I enjoy humor about married couples.
Comedian Brian Kiley said recently, “I love being married. When I was single, I got so sick of finishing my own sentences.”
A pastor was teaching on Proverbs 16:24 which reads like this: “Pleasant words are as a honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.”
The minister then added, “In other words, you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”
One woman in the congregation put this advice to work immediately. She leaned over, put her head on husband’s shoulder and whispered in his ear, “I just love to watch your muscles ripple when you take out the garbage.”
Our lesson from Mark’s Gospel is about marriage. It is also about the more painful subject of divorce.
A man tells about browsing in a Christian bookstore one day. He discovered a shelf of reduced‑price items. Among these items was a little figurine of a man and woman, their heads lovingly tilted toward one another. The figurine was obviously designed to be a gift.
“HAPPY 10TH ANNIVERSARY” read the inscription. It appeared to be in perfect condition, yet there was a tag on it which said, “DAMAGED.”
Examining it more closely, he found another tag underneath this tag that explained what was damaged. The tag said simply, “WIFE IS COMING UNGLUED.” (1) Well, it’s evident in our society today, that not only are some husbands and wives coming unglued, their marriages are, too.
I suspect the fragility of families today partially explains the nostalgia many people have for the 1950s. We live in a world very different from those seemingly innocent days of the ’50s. Oh, in some ways things are better. Technology has added to our lives such things as HD-TVs, smart phones and other material goodies. With these changes, however, have come longer working hours, more stress, more meals away from home, more disposable income and less free time to enjoy it. One change has been particularly noticeable the destruction of many families.
A few of you remember the days of black and white television when television networks carried shows like “Father Knows Best” and “Ozzie and Harriet.” The norm for these programs was a family with a working husband and a wife who stayed at home lovingly devoted to her husband and her children. At least that was the image the media portrayed. Most families even then were not as idyllic as the sitcoms portrayed them.
Nevertheless, we live in an altogether different world today a world of single parent families, two income families, blended families and latchkey kids. Divorce, almost unheard of during the 1950s now affects 60% of the children in America before they reach eighteen. (2)
Everyone is this room has probably been touched by divorce or a dysfunctional marital relationship in one way or another. You may have been through a divorce yourself. Or perhaps it’s been your son or daughter, your sister or brother or a close friend. You may be a child of divorced parents, or perhaps you bear scars not from a divorce, but from a father and mother who maintained their marriage relationship but were so abusive to one another that it would have been better if their marriage had never taken place.
So Jesus’ teachings on marriage and divorce are important to you even if you have decided to remain single. Perhaps, if you are divorced, Jesus’ teachings have been used against you, and you have had pain added to the heartbreak of a broken marital relationship by the reaction of so-called Christian family members or friends. As someone has said, we are the only army that shoots its wounded. That’s not altogether true, but let’s wrestle with Jesus’ teachings for a few moments, even though they may trouble some of us.
Some Pharisees came to test Jesus. They were not honest seekers who were coming to learn from him. They were enemies who were trying to catch him in violation of the Law of Moses. They tested him by asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”
You need to understand that divorce was quite common in Jesus’ time, just as it is today. It was a different social situation from our own, however. Women were basically property. Often they were sold by their families to men whom they thought would bring the family land and other real property. And as property, women were sometimes disposed of quite cruelly.
The beautiful picture from the first chapters of Genesis of woman created from man’s side as an equal in the marital relationship had never quite been realized. Some say it still hasn’t been realized. Notice that the Pharisees didn’t ask, “Is it lawful for a man and woman to divorce?” They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” It would be unthinkable in that culture for a woman to divorce her husband.
Marriage was unequal. Still, it was about all the legal protection that a woman had. If her husband threw her out, a woman would probably be consigned to a life of abject poverty. If she had no family to take her in, she would starve, or turn to begging or prostituting herself to survive. She might even lose her children since the children too were property of their fathers.
These one-sided arrangements were protected by the religious establishment. Oh, to be sure, there was controversy in the religious community over reasons why husbands could divorce their wives. One prominent rabbi named Shammi said that divorce was allowable only for adultery and infertility. However, another prominent rabbi named Hillel taught that anything the woman did that displeased her husband was grounds for divorce. Burn the toast? Scratch the bumper of the car? “You’re outta here!” This was the historical situation. This helps explain Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees.
“What did Moses command you?” Jesus asked, turning the question back to the Pharisees.
They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.”
To this Jesus gave an interesting answer that surely shocked the Pharisees. “It was because your hearts were hard,” he said, “that Moses wrote you this law.”
What did Jesus mean by this? Think of it this way. In the time of Moses, men were abandoning their wives. And why not? If they were simply property, why not trade them in for the latest model? Human nature really has not changed much over the past 3500 years. In light of what was already happening among the people, Moses commanded the men to at least give the woman they were abandoning a certificate of divorce. That way she would at least be free to remarry. Without that certificate, technically she was still the property of her former husband. So Moses was trying in a small way to give women some protection. Not enough, quite obviously, but it was a step in the right direction.
However, Jesus wanted the Pharisees to know that Moses did not go far enough. What Jesus wanted them to see was that even the religious scholars had missed the whole point of the relationship between men and women. People are not property, regardless of their gender. People are not things to be used and then disposed of. Relationships are sacred, especially the marriage relationship. Jesus doesn’t appeal to the Law of Moses as his authority. He goes farther back to the story of creation.
“It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” he says to them. Then he goes back to the second chapter of Genesis. “But at the beginning of creation,” Jesus continues, “God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Did you catch that? He’s not talking about property rights. He’s not talking about legalities. He’s talking about two people merging not their real estate, but their hearts, their souls, their minds. Isn’t that how most of us approached the marriage relationship those of us who are married or have been married? We sincerely wanted to become one with our partner.
If that is not how you approached marriage, then shame on you. If you got married with the idea up front that, “Oh, well, if this doesn’t work out, I can move on to someone else” you’re too immature and self-involved for marriage in the first place. We approach God’s altar and ask God’s blessing on our choice of a bride or groom with the idea that this is the one and this is forever. That’s why the breakup of a marriage is so painful. So much hope, so much faith, so much love was invested in this relationship for some people it is as if the very heart is torn out of them.
Jesus wants us to see that, right from the very beginning, this was what God wanted for His children. The marriage relationship is God’s gift to us. It is God’s way of providing a lover, a helpmate, someone who will always be there for us. God never intended for men to treat women like property or women to treat men like that for that matter even if it was encoded in the Mosaic Law. God has something much, much better in mind for us. “So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Considering the mores of the society of Jesus’ time, when women still could be abandoned so easily, this was quite a shocking teaching. Even the disciples asked Jesus to clarify what he meant. His reply to his disciples was even more pointed, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.” In other words, he was saying to his disciples, “Forget everything you’ve ever heard about marriage and divorce. Here is how it is. Marriage is a sacred event. Divorce is a sin.”
Those are strong words. I know they make me uncomfortable. But notice this: if anybody ever asks you, “What does the Bible say about divorce?” tell them quite properly, it depends on where you look. Moses says in Deuteronomy 24:1, a man can give his wife a certificate of divorce and walk away, having fulfilled the law. Then Jesus says that, if you divorce and remarry, it is adultery. Then St. Paul, who, remember, wrote years after Christ’s death and resurrection, in I Corinthians 7:10-16 suggests that it would be acceptable for a believer to divorce an unbeliever. So we have three different views on this important subject by the three leading lights in Scripture. Of course, Jesus is the one true light so we have to give his teaching priority.
But notice that St. Paul felt emboldened to amend Jesus’ teaching. This says to me that he understood that Jesus was not giving us a legalistic formula for marriage and divorce when he gave this answer to the Pharisees. He was answering a specific question within a specific context. The Pharisees were looking for a loophole. “Is it legal for a man to divorce his wife?” Jesus didn’t really worry that much about what was legal. He worried more about the effect of divorce on people. Good people were being damaged by the abuses of the marriage contract in his time. He wanted them to see that this was not what God intended marriage to be. Marriage is a gift God has bestowed upon human beings the gift of sexuality, the gift of a lasting relationship, the gift of affirming love. Jesus wanted them to focus on the gift and not the law.
Divorce happens. It shouldn’t happen, perhaps, but it does. Jesus knew that. He acknowledged that when he spoke of Moses and the hardness of human hearts. Moses gave his edict because he knew how people were. Some men were going to cast off their wives. And, given the chance, some women will cast off their husbands. Not every marriage is made in heaven. Some couples marry for all the wrong reasons. People sin. People fail. People fall. That’s why we have forgiveness. That’s why we have grace.
Does Jesus condemn divorced people? Is it adultery if a divorced person remarries? Well, even if you take it literally that it is adultery, remember that Jesus said that even to look upon a woman with lust in your heart is adultery (Matthew 5:28). Jesus wanted us to focus on the condition of a person’s heart, not a legalistic approach to life. And listen again to his words in John 8 to the woman who was caught in the very act of adultery, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
So, even if we interpret Jesus’ words literally to mean that remarriage of a divorced person is a sin, forgiveness is available there is no condemnation not by the Master. And if not by the Master, then who dares condemn the divorced person? If the tragedy of divorce has happened in your life, don’t listen to the legalistic Pharisee who would kick you when you are down. Divorce is not God’s plan for God’s children, but divorced people are loved by God just as much as the purest saint.
But let’s get back to Jesus main point. Marriage is a gift from God. It is not intended to be a burden but a blessing. It can be the most wonderful thing that happens to us if our hearts are one with each other as marriage partners, and our hearts are one with God.
A few years ago, there was a man whose wife became seriously ill with Alzheimer’s disease. She completely lost all of her memory and her ability to remember who she was or who anyone else was. She was in a nursing home and her husband came by to sit beside her bed and be beside her every day.
One of his sons told him that he didn’t need to keep doing that because she didn’t remember who she was and she didn’t remember who he was. The man said: “I know she doesn’t remember anything, but I do. I remember who she is and I remember who I am. I am the husband who said to her 55 years ago, I will love and cherish you for better or worse and in sickness and health. And I intend to do just that.” (3)
What a gift that man was giving to his wife, a gift like unto one that many of us may one day be required to give to the person we love. Even more importantly what a gift God offers humanity a lifelong partner to help us through life’s joys and sorrows. It doesn’t always work that way, even for the best of people. Divorce happens. It doesn’t make God happy, but neither does it change God’s love for the persons involved. And it shouldn’t change our attitude toward them either.
1. Gayle Urban in Edward K. Rowell, 1001 Quotes, Illustrations, and Humorous Stories (Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Group, 2008), p. 345.
2. Larry Davies, Sowing Seeds of Faith in a World Gone Bonkers (Amelia Court House, VA: ABM Enterprises, Inc., 1996), pp. 169-170.
3. Rev. Dr. William S. Shillady, http://www.parkavemethodist.org/sermon.php?s=16.