To Such As These

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Ordinary 27/Pentecost 19B

World Communion Sunday

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Mark 10:2-16

²Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” ³He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” ⁴They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” ⁵But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. ⁶But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ⁷‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, ⁸and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. ⁹Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

¹⁰Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. ¹¹He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; ¹²and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

¹³People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. ¹⁴But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. ¹⁵Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” ¹⁶And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

“We’ve only just begun to live … white lace and promises … a kiss for luck and we’re on our way …”

Yesterday afternoon I drove up to Elkwood, half an hour or forty-five minutes on the far side of Fredericksburg, to officiate the wedding ceremony for a young couple who had gotten my name from a friend of a friend of the bride’s mother. We’d been in touch over the last several months via email, and things came together for us in such a way that, other than through email communication, we didn’t meet face to face – in the case of the groom – until I arrived about an hour before the ceremony. I didn’t actually meet the bride until she walked down the aisle and stood next to her future husband. It was a little odd, though made a little less so by having had at least that initial virtual contact with them over the Internet.

The wedding was outdoors, in a clearing in the woods behind a beautiful little cottage set in the rolling hills of the area. There were maybe 30 or 40 people in attendance. And the couple was ‘truly, madly, deeply’ in love. I watched the groom’s face as his bride walked toward him, first through the path in the woods, then down the aisle, then as she stood next to him. He could not stop smiling.

As I began with the words of welcome and introduction, I could hear the bride start to sniffle, and then she started to really cry. It was both a little unsettling and heartwarming at the same time, because they were tears of joy.

Going through the ceremony, they had chosen their own words for their vows and the exchange of rings. In each case, they were simple, straightforward and from the heart. It was a beautiful wedding, full of hope and promises and vows and all that stuff that weddings nowadays are made of.

But in the back of my head I knew that this text was waiting for me for this morning.

It helps to put the comments from our text this morning in context – both socially and politically as well as … theologically.

Socially and politically, here’s what’s happening: in Jewish law, with regards to divorce, there were two traditions, two views of divorce. The more restrictive view, held by the Shammai school of thought, was to say that divorce was only lawful if the wife had committed adultery. The alternate view, held by followers of Rabbi Hillel, saw the issue in broader terms, allowing for many other things to be grounds for a man to divorce his wife. Divorce was a one-way process, by the way. A woman could not divorce her husband – remember, women were considered property. If a man committed adultery with the wife of another man, he was considered to be committing adultery against her husband, not his wife. Where do these different views come from? The root meaning of the Hebrew word, translated "something objectionable," is "nakedness" or "nudity." This led the School of Shammai, as noted above, to conclude that only adultery was grounds for divorce.

A secondary meaning of the Hebrew word is "offensive" or "shameful," which led the School of Hillel to conclude that anything the wife did that offended the man was grounds for divorce.

When two people were joined in marriage in ancient times, it wasn’t so much an covenant between two individuals – really nothing like the wedding we celebrated yesterday afternoon – as it was a business agreement between their parents to join the two families. So there was still an enormous amount of cultural weight going against a divorce, because if it did happen, it wasn’t simply the dissolution of the relationship between the husband and wife, but it was the dissolution of the relationships that their parents had made between THEMselves – it brought shame and dishonor on the entire extended family, not simply on the couple.

But the fact of the matter was that the admissibility of divorce was never in question.

Politically, here’s the back story: John the Baptist has just been beheaded in chapter 6, verses 17 and following, for stating that Herod’s marriage to Herodias was unlawful, since he held to the Shammai school of thought on divorce.  I wonder how THAT came up in conversation?

The religious leaders who were so set on maintaining their control over the correct way to understand and believe what God wanted people to do of course saw Jesus as a threat to that control, so they decided to try to put him in the same situation that John found himself in by asking Jesus the question of lawfulness while he was in Perea – under Herod’s jurisdiction.

Jesus answers their question with a question – which is a time-honored rabbinical practice: he asks them ‘what did Moses command?’ – which is a subtle way to phrase it. Moses had no ‘command’ as such regarding divorce. The provision for divorce in Deuteronomy was, essentially, a concession to the reality of divorce and an attempt to provide structure and guidelines in its wake.

The Pharisees respond that "Moses permitted to write a paper of divorcement and to release."  With the understanding that a "permission" is not the same as a "command", this was true.  Moses had permitted divorce. The Pharisees present an acceptable legal argument based on the Deuteronomy passage. 

Jesus dismisses it with a cutting reply.  "For your hardness of heart" Moses allowed divorce, he says.  The accusation of "hardness of heart"--sklerokardia--is a serious one.  "Hardness of heart" is associated with resistance to the ways of God. It was the same word used to describe what Pharaoh developed in response to the plea of Moses to let his people go. He essentially says divorce is a reality because the world is broken. It is not how it should be.

And Jesus makes the deeper statement: That God’s design was for a relationship between two people to be more – so much more – than something that could be undone by the actions or words of one or the other person. He speaks to the design of God for two people to come together – both of them bearing the image of God – when he quotes Genesis 1:27 – and of two people becoming one quoting Genesis 2:24 – of their lives becoming so entwined that they would stop being part of their families of origin and become a new family, separate and unique. It is a subtle but very pointed statement about the equality within the marriage relationship between a man and a woman – that both are equal partners in it – it is not more one’s than the other’s.

Then comes the private conversation between Jesus and the disciples after they’ve left the crowds and gone ‘into the house’. “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; ¹²and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

While this would seem to be a pretty straightforward statement to our ears, it was not to the disciple’s. The first part of it would be stiff, but understandable. The question would seem to be primarily centered around the question of remarriage resulting in adultery, not the question of divorce itself. What is radical for the time is the second part of the statement. To us, it sounds (again, hard, yes.) but only fair. According to Jewish law of the time, it was not possible for a woman to divorce her husband. It WAS by Greco-Roman law, but not Jewish law. The fact that Jesus even made the statement that way ‘if she divorces her husband’ was earth shaking. It again gave value to women such as they had never really had.

So even in this context – in speaking of the terrible tragedy and heart-rending experience of going through the dissolution of the marriage relationship – Jesus is lifting up, is making equal – women and men – stating that both – in a very profound sense have worth as children of God. He is giving a place to the person who was previously without a voice in the marriage relationship – the wife.

So it comes to make a little more sense to me to read that the writer of the Gospel of Mark put the next couple of verses at the conclusion of the discussion on divorce.

This past Wednesday we finished hearing Bruxy Cavey’s series “God’s Library” – talking about how the Bible came together and how it functions in our relationship with God through Jesus, and he made a summary statement about the style of literature that the Gospels are – Greco-Roman biographies – and do you remember how he described them? The writers take events in the life of the person they are writing about, along with statements they’ve made, and put them together thematically, not chronologically. And that is what is happening here.

There is no way to determine if the incident with the children came immediately after the discourse on divorce or not, but here is the tie-in thematically: Jesus has just finished teaching about divorce, and in the process, has enfranchised those who previously had no voice – has elevated women to an equal standing with men within the marriage relationship (albeit in the context of speaking of the dissolving of that relationship).

The very next scene has people bringing children to see Jesus so he can ‘touch’ them. The word that is translated as ‘touch’ (apto) in English is the same word used every other time in the Gospel according to Mark to describe Jesus’ ‘touch’ when a healing occurred.  It is estimated that 60% of children in the ancient world did not survive to their 16^th birthday, and we have ample references to children being sick elsewhere in the gospels that Jesus goes on to heal. In the ancient world, children, like women, were considered property – with no ability to speak for themselves. They were, generally and largely considered to be a nuisance or worse – a burden to families who were living in poverty or at the very least in scarcity. Children were viewed as foolish, without understanding or self-will, inclined to naughtiness and in need of sharp discipline; it was a waste of time for a scholar to spend time with children and more, it was a man’s undoing to speak to a child.

If we layer onto those attitudes towards children the probability that they were not just all that, but also sick – with all the possible variations that might entail – vomiting, diarrhea, fever, coughing, eruptions of all kinds, not to be too graphic, but you can imagine – given the absence of medical knowledge at the time – then it kind of makes sense that the disciples wanted the kids to be removed from the area.

But Jesus’ response underscores what he’s just finished making clear about women – that children have worth in the eyes of God too. That, in fact, it is to such as these that the Kingdom of God belongs.

I used to think that this reference – this scene – had to do with the innocence of children’s trust in God – and I still think it does, to a degree, but I read something that changed the way I look at this passage now. Just as with women, in ancient Palestine, children were considered property as much as women were – perhaps more so – even into adulthood – as we’ve seen in the view of marriage being an extension of an agreement between families – specifically fathers – more than a covenant between two individuals. As such, they not only had no voice, they had no claim on anything apart from their father. So in a very real sense they were completely dependent on their father for everything they had – absolutely everything.

That may be a slightly different view of “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

So our question now becomes this: are we that dependent on God for everything in our life? Do we seek his will, look to him for guidance, sustenance, wisdom, instruction as we live into what it means to be his children?

Specifically for the purposes of approaching the communion table this morning, do we look to him as our model of how to live lives of giving and sacrifice? Because that is ultimately what he is teaching us.

(communion)