Tests. You’ve all taken them, in school, at university, or maybe even on the internet! While most of us grew up dreading the school or workplace kind, we’ve grown to love the kinds that showcase our unique personalities: the MBTI/16 Personalities, the Myers-Briggs, the SAPA, or the new, hugely popular Enneagram test.

Each kind of test is designed to reveal or highlight certain characteristics about our character, our personalities, or our emotional wellbeing. Looking at the various ways we have scored, we can potentially make better decisions about career choices, find partners who complement us, seek projects that showcase our strengths, or work on improving our weaknesses.

But some types of tests are not about self-improvement or even identifying strengths but about weeding out those who don’t conform to certain bars or standards. The legal bar, the CPA test, the SATs or GREs, even competitive sports such as swimming or Shark Tank measure our skills and place us before judges who will determine how we fare on a pre-determined scale.

Think about how many kinds of “tests” we have in our world. For some people, it would be nearly impossible to go through a single week without going through some kind of testing procedure.

Why are we so enamored of tests? While tests encourage us to improve and reach goals, they can also serve as ways to separate people into preconceived groups or to establish the control and power of the testing group as opposed to those tested.

For many of us, testing helps us to establish boundaries, rules, and guidelines to live by. Every social community lives by a set of guidelines or laws, even if they are unwritten ones. Without any guidelines, we would quickly become confused about who we are and what our purpose is. Our lives are lived within a series of frames.

That said, sometimes when rules are not benefitting a society on the whole, when certain people are the “testers” and others are the “compliers,” when the control and power of the testers grows and those following the rules feel the bar rising to impossible limits, imbalances begin to grow.

At this point, social guidelines no longer benefit a community. They only benefit those in power. Dissatisfaction begins to grow. Creativity is squelched. Voices are silenced. And people begin wilting. When  growth is stifled, testing is no longer fun, no longer a means for improvement and innovation, but has become exactly the opposite: the way to keep rising people down and competitive people invisible.

Jesus had a way of challenging these kinds of tests, rules, laws, and boxes even while messing with the heads of the testers.

In our scripture today we see a prime example of Jesus’ biblical sparring skills. The Pharisees are always trying to trip Jesus up, giving him “test” after “test” on Jewish purity laws, the oral Torah, Levitical guidelines, and the laws of Moses.  This time it was no different. They tried in vain to challenge him with scripture, but Jesus always had a witty answer that would provoke and surprise them. Jesus not only knew the scriptures inside and out, but he also knew the social and religious-political issues buoying the power of the Temple lot, and he knew the suffering of those who were excluded from this “insider” politic: the ill, the infirm, the widowed, the divorced, the orphaned, the poor, especially women and children, the powerless of the powerless.So when they come to him again to trap him, a devout Jewish rabbi, with Jewish rules on divorce, Jesus is ready for them.

But to understand this “test,” we need to understand a little bit about these “divorce” rules of the time.

In Jesus’ day and long after (even still in the 19^th century), women could not own property, make major decisions, or survive reasonably on their own. This is the reason for so much emphasis in the Jewish tradition on taking care of orphans and widows. In fact, rules were set up so that women would be taken care of. The levirate marriage stated that if a woman’s husband died, one of his brothers or another member of his family would be under obligation to take her as his wife, so that she would be taken care of. This was considered the honorable thing to do. To lose one’s husband then would be disastrous for a woman if she had no living parents or brothers, or if her husband divorced her.

Women could not ask for a divorce. Only a man could divorce a woman. The usual reason a man might divorce a woman was due to infertility. Because of the emphasis on bearing children in order to carry on a family name, and a family business, this quality was all-important. People in those days understood nothing about male and female fertility, and so if a woman could not get pregnant, the fault was set at the woman’s feet. Often a charge would be trumped up against her, such as adultery or disrespect, so that a man could divorce her and marry a more fertile woman. This however often was a sentence of poverty for her.

So, when the Pharisees came to Jesus wanting him to sanction their divorce laws, using scripture to back up their practices, Jesus –always sly as a serpent but gentle as a dove—knew what to say: “Moses wrote this commandment for you, because of your unyielding hearts.”

They had started out asking him, “Does the Law allow a man to divorce his wife?” The Pharisees were testing Jesus to see if he would uphold the scripture, the scripture they had chosen to back up their corrupt practices toward women.

Jesus answered, “What did Moses command you?”

They answered, “Moses allowed a man to write a divorce certificate and to divorce his wife.”

Instead of Jesus nodding in agreement and satisfying their powerlust however, Jesus replies: “Moses wrote this commandment for you, because of your unyielding hearts.”

God gave you a commandment because you need guidelines. Otherwise, you’ll behave even worse than you do already toward the powerless in your midst.

“Humans must not pull apart what God has put together,” Jesus said.

Jesus knew how to uphold the laws of scripture and yet challenge the Pharisees’ interpretation and misuse of them at the same time! Yet again, the Pharisees could not thwart him. Their tests could not fell him.

What is Jesus’ trick? For every question about law, Jesus gives a relational answer. For every legal challenge, Jesus challenges back with a relational counter. While laws and guidelines are there for us, because we are a people who need structure to know who we are and to understand our goals and each other, our greatest goal is our relationships.

God made everything and everyone to be in relationship. And this is where we find true growth, truth, revelation about who we truly are, and joy as a people and as a community.

Every generation from Jesus’ time onward has in some way looked to scripture to back up personal, human-designed, power structures. Whether benign laws like the “Blue Laws” or deeply harmful laws allowing slavery, these systems and legal allowances have undergirded their “tests,” their power, and their control by quoting scripture.

And we still are doing it today.

But Jesus teaches us today, the scriptures were not written to be used as “tests,” or “laws,” or “power wielding sentences.” They were used to teach us about who we are in relationship with God, who we are in relationship with the world, who we are in relationship with each other, and who we are in relationship even with ourselves. The moment we begin to use them as weapons, that’s the moment we have entirely misunderstood the scriptures, and the One who wrote them.

Jesus came to us declaring a new kind of covenant, and a new kind of community –one based in mutual love, care, respect, and peace.

May we revel in the joy of the scriptures, and the Truths they reveal about us and about our lives. But even more so, may we revel in the joy of Jesus, our Savior –our Way, our Truth, and our Life.  Advocate of Truth. Advocate of all.