Sunday 6th October 2024
A Sermon given by Canon Dr Peter Sills Preaching on the Lectionary can be a challenge – the connection between the readings is not always obvious. Today, two are clearly connected; they deal with marriage and divorce, and give the opportunity to do a bit of detective work to discover what the Bible teaches about marriage and divorce.
Jesus clearly saw marriage as a life-long commitment. The key text is from Genesis: ‘a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and the two become one flesh’ (2.24 rsv). Commenting on this Jesus said, ‘What God has joined together, man must not separate’ (Mark 10.9). I wonder if anyone asked why: Why is marriage a life-long commitment? Why should a man cleave to his wife? [‘Cleave’ means to stick fast, to adhere, attach permanently.]
The answer is also in Genesis: God created Eve as a companion for Adam: ‘It is not good that man should be alone…’ (2.18), and they become one flesh. We are social beings; we need a companion to grow into the person we have it in us to become. Jack Dominian, a leading Christian psychiatrist, said marriage had a threefold purpose: sustaining, healing and enabling personal growth. Commitment, real commitment, is necessary for growth. Musicians, for example, have to be committed to their art in oder to become proficient; in the same way, commitment person to person enables our growth into human maturity.
But things go wrong. We are fallible and make poor choices, or we simply don’t understand the purpose of commitment – one bride I married divorced after two years, saying she couldn’t spend all her life with one man. And so, when things go wrong, the question is raised can a marriage be ended? Are we to understand Jesus saying as an absolute rule prohibiting divorce? Some believe if marriage is an indissoluble union, as Jesus said, then it can’t be broken. Others take a different view, accepting that a life-long commitment is the ideal, but accepting also that we are finite beings and our capacity to live up to the ideal is limited. Even with good intentions, relationships go wrong; marital breakdown will always be with us; mercy demands there must be a way out of an intolerable marriage.
This was a live issue in Jesus’ day. Some Pharisees asked him about it. There are two versions of the encounter, and two different answers. According to Mark (Mark 10.1–12) the question put to Jesus was: ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’ It is about the legality of divorce: is it right or wrong? Jesus does not answer this question but asks another in return: ‘What did Moses command you?’ He does this to direct attention to the heart of the matter, the true nature of marriage. The rule laid down by Moses is given short shrift: ‘It was because of your stubbornness that he made this rule for you…’ The vital thing is to understand God’s purpose in the gift of marriage: ‘But in the beginning, at the creation, “God made them male and female.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother, and is united to his wife, and the two become one flesh. Therefore What God has joined together, man must not separate.’ According to Mark, Jesus placed the emphasis on the ideal and was impatient with those who asked legalistic questions designed to trap him.
Mathew records the same incident, but to quite different effect (Matthew 19.3–9). In his account Jesus was asked: ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause he pleases?’ This is not a question about whether divorce is legal – the legality of divorce is accepted – but on what grounds it can be permitted. Jesus was being asked to take sides in a dispute between two Rabbis: Rabbi Shammai held that divorce was only permissible where there had been sexual misconduct by the wife, whereas Rabbi Hillel held that any conduct which displeased the husband would suffice. Jesus takes the strict view and thus sides with Shammai, and that, says Matthew, is the rule for Christians: ‘if a man divorces his wife for any cause other than unchastity, and marries another, he commits adultery’. NB: In ancient Israel only men could initiate divorce.
Matthew sets the incident in a different context to Mark because he is writing to meet a different need. His Gospel was written some twenty years after Mark’s, when the Christian community had settled down and had to face the inevitability that some Christians fell short of the full demands of the gospel. As a Jewish community (Matthew is thought to have written for a Jewish Christian group in Syria) they accepted Moses’ teaching that divorce was permitted, and needed to be clear about the grounds for divorce. So the emphasis in Matthew’s account is on the rule, not on the nature of marriage. Thus, in the first two Gospels we have two different views; respecting both, we can’t say divorce is wrong; to do so misunderstands Mark and ignores Matthew.
Paul also wrote about marriage and divorce to the Christians in Corinth (1 Cor. 7. 10–15) – one of the many issues that troubled them. Paul’s opinion differed according to whether both husband and wife were Christians. Where both are Christians his ruling is based on Jesus words in Mark: ‘a wife must not separate herself from her husband – if she does, she must either remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband’. But in mixed marriages, i.e. those between a Christian and a non-Christian, Paul permits divorce on grounds wider than unchastity, and this is justified by an appeal to the principle that God calls us to live in peace:
’To the rest I say this, as my own word, not as the Lord’s: if a Christian has a wife who is not a believer, and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her; and if a woman has a husband who is not a believer, and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him… If, however, the unbelieving partner wishes for a separation, it should be granted; in such cases the Christian husband or wife is not bound by the marriage. God’s call is a call to live in peace.’
According to Paul, in a mixed marriage the call to live in peace takes precedence over the ideal of a lifelong, unbreakable bond. The same idea lies behind the law today which permits divorce on the sole ground that the marriage has broken down irretrievably.
Paul had no hesitation in adapting the moral rules to the situation of a predominantly Gentile society. Mark did the same. It is thought he wrote for a Christian community in Rome, and he extended Jesus’ teaching to cover women who divorced their husbands, something that could be done among the Romans but not among the Jews. These two examples show a development in moral teaching in the NT: the rules change as social conditions change.
Social conditions and Christian understanding develop in every age. Today we reject the subordination of women as contrary to the will of God, and most marriages are not between Christians or are mixed in the sense that Paul used that term. We also understand more about human motivation and fallibility – how we are led to make bad choices. Are we to forbid people finding a partner with whom they can experience sustaining, healing and growth because they made a bad choice?
It seems to me, we can affirm the ideal of marriage as a life-long commitment, and at the same time help people to live in peace. Like Mark and Paul, we need to adapt the rules to deal with the situation we face. In Mark’s account Jesus acknowledged that people fell short of the ideal. He said Moses permitted divorce because the people were ‘hard-hearted’. So long as that hard-heartedness exists marriages will break down and society must be protected from the greater evil of constant and bitter domestic strife by allowing people to divorce. God’s call is to live in peace.
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