and we still have a difference of opinion in the church about the Apocryphal books.

So, what is it that gives these texts their authority?

I was recently reminded that the authority comes from the determination by our forefathers in the faith that these texts should be regarded as sacred texts.  They were not saying they were written by God, as some religions do with their texts - the Quran and The Book of Mormon, for example - but they were saying these texts give us a great basis for discovering what God wants of us.

The task we have, as have God’s people have had throughout all time, is to discern from these texts how we should then live, and because the texts are constantly being considered in different times and places to when they were written, we have a complex task of interpretation.

What must I do to Inherit Eternal Life?

Some years ago I came across a series of CD recordings from a conference by Franciscan Monk, Richard Rohr and a lay-woman writer, Paula D’Arcy.

The theme of the conference, to which they spoke, was “A Spirituality for the two halves of life” and I have listened to those talks over and over again because they speak into a very deep part of my life and experience.  In some ways they gave me a vocabulary for things I knew without having the words to express or even understand them.

Many of us understand the image of life as a journey and perhaps even more so when we give some consideration of our spiritual life as a journey – and I think it is fair to say that this could be a theme common to the readings we have had today and which I would like to explore with you.

Richard Rohr and Paula D’Arcy explore the idea that when we are young, or young in the faith, we need a structure for our spirituality that is very much based or rules and good order.  It is about developing the confidence that we know we are in the right place with God.

So it is that when we were young, what we needed for our faith to flourish, was good teaching, strong community and a set structure for our spiritual life such as regular times daily for prayer and devotion, strong obligations to be along at everything happening at church and the like.

All of this gave us a great foundation to build our life of faith on – Rohr would call it a strong container.

The interesting thing is that it is almost universally the case that after a while something will happen on our journey of faith that will break the container.  We will find ourselves in places where the old rules don’t work any more.  There are now too many inconsistencies in life or contradictions that we were once blind to but which are screaming in our face for attention – the rules and structure of the old container can’t cope with them any more.

Paul D’Arcy is the speaker who tells very graphically how her container was broken.  She had grown up in a devout Catholic family where their life in Christ was the rich seedbed of their family life. 

When she was just 27 years old and expecting her second child, she was involved in a traffic accident that killed her husband and daughter.

In her grief, the container broke.

This was not supposed to happen.  She had been a good person of faith.  She had done all the right things.   This was not supposed to happen.

It took her a long time, but she gradually discovered that there were some new ways in which she could be with God, in which her spiritual life was nurtured that didn't rely on everything fitting in according to the rules.

It is into this kind of faith that Job is being called through the most incredible suffering.

It was into this kind of faith that David was called as he struggled with his sense of failure and abandonment.

And if you study the lives of the great saints of God you will generally find that there has been a transformative moment for them that is born out of suffering but in which their container was broken but they went on to discover new dimensions of life in God.  St John of the Cross is a great example – he joined a monastery at a young age and was really very good and obedient.  But something went wrong and his Abbott put him in the monastery dungeon for two years – that really broke his container.

The Hebrews reading and the Gospel tell us something about Jesus that lines up with this.

One of the themes that Hebrews emphasizes is that Jesus was fully human and experienced all the highs and lows that we count as the human journey.

In this context, I can’t help wondering what might have happened to Jesus before he took on his public life and ministry as a thirty year old.

I am sure Mary & Joseph brought him us a good Jewish boy – he would have learned the Torah by heart and known the law as well as anyone, but it is very clear from his teaching that he has moved beyond that kind of “goody-two-shoes” kind of faith that is so full of confidence because he has kept all the rules. In fact a large part of his teaching ministry seemed to be railing against those who were using the rule-keeping as a means of maintaining their own self-righteousness and burdening others for whom it no longer worked.

I don’t think Jesus could have arrived at that kind of wisdom without some kind of transformative moment born out of great trouble or grief – but we will never know what it was.

So, a man runs up to Jesus and asks:

“Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Most of us resonate positively with that question, don’t we?  I am not sure that we all understand it in the same terms, but I think we get the idea – “How can I be sure?”  He wanted some reassurance that he was getting it all right.

It is interesting that Jesus starts with the rules – the Ten Commandments – and the man is able to say that he has kept all of these from his youth – he really was a “goodie-two-shoes” wasn’t he?

And then he gets to the heart of the matter – keeping the rules doesn't matter if your heart is set on things less important than God.  This man was rich and Jesus said “Let it all go – give it away to the poor.” 

This is the pathway to life in God – driving through the rules to the things that are most important.

For some people the distraction is money, but for others it is their job, or their social standing or their power.  All sorts of things can get in the way – things that we think will make us happy, but which invariably do not.

So, Jesus’ suggestion here that the man give away his money to help the poor is much more about the man than it is about the poor – not that Jesus doesn't always seem to have his eye out for the poor.

If you listen to the teaching of Jesus you do not find him often siding with the priestly style that emphasizes the law and the rules – most often he sides with the prophetic tradition that invariably involves a challenge to the establishment and the rules.

In Micah 6:8 we have three very simple filters through which to decide what is expected of us:

            Do Justice

            Love Compassion

            Walk Humbly

Jesus was inviting this man into that space and was saying in effect that if he did that, he would find peace with God – a much better peace than he gets from keeping the rules.

If I could remind you of last week’s Gospel story where Jesus seems to have a very legalistic response to the question about divorce and remarriage.  If you look carefully at the story you will discover that Jesus’ concern was not that the Pharisees wanted to be able to divorce – with him responding that you cannot do that.  Jesus’ concern was the sense of self-righteousness that the Pharisees wanted to maintain while they were doing what was clearly unjust and unkind – condemning a woman to a life of destitution because they wanted a new wife.  Jesus ran those filters over the situation and came up with what seemed like an unexpected answer.  I don’t think he would give the same answer to a woman of today who has been beaten and abused asking if it is right for her to divorce and remarry; or to a couple who have just lost it for so long now that they really are bad for each other and need to be free to start again with someone else.  They need grace and forgiveness – and Jesus offers a freedom to receive that and move on.

But I digress.

I really like the work that Richard Rohr and Paula D’Arcy have done, although there are times when I feel like they are simply describing two different kinds of spirituality, rather than one into which we are best suited to grow into.  So long as the structure of rules and the like is not having a negative impact on a person’s life, so long as they are not just papering over the things that don’t work in order to keep the rules-framework, then they are okay and they are in the right place for the moment.

But I wanted to use these readings today to introduce you to the idea, if you didn't know it already, that there is another way of living our life in God, that generally comes out of the tragedies and struggles we have in life and that is grounded in grace and freedom. 

More than once Jesus made it clear that no amount of rule-keeping is going to get us over the line – even the best rule-keeper will have failed to satisfy the demands of the law just as much as little old you and me – and we both know we aren't very good at the rules.

And the good news is that this new way, this way of freedom and grace, enables us to respond with compassion and inclusion to all the people we meet in our journey and be willing to travel with them for a while.

The Lord be with you.