October 8, 2006 - 18th Sunday after Pentecost - Reverend Johnson

A pastor was visiting the fourth-grade Sunday School class to talk about marriage as part of the lesson for that morning. He asked the class, "What does God say about marriage?" Immediately one boy shot up his hand and replied . . . "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do"!

I must confess I feel a little bit like that this morning -- that is, I'm not sure I know what I'm doing. I am a divorced man. And I have re-married. And, believe me, that doesn¹t make it any easier to deal with this morning's gospel lesson. Furthermore, I recognize that for a sizable number of you listening to me this morning, our society does not even allow you to marry -- and California's version of divorce for domestic partners, is a big mess. So, that's a problem.

To be sure, I could avoid the whole business and preach a smarmy sermon about Jesus and the little children. But that would be copping out, wouldn't it?

So, having acknowledged the difficulties, I ask you to bear with me as we try to mine this passage for that "moment of grace" that always does come from an encounter with Jesus.

"Some Pharisees came up to Jesus in order to test him. They asked; "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife."

I invite you to keep in mind two things regarding this passage from Mark's Gospel.

First, it is a man's game. The conversation started with the Pharisees asking if it were lawful for a man to divorce his wife. It was about men's rights. In that era in Jewish culture, divorce was largely the prerogative of men, not women.

As far as I can remember there were only three grounds on which a woman could divorce her husband: If a Jewish man wanted to leave the holy land and go and live in a pagan country, she could refuse and seek divorce. If the man embraced another religion, the wife could divorce him. The third ground for divorce -- I think -- was if the man committed blasphemy.

On the other hand, men had numerous grounds. And . . . women had no right of reply. If a man found anything "unseemly" in his wife, all he had to do was to write out a statement of divorce, listing the grounds, get it witnessed by another man, and then send the wife away. This put a woman in a perilous situation. She was disgraced in the community; her family was not likely to take her back. If she could not quickly find another husband, her options were either to become a servant, a beggar, or turn to prostitution to keep alive. So when Jesus speaks about divorce in his social environment; it should be heard as a vigorous protest against a grave social injustice.

Secondly, back to basics. Jesus immediately drives the Pharisees back to basics. They wanted to have a discussion about their rights under the regulations of Moses. Jesus redirected their attention from the compromises and confusions that happen when relationships don't work well, and he pointed them back to God. That is the only valid starting point as far as Christ was concerned. What does God see as the best possible way of life? Togetherness; an ever-growing love through a life of mutual cherishing. That is the goal.

There is a yawning gulf between Jesus and legalistic religion. Like their imitators in today's world, some of the Pharisees always wanted to be in the right. They expected to get from Jesus a list of conditions under which they could divorce their wives and feel very righteous about it. That was their thing; the thing that gave them a buzz. They had to be in the right. It was not only in matters of divorce that they saw things this way. It applied to every other moral and religious issue. They were fanatical about justifying themselves. Therefore they were continually looking for 'mitigating circumstances'. For it was such mitigating circumstances, deduced from the laws of Moses, that allowed them to maintain their high and mighty self-righteousness.

So, there we have it. In a society where marriage was in a mess, and where men were divorcing their wives for trivial reasons, these paragons of virtue wanted to talk about rights. Jesus stumped them by in effect saying: The only thing that God intends, and the only thing in God's eyes that can bear the load of being called "right," is a life-long relationship of committed love. And that can only happen in an environment of shared grace, where forgiveness and respect is ever present.

You might think that Jesus is being very hard. And He is. But that is the only way Jesus can be if he is a man of utter love. You see, all this talk about our rights is a self-deception which prevents us from achieving profound self-honesty, and from dealing with our own failings and those around us, cleanly and therapeutically.

The Pharisees came wanting a debate about legitimate grounds on which a man could discard his wife. They demanded grounds that would enable them to feel righteous if they should be involved in a divorce. "Teacher," they say, "when is divorce right?"

"Never!" That's certainly what Jesus' reply means. He tells them that Moses allowed it only because of "the hardness of men's hearts." It is a compromise; a concession to the folly and sin of human beings. But that is not how God intended things to be. From the beginning God wanted us to live together in harmony. That is the aim. That is always the goal.

Jesus is not so much forbidding divorce as driving us to recognize our inability to fulfill the perfect law of God -- and then offering us grace. Grace is the remarkable alternative to legalistic self righteousness. In all the ethical issues we face in life, we fail often, yet we can gladly avail ourselves of the liberating grace of God, through Christ Jesus our Savior.

I believe that at one level, Jesus was confronting the male arrogance which had made divorce primarily a male privilege. He was angry with their treatment of women. His words about divorce and the hardness of men's hearts are a social justice protest.

But even more they are a protest against moral and religious legalism, which does not draw you closer to God but pushes you further away.

Jesus was not putting a ban on divorce. He was putting a ban on self righteousness.

At a basic level, all of us have committed adultery. That is, we have watered down the perfect, beautiful, loving will of God on a dozen different moral issues. Everyone of us has compromised hundreds -- maybe thousands of times. Only when we stop trying to put ourselves in the right, when we cease asking "when is it lawful" to do less than the best, only then do we open up our minds and hearts to the renovating mercy of God. Then we are enabled to get on with life, gratefully and grace-fully.

This is the Good News.