Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost; 3 October 2021; Proper 22B (RCL); Job 1:1, 2:1-10; Psalm 26; Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16.
The modern preacher always feels the need to tread carefully with this Gospel reading, knowing that a fair number of the congregation will be divorced persons. Shame is not always a helpful homelitic aid. And this is the only saying of Jesus (besides the last supper) quoted by Paul, so it seems pretty firmly fixed in the tradition. What to do?
We live in an age and a society in which we think of marriage as concerning primarily the two people involved, and maybe their children. We think it is a matter of (romantic) love between two people. This is a recent phenomenon. In literature as recent as the middle ages and beyond, romantic love was something shared by non-married partners (in the Arthurian cycle, it is always adulterous — marriage was about something else). In other societies and times, marriage was a contract between two families, and across generations.
A Tanzanian student of mine wrote a paper on why same-sex marriage couldn’t happen in his context: marriage was a contract between two clans over three generations. The bride price was negotiated between clans, and was renegotiated for every child born to the couple (going up), as the benefit of the marriage increased. Two men or two women might enter into a relationship, but it would not be a marriage thus understood.
My Cambodian friend used to laugh and say that Americans were crazy — they married for love. His was an arranged marriage. He asked me, “On those mornings you wake up and you don’t like your spouse, who do you blame? You can only blame yourself. I can blame my parents.”
It is into a context like Tanzania or Cambodia that Jesus speaks about marriage. In that context, a divorced woman was likely to have little recourse: if her father didn’t take her back in, she would have had less standing than a widow (as the children would belong to her ex-husband). Divorce in such a situation would be catastrophic. That’s why Jesus says that it was for our hardness of heart that Moses allowed divorce.
I believe that it is significant that Mark places the episode of Jesus blessing children immediately after the sayings about divorce. Children are the expected and hoped-for fruit of a marriage in his context. This grounds marriage back into its social setting. And it forces on us the question of the fruit of marriage in our context.
It troubles my conscience that when I officiate at a marriage, I act not only as a minister of the church, but as an officer of the state, when I sign the marriage license. The state has other interests in marriage (the tax code being one) than does the church. For the church, marriage is a sacrament, and that means we find it revelatory of God’s purposes for humanity and creation. Children can certainly be part of that purpose, but do not exhaust it. And the church does not bless marriage in the abstract, but particular marriages (the service is called “The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage”).
That means that whatever the fruit of any given marriage may be, it belongs at least partly to the church. Just as society has an interest in replacing itself (hence the favor the tax code gives to couples with children), so the church has an interest in the revelatory character of a marriage (between whatever two persons). And just as in many societies, the marriage serves no purpose if there are no children, and can be called off for that reason, so when the revelatory fruit of a marriage has dried up, the marriage can be broken.
But, Jesus’ saying is meant to protect the parties to the marriage, especially the weaker party. That’s why, in his explanation to the disciples the man comes in for the sternest warning of committing adultery against his wife if he remarries (it was much easier for a man to divorce his wife, than a wife to divorce her husband — she would have needed independent means of support). So, the church should not take a laissez-faire attitude toward either marriage or divorce, but should do due diligence to assure that the fruits of a relationship make it bless-able in the first place, and that its fruitfulness has indeed dried up before ending it.
This places the church’s role in marriage on a completely different footing than is usually understood. The church should have an interest in every marriage it blesses as a revelatory sacrament. What of God does the church see in this particular relationship, not just marriage in general, should be the question with which it approaches marriage. And how can the church support that marriage to maintain its revelatory purpose. These are questions I hope we can ask.