Once again our Gospel text for this morning seems like a weird mish-match of stories. First we have this test by the Pharisees that led to these seemingly harsh teachings about divorce. Followed immediately by this beautiful image of Jesus taking the children into his arms and blessing them. These seemingly disparate images are hard to fit together as one coherent reading. Why would the lectionary have us read both of them this morning?
One commentary I read suggested the Jesus blessing the little children passage was added as a cop-out for pastors who didn’t want to deal with the divorce passage. Maybe, if the passage was read with enough monotony, no one would notice mean Jesus, and we could slide on over to nice Jesus who loves babies. But of course, we can’t. One, because this is one of those passages that as your pastor I feel responsible to unpack for us this morning, you can’t read something like this and just walk away. But two, because there isn’t mean Jesus and nice Jesus, there’s only one, Jesus, the loving, healing, grace-filled savior of the world. So if Jesus says something like this, there has to be grace in it, there has to be meaning for us. So what is it?
The lectionary may have arbitrarily stuck these two readings together this morning, but Mark did not. These passages follow each other for a reason. You might have noticed this is the same pattern Jesus has been following throughout the last few weeks. Hard teaching, welcoming children, hard teaching, lifting up the little ones, hard teaching, blessing children. Jesus follows each of his hard teachings up with an object lesson about children. So let’s talk a little bit about the role of children in Jesus time. For us to really understand the power of Jesus words here, we have to take off our twenty-first century glasses and see this moment through the disciples’ eyes. Because we value children in our culture. Children are precious, sacred, we make them the center of our homes and of our lives. This was not the case in the first century. Children had no value in society until they were old enough to work. They were pushed aside, worthless. So when Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me,” this is not the Sunday school image of a shiny long-haired Jesus holding clean, chubby-cheeked, little children. A better image for our time would be Jesus saying, “Let the drug addicts come to me, let the convicted felons come, let the homeless, let refugees, let transgendered youth, let anyone whom society has cast aside, has said is worthless, let those people come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.” In welcoming the children into their midst and blessing them, Jesus is making the case that the kingdom of God is not for people like the Pharisees, people with power and money and prestige. The kingdom of God is for the vulnerable, the cast aside, the helpless, the hopeless, the forgotten. Then Jesus goes on, “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” This passage can really have two meanings. It could mean, welcome the kingdom of God like a child would welcome it. I think of my little buddy Emma, who though she is only three, seems to understand communion better than I do, holding out her hands wide with a huge grin on her face, so totally excited to “eat Jesus.” Were that I always received the Eucharist with such unabashed joy. But, lest I glorify childlike faith, if we settle on this interpretation we also have to take the other side of children. Emma’s three-year-old stubbornness often leads more to “why” and “no” than it does wide-eyed wonder. It is too simple to assume that God is calling us to sentimental child-like faith, because with children remember that questioning and refusing is just as much a part of the bargain.
The second thing this passage could mean is “welcome the kingdom of God like it is a little child.” Like the kingdom of God itself is vulnerable, small, weak, and lowly. What a world-jarring image, that the kingdom of God would come to us not in power and might, but in weakness and vulnerability. Whoever wants to be first must be last, Jesus said just a few verses ago, for the kingdom of God belongs to those the world has left-behind.
With that framework, let’s unpack these teachings on divorce. Once again it’s important for us to take off our twenty-first century framework of marriage as a legal agreement between two consenting adults. In the first century, marriage was a property contract between a woman’s father and her husband. She was literally sold from her father’s house to her husband’s. And notice who is having this conversation. Jesus is not talking to two people in pain because they cannot make their marriage work. Or to someone escaping an abusive situation. Jesus is talking to the Pharisees, to a bunch of men. There are no women a part of this conversation. This is because divorce was totally one-sided. Women could not divorce for any reason; only a man could cast his wife out. The command of Moses the Pharisees referenced allowed a man to divorce his wife if he found “something objectionable about her.” “Something objectionable” could be growing older, failing to bear a son, burning toast, or even the husband simply being bored. And a woman’s entire value in society was connected to the man, either her father or her husband. A divorced woman could not return to her father’s home, and no one else could marry her. So divorce left her destitute, abandoned, and alone. Exactly like the little children Jesus so eagerly welcomed.
That this teaching takes place beyond the Jordan adds another dimension to the story. The Jordan River should remind you of John the Baptist, who taught and baptized at the Jordan, and was beheaded by Herod for calling out Herod for marrying his sister-in-law. Which, if you remember from earlier in the summer, was a move made not for love but for power. What Jesus seems to be doing, both here and in the John the Baptist story, is not setting some parameter that all marriages must fall into, but calling out the Pharisees on their on-going efforts to treat the law of God as a tool of oppression, a way to keep people in bondage, to separate people from God and from each other, to stop people from living into the fullness of God’s love for them.
I think the gist of what Jesus is getting at here is that people are not disposable. Moses may have permitted divorce because of men’s hardness of heart, but Jesus will not allow any of his beloved children to be treated as disposable, free to be cast aside by their husbands at the husbands’ will. This text seem less like a commentary on modern-day divorce, and more like a critique of the tendency of people in power to create laws and rules that keep them in power at the expense of the weak.
Ironically, I think this makes this Gospel teaching from Jesus the exact opposite of what it has historically been used for, as a “clobber text” to tell people that they are not welcome in the kingdom of God. This Gospel is, in fact, a firm declaration against all of the people who would try to use the Bible to assert that the kingdom of God is anything other than the place where the lowly, the lonely, the broken, and the hurting are taken up into the arms of Jesus and blessed. Grace, remember, is not the same as niceness. Grace encompasses both law and gospel. And for the Pharisees and any time we might try to use scripture to treat someone else as less than, this passage is law. Jesus is calling the Pharisees out on their treatment of others, because to do anything else would be to turn a blind eye to suffering. Grace is about shaking us down from our self-righteous thrones so that we can live in the beauty of the kingdom of God. Because it is in the knowledge of our weakness that God comes.
Broken relationships hurt. Be those relationships be divorce, a damaged friendship, an alienated child or parent, be they broken by racism, sexism, homophobia, pride, greed, violence. So many things can break our relationships, leave us hurting and alone. Even in cases where a broken relationship is the absolute best outcome. Even when the marriage, the friendship, the bond, whatever it might be is frayed to the point where the only healthy decision is to walk away, even then it hurts; even then it is awful. And that pain, even when it is the absolute right thing, even when it is the only way to healing, is not pain God wants for us. God will walk with us through broken relationships on the path to wholeness, but that pain is caused by human failure, it is never God’s divine plan for our lives. But anyone who would willingly bring that pain on another, who would willingly cast another aside; that is the brokenness Jesus is speaking against. What God has joined together the powerful cannot from their own hardened hearts, separate. Using your power to subjugate another, to treat another as less than you, is wrong, Jesus says, in no uncertain terms. God’s law is not a tool for your oppression.
But also, all of us have experienced times when we have felt cast aside by others. When we have been broken by the sin of another, left hurting and alone by fellow children of God. And it is in those times that this passage is flowing with good news for us. Because this Gospel passage says you who are hurting, you who are broken, you who have been cast aside, come to me, do not be stopped; for it is to you, who you are, as you are, that the kingdom of God belongs. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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