Mark 10:1-12
Think about all your relationships.
There were probably some people you grew up with, who were close friends, and you thought you would always be friends. And then life happens. You grow in different ways. You make decisions; they make choices. You both become different people. You grow apart.
There were probably some people you met in college, with whom you grew close. You were older. It wasn't high school anymore. You were more sophisticated. You got a little smarter. People in the dorm or a class seemed attractive as far as friendship goes. Then college ends. You and your friends graduated. Maybe got married. Life and miles and occupations happen. You just grew apart.
You make friends over Facebook. You shoot quirky messages back and forth. You get to know each other. But the more you communicate, the less you realize you have in common with that other person. Or maybe they are someone you know, but they go all Facebook nasty on you. So you "unfriend" them. Cut them off from your Facebook world. It happens.
So many of the relationships we have through life change and go by the wayside. We may feel sad about that. We may say, "That's life; that's just the way it is." The loss of some relationships may not bother us a whole lot. Other relationship losses may create a deep sadness. But most loss of relationships, for whatever reason, just basically get absorbed in the ebb and flow of life. We take those changes as a matter of course.
Except one. Except one relationship. Marriage. When married couples split, and end their relationship, and go through the whole divorce process, the weight of that break up carries more stigma and social damage than if you "unfriended" someone, either on Facebook or more visibly from your circle of friends.
To say to a long time friend, "I am no longer going to have anything to do with you," just doesn't carry the weight of saying the same thing to a spouse. To say, "We just grew apart," in describing a friendship ending just isn't the same as making that same statement about the one you are married to. People might nod their head in understanding if you say that about the end of a friendship. You may not get the same knowing nod when you say that out loud about your marriage partner.
A marriage relationship comes with much higher expectations and deeper resolves. So when the marriage ends in divorce, as it does for half of us, there is more stigma, more shame, more misunderstanding and lack of understanding and empathy, than when other kinds of relationships end or slowly go their separate ways.
A large part of the reason for this is we don't stand up in front of a group of people at church when we declare we are pledging our friendship to another person. We don't have a celebrative ceremony or rite for promising our lifelong friendship. But we do when we get married. We stand "before God and these witnesses" to pledge our undying and eternal love for each other as a married couple. Because of that ceremony, we feel a deeper sense of regret and shame when that promise and vow just doesn't work out--for one reason or another.
Divorce has always been a great difficulty for couples and families to deal with. So much so that a number of sociologists and psychologists have been writing lately, wondering if human beings are even capable of such a "forever" kind of relationship.
It certainly was so back in Jesus' day. Divorce was a huge issue. A totally unresolved issue. There were two major schools of Rabbis that had two very different outlooks about divorce. The school of the rabbi Shammai taught that divorce should be allowed solely if there was adultery involved. If one or both in a couple were unfaithful, that was an unrepairable breach in the marriage, and it could and should be dissolved.
But the other school of the rabbi Hillel, one of the most famous of rabbi's in Jewish history, taught that divorce should be allowed for any reason that would cause the marriage to be broken. And since the rights of the marriage laid more heavily in the husbands favor, if the wife repeatedly burned the meal, or he didn't like how his wife was raising the children, or if the wife talked funny, papers would be written up and the wife was out.
Guess which school of rabbi's teaching on divorce was more popular at the time of Jesus.
Even though the divorce papers had to be approved by the Sanhedrin (the Jewish court made up of priests and Pharisees) the divorces were nearly always approved in favor of the husband.
One of the main pieces of scriptural law that the Sanhedrin used in approving a divorce was Deuteronomy 24:1, which reads:
If a man marries a woman and then it happens that he no longer likes her because he has found something wrong with her, he may give her divorce papers, put them in her hand, and send her off.
The main point of discussion from this verse, between the two schools of rabbi's was that little phrase, "...found something wrong with her..." What exactly does that mean? This statement is from Moses, remember, so it carries a lot of weight. Moses doesn't give any further description of what "something wrong" might be. And I'm sure, especially if you are a woman, you heard quite clearly, "...something wrong with her." Not him. Certainly husbands can do no wrong.
Although, there is that modern saying, "If a husband speaks in the woods, and his wife isn't there to hear him, is he still wrong?"
So divorce is one of those sticky, long-time issues (and I mean long-time) that just won't go away. Is divorce permitted, and if so, for what reason? That's the question the Pharisees came up and hit Jesus with: "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?"
Mark told us that the Pharisees asked this question to "test" Jesus. The word means to scrutinize. It doesn't appear that the Pharisees were out to trap Jesus, like they did time-after-time. They just wanted to know if Jesus sided with the Hillel or Shammai rabbinical school on this prickly issue of divorce. It's not clear if Jesus would have gotten in trouble with his answer, if that answer sided with one Rabbi or the other.
It appears Jesus sided with Shammai. That Jesus went along with the stricter definition of divorce. Maybe that's what the Pharisees were hoping, since it was the more unpopular interpretation of Moses' words. Jesus' answer would clearly make him unpopular with the people who liked the more "liberal" interpretation of divorce-for-any-reason.
But, as what usually happens with Jesus, he undercuts both schools of thought at the time, and establishes his own. Look again at Jesus' full reply:
But Jesus said to them, "For your hardness of heart, Moses wrote you this commandment. 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. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder." (10:5-9)
First, there are a couple of words I want you to pay attention to. They actually are the same word, occurring at the start of two of Jesus' statements. It is the word, "But..." Think back to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. There was a part of that sermon where Jesus does a back-and-forth thing where he says, "You have heard that the Law of Moses says...But I say to you..." The two Buts at the start of Jesus' teaching about divorce, thus signals for us that Jesus is about to make one of his great reversals.
The first reversal is to interpret Moses entirely different. The Pharisees were reading the verse in Deuteronomy as law from the very mouth of Moses. But Jesus discounts Moses by saying that Moses didn't utter this statement as if from the mouth of God, but simply because Moses felt like he had to make a concession to the total waywardness of the people. Moses wasn't making law, Jesus was saying. Moses was simply throwing up his hands at the total lack of commitment exhibited by the people in their marriage relationships. Moses was giving in, while still trying to put forth at least a remnant of marital morality.
So Jesus' first "But" had to do with the Pharisee's total misinterpretation and misreading of Moses. Moses' statement about divorce said more about the misguided and self-centered people rather than Moses' authority to issue a law on the subject of divorce.
Which leads us to the second "But" in Jesus statement. Jesus' second "But" was followed by a quote from Genesis about God's intentions for marriage. If the Pharisees were smart enough they would have realized Jesus was saying Moses doesn't even get a say about defining what marriage is all about and what it takes to dissolve that special relationship. Jesus is forcing the Pharisees--and the disciples and the people listening in--to understand Moses isn't the authority on this issue. God is. God created marriage--created the male-female relationship--so it is God who must be consulted in all things concerning marriage.
So, what Jesus does to turn the tables, is first remove Moses and his statement from the acceptable justifications made for divorce. Only God gets to do that. Then, Jesus further upends the tables by telling what God's purposes are for marriage, not what God's allowances are for divorce. That's where the emphasis should be--on God's purposes for marriage.
The first thing Jesus said about marriage is that it involves a male and a female. God intentionally made two distinct genders. God didn't make just one gender. Instead, there was something that God definitely had in mind by creating two different kinds of humans.
Jesus then goes on to say that the intention of God for making two distinct genders was so that they could come together. The word Jesus used for coming together literally means to be glued together. God's intentions for the two genders--for a man and a woman--is to be glued, or stuck, together. That these two genders will leave their parental, growing up family world, and be glued together so-to-speak.
And finally, as Jesus is defining what a marriage relationship is here, that the two different genders will become "one flesh." The word one means one, but in terms of cardinal. Like we would use that term in a sentence like, "This is the cardinal rule." This is the one, most important thing to remember. So, "one flesh" would be like saying, "This is the one cardinal relationship--two very distinct genders, coming together as if they were glued together, to form the one foundational and cardinal of all relationships.
And who did all this? God. This cardinal relationship of a man and woman being solidified together is the work of God, and done by the very intentions of God to form the basis of all other existing relationships. All other relationships flow out of this one cardinal, basic relationship of a man and a woman coming together in a permanent unity under God.
Then Jesus makes the ultimate statement: "What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate." In other words, we don't get to mess with God's intentions and creation of the marriage relationship. We shouldn't be looking at all the ways we can creatively mess with that relationship that God created. Instead we should be concentrating on what God intended for that marriage relationship: a unity, a glue, for all subsequent relationships to flow out of that one, cardinal relationship of a man and a woman.
Without the strength of that one, cardinal, God built relationship, all other relationships that use the marriage relationship of a man and a woman as a foundation, will fall into ruin and disrepair.
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