Of course, the Lord’s words in today’s gospel are difficult to hear.
Mark’s account of Jesus’s teaching on divorce and remarriage is plainly blunt, harsher than Matthew’s account. These words of Jesus, as you can imagine, have been much debated, sometimes hated, and much ignored. They are as shocking to hear now as they were to hear then.
There is much we could say about it, theologies to describe and histories to tell. A few years back some of us in the parish spent an entire year looking at the Western and Catholic (and even Protestant and secular) views of marriage; maybe it would be good to do that again. But that would require a lot reading and a quiet mind, a little bit more work than watching a YouTube video. You see, a passage like this makes for a long conversation, and we’re not good at that stuff anymore. My point is there certainly is no way I could unpack it all within the span of a homily—definitely not a Catholic homily, brief as it must be. So, of course, that means most questions will remain annoyingly unanswered. But that’s just the way it is, for this is wisdom, I’m afraid, that isn’t had on the cheap.
And so, really, all I want to do is point out how Jesus, when it comes to marriage and divorce, is unashamedly an idealist here in Mark’s Gospel. Or maybe we can be more specific and invent a term; we could call Jesus an Edenist, for that seems to be the unnuanced position he takes. What the Pharisees worried about was where Jesus stood on Deuteronomy 24, on the question of Mosaic divorce; they wanted to know his take within the interminable debates about what Moses meant about divorce and what was permissible. They wanted to know where Jesus stood in those debates; they wanted to label him one thing or the other. Much like today, you know, how the loud ones want you simply to state your party, your ideology, whatever your -ism is, so they can know how to treat you.
But Jesus doesn’t fall for that. He sides neither with the liberal or the conservative schools of thought. The idea that divorce should be easily permissible, Jesus calls that a matter of sklerokardia, hardness of heart.[1] He doesn’t go into detail here; he simply points to Eden. And this is frustrating for us, of course, for we immediately think about the messiness of our own lives, the puzzle pieces of our lives and loves that just don’t seem to fit together. And, honestly, I don’t know what to tell you here other than I am a child of divorce myself who, had my mom not married again, would not be standing here preaching to you.
And so, what am I supposed to do with that? What are you supposed to do with that? I don’t know, the only thing I can say is that I myself have found it fruitful at times to sit silently before God with the things I’ve not figured out. Not that I’ve figured anything out by doing so, by sitting there silently and sometimes painfully before God; but I have in those moments sensed—almost like hearing it—that God loves me eternally anyway, no matter how little I understand or how much a mess I’ve made of things. What I mean is that these hard words of Jesus have mysteriously brought me to know God’s mercy in a way, and I just have found that beautiful. It’s like when I hold my own child in my arms and tell her everything’s going to be okay.
And really, it’s only in knowing that beautiful mercy, in feeling it like I do, that I can be grateful that Jesus remains an idealist, an Edenist, when it comes to marriage—grateful he doesn’t preach cheap grace, that false grace that says there is no pure love, no lasting beauty, no joy in truth. I am grateful Jesus doesn’t do that. I’m grateful Jesus dares to talk about the pure love of Eden, that he holds on to it and sets it before us as the will of God for our lives. I really am thankful for that. For how is there any love otherwise if there is no such thing as pure love? “But from the beginning of creation,” Jesus said; isn’t that beautiful?[2] I really am glad he said it; it’s like light in a dark room, beauty in a room—heavenly, angelic. It is what you recognize as beautiful in the man and woman married, in their children, in the sacrament and sacrifice, in the exhaustion and joy of the Christian family: that it is Eden come again as the kingdom of God in your midst, in your homes, in the love of husband and wife and the noise of children—as the angels we do not see dance about us. Amen.
[1] Mark 10:2-5
[2] Mark 10:6
© 2024 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
