It’s unlikely you’ve heard of John Beukels, the charismatic Anabaptist leader of the German city of Münster in the 1530s, from the early years of the Reformation.
His story is one of the darkest of that time; the authority and teaching of the Catholic Church dismantled, thanks to Luther, these early years of the Reformation was a time not only of new freedoms but also new extremes, some of them brutal and bloody, like those brought to Münster by this self-appointed prophet.
Gaining political leadership of the city, he declared Münster the “new chosen Israel,” instituting also the practice of polygamy. “Be fruitful and multiply” was the idea; Beukels wanted the city’s population to reach 144,000, and so he thought the more wives for each man the better: “the man with the most wives was the best Christian,” he said. This, of course, unsurprisingly, lent itself to the most brutal human debauchery; the rest of the story of John Beukels and Münster—that is, up until the city was occupied by an army and Buekels executed—reads like something from ISIS or the Taliban, of crimes so dark and grotesque I cannot describe them.[1]
It was the last great experiment with polygamy in the Christian West until the Mormons in the nineteenth century. It’s something many don’t realize, that early in the Protestant Reformation, polygamy was counseled and practiced among some. Luther counseled Henry VIII, for example, that in his unique case he should be allowed to “marry a second queen.”[2] Later, Luther would write, “I prefer bigamy to divorce.”[3] He also counseled Philip of Hesse to take a second, much younger, wife, but to marry her quietly.[4] And Luther here was not alone in thinking like this; it would take the much more brilliant John Calvin to put a stop to this nonsense. Once the Catholic sacramental idea of marriage had been destroyed, such was the theoretical chaos—and in Münster’s case, the bloody chaos—which followed. It was a time of social upheaval, of instability at every level of society.
And at the heart of the chaos were questions about love and marriage. Seasons of confusion are not new to humanity and history, and especially on this topic. Early Syrian Christianity, for instance, in the early third century; the Protestant Reformation; our own era: it happens from time to time—revolution, paradigms shifted, twisted, or broken. It’s funny how these questions of love and marriage, and related things, are always socially disruptive, socially chaotic. We may think ours an age entirely new, but it isn’t. It’s more just a fever, but the body is the same, and human nature remains, just as Aristotle said.
In Jesus’s day things were confused too, debated at least—especially the question of divorce and remarriage. Some looked at divorce liberally, some conservatively; it was a topic dividing rabbis as well as ordinary Jews. In today’s gospel we see the Pharisees trying to lure Jesus into this apparently complicated and contentious debate. What position will Jesus take, liberal or conservative? That’s what they’re trying to do, to put Jesus into one sort of category or the other. “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”[5] What does Jesus think? With whom will he side? That’s what happens when things are confused; fools insist on certainty, parties are formed, orthodoxies are established and enforced.
But, of course, Jesus has none of it. At least as Mark tells it, Jesus cuts through the complicated chaos, going primitive, pointing to the original love born in creation in man and woman in Eden. He says that God is the author of marriage, and so, therefore, it can’t be undone by humans or human authority.[6] As I said, Jesus here is blunt and simple and plain, unnuanced. Which, of course, infuriated those listening, as it still does even today.
Now, at this point, I don’t know what to say to you. Myself a child of divorce, son of a loving step-father, I don’t know what to say. It’s clear ours is an age of confusion made worse by a glut of tweeting, confident fools. Ours is an age in which most Christians haven’t the faintest familiarity with the Bible or with Church teaching, clueless about things like the theology of marriage. And it’s clear Jesus had something to say about marriage, that he called his disciples to practice primitive, pristine love; he called us to believe that marriage is made by God. It’s also clear Jesus’s teaching on marriage isn’t really accepted in practice by many, not beyond lip service. I don’t say this as a matter of judgement; I count myself a sharer in this confusion. It’s why I think we hear today’s gospel and have no idea what to make of it. Because Jesus is simple, and we don’t want to be.
I’ve said it before: as a preacher, I’ve discovered that sometimes I have to point out how I can’t really preach the gospel; because, if I did, you’d hate it. Or, better said, I’ve discovered that sometimes the gospel is so foreign to how we think, that we can’t really make any sense of it at all; we just blink and get on with the zeitgeist. And that’s really the challenge we Christians face, those of us who want to be Christians genuinely and not just culturally; and that’s how to prepare ourselves to encounter the real gospel, the real teachings of Jesus and the Church, by being honest about how far we are from it. How do we clear the mind and the heart of the clutter of our preconceptions and cultural assumptions? How do we begin to listen to Jesus?
This, of course, is a big question; and, again, I don’t have all the answers. However, I do think there’s one way we can begin to listen to Jesus more clearly, and that’s to do away with sentimentality. You’ve heard me talk of sentimentality before; and the way I use it, it’s never a good word. And that’s because sentimentality is the habit of thinking and acting upon feelings without regard to truth. Feelings, of course, aren’t bad, but when empty of truth, they can be trouble. Sentimentality is the false assumption that we can be loving and kind without also being truthful.[7] It’s the assumption that Jesus didn’t really mean what he said; that what only matters is how you feel and whether you’re polite. It’s the refusal to believe that Jesus actually said some very hard and demanding things, and that the Church does too; and that these hard and demanding things may actually be good for us, even though, at first, we may not like them. It’s the refusal to believe the Church can tell you no, and that sometimes she should.
At the end of the day, sentimentality is the smiling, sweet refusal of humility, which is why it’s so dangerous. Because humility, as the gospels make clear, is necessary for faith. Without humility, Jesus said, we’re blind; and on top of it, arrogant and proud. Which is our problem, mine as much as anyone’s. And it’s why I don’t have much to say about the chaos of today, or about what Jesus would say; because at present we’re not humble enough to listen to each other, much less God. Such is true of all of us, even that overconfident progressive and that loud conservative.
It’s why the best I can tell you is to sit down, get low and get quiet and get humble. Because until we do, we’ll remain blind fools in a world only growing darker. And because it’s the only way you’ll see Jesus, the truth and the light—by being humble—the Jesus who loves you, but who can only love you in truth. Because that’s the only sort of love he is. Amen.
[1] John Witte, Jr., The Western Case for Monogamy Over Polygamy, 220-223
[2] Ibid., 208
[3] Ibid., 211
[4] Ibid., 216
[5] Mark 10:2
[6] Mark 10:6-9
[7] Stanley Hauerwas, The Character of Virtue, 47
© 2021 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
