Twenty seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B
Mark 10:2 - 16
If you are like me, you’ve known people who have been divorced and remarried; sometimes people who are living in admirable and happy second marriages. We know that Catholics, like most Americans, have an equal chance of their marriage ending in divorce and in death. And yet, we have to listen to the words of Jesus, who is quoting the words of Genesis -- saying that this is what God wants of a marriage -- that the two become one flesh, that they stay together until one of them dies. It’s a hard saying, and When Matthew, who wrote his gospel about 30 years later, quotes Jesus, he adds the words “except for pornea” which is usually translated as adultery, or impurity, the implication being that some sort of sexual sin is a reason for breaking up a marriage. But I think Mark is the more accurate. And we see some rather amazing things in this passage, if we pay attention to history.
During Jesus’ time there was an ongoing argument over what were the grounds for divorce -- and remember, this is the husband divorcing the wife. No one ever even thought of the woman divorcing the husband. One school of thought said you could divorce your wife for literally any reason -- you would write a bill of divorce and hand it to her and that was it. Islam still has a law like this; you tell your wife “I divorce you” three times and the marriage is over. The other end of the spectrum was the idea that you could only divorce your wife for very serious matters. Since Moses didn’t clarify the reasons, the Pharisees tried to figure them out. But there was no consensus. So, they said, tell us where you, Jesus, draw the line?
And Jesus pointed them back to the beginning. He went back beyond Moses all the way to the Garden of Eden. This, Jesus says, is the ideal. No lines.
We Catholics of course have complicated rules. We talk about annulments -- the declaration that there was never a real marriage in the first place. We look for reasons why at least one of the couple had an impediment to making an informed decision. Of course it’s easier in some dioceses than others. And we have some other rules about dissolving a so-called natural marriage (between two unbaptized persons) because one wants to become a Catholic and the other actively opposes this. And of course, I know of a couple, a baptized Catholic and an agnostic, who married before a Unitarian minister. She continued to go to Mass and receive communion on Sundays, often dragging her husband with her, and raising her children Catholic. She passed away a couple of years ago and her husband, still an agnostic, continues to support the local parish.
Do we compromise as Catholics? I think we do, but we have Our Lord as an example. He after all offered “the water of everlasting life” to a woman who had been married five times and was living with a man outside of marriage. He prevented the crowd from stoning a woman caught in adultery and told her she was forgiven. When Jesus gave us the ideal, he was talking about theology; but he could be pastoral also, and was. And I think that any young couple getting married has no idea what they are getting into; and most young couples getting married have every intention of staying married.
I think our Lord had seen the example of his own parents, Mary and Joseph. We have no idea about Jesus’ early life except for the episode when his parents returned to Jerusalem to find him in the temple. But we have a clue; Mary speaks for both of them when she says “Your father and I have been out of our minds searching for you” and the last part of this little scene has Jesus going home and “being subject to them”. To Jesus, I’m pretty sure he witnessed the constant efforts of his parents to become one flesh. Because it doesn’t happen overnight, and I can personally tell you that the work of becoming one flesh is not over even after 54 and one half years.
Jesus is dealing with a patriarchal society here, and we might overlook something in the text that’s very important. When he speaks to his apostles, he says “ Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her” That was probably the most radical saying -- that adultery could be committed against a woman. This is one of those places in the gospels where Jesus hints at his own view -- that men and women are equal in the eyes of God.
So where does this leave us? Jesus clearly holds up an ideal -- marriage is supposed to be permanent. And Jesus is aware that patriarchs and kings and probably some of his own contemporaries were living in relationships like polygamy, and had divorced their wives for burning toast, among other things. Ahd he shows by his actions that he’s sensitive to people who haven’t met the ideal. And that should be our attitude as well -- to encourage couples who are having difficulties to seek help, to try to heal their relationships. But at the same time to do what we can to not cut off people from our assembly who haven’t met the standard Jesus sets.
