There are certain texts that feel unethical as a pastor to read in worship and then not address them in the sermon. The brilliant and wonderful souls of the lectionary committee gave us two such texts this morning. Of course the Mark text about divorce is, well, loaded. And then the Genesis reading also brings along its own fun history of misuse and abuse. So hang in there friends, because we’re going right in this morning.
First let’s talk about what the Pharisees were really up to in asking Jesus about divorce. The lectionary left off the first verse, which told us Jesus left Capernaum where he’d been last week and traveled “to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan.” I don’t expect you to remember, because we read it way back in December and January, what else took place in “the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan.” Mark chapter one, verse four, “John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness… And people from the whole Judean countryside… were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan.” That’s where we are this morning, in John the Baptist’s territory. But John isn’t in the Judean countryside anymore, and this was only a few months ago, so maybe you remember why John isn’t there, what happened to John. Mark chapter six, John was arrested, and beheaded, by Herod for calling Herod out for divorcing his wife in order to marry his brother’s wife. A move which, knowing what we know about the Herodian clan in general, certainly was not about love and certainly was about power and political maneuverings. The Pharisees didn’t ask Jesus this question because they wanted him to enlighten them on what the law says about marriage, they asked him because they were hoping Jesus would back himself into the same trap that John the Baptist ended up in, and Herod would go ahead and remove Jesus from the scene for them before Jesus could threaten their status any further.
This is interesting, sure, but still doesn’t get to the heart of why this text can be so painful and why this text has so often been misused, what Jesus actually said about divorce. One approach preachers, myself included, often take with this text, is to place it in its proper historical context. Because the experience of being married in the time of Moses, and even in the first century, was vastly different then the experience of being married today. Today’s definition of marriage is a legal agreement between two consenting adults. First century marriage was a legal bill of sale between a man and the father of his soon-to-be wife. The woman was literally sold from one home to another. And this “certificate of divorce,” the Pharisees referenced. Such a certificate could legally be issued if a man found “something objectionable” about his wife. “Something objectionable” could be growing older, failing to bear a son, burning toast, or the husband simply becoming bored. And a woman’s entire value in society was connected to a 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.
Let’s also notice the players in the conversation. The instigators of this conversation were Pharisees, who were men, powerful men at that, and they were talking to Jesus about what the law says about whether a man can divorce his wife. The question at hand here isn’t, what do I do about this relationship that has become unhealthy. The question is: can I sell my property when I don’t want it anymore. So between the locational allusions to John the Baptist, and thus Herod, the social status of women at the time, and the male Pharisees own social status, this text is clearly power, who has it, and who wants to keep it.
But as interesting a historical lesson as all that is, I still don’t think it really deals with the pain and suffering centuries of poor interpretation of this text has left us with. I also don’t think unpacking this text in its proper historical context is all that hopeful. And believe it or not, I think Jesus is offering us a lot of hope in this challenging teaching about divorce. I found that hope in a pretty unexpected place this week. Remember at the beginning of the sermon I said there are two texts this week that make me feel an ethical responsibility to address if they are read? I found the hope for this text in diving into the other text. So let’s go there now.
Genesis two, verses eighteen to twenty-four also has a rich history of being used to justify abuse and oppression. Often the target of that abuse is women but not exclusively; LGBTQ people of all gender identities and expressions have certainly also had this text read against them. But what’s really going on here?
Verse eighteen starts right off, “The the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” That it is “not good” is immediately a problem, as again and again in chapter one God made creation and called that creation good. So if something is “not good,” then the work of that part of creation is clearly not complete yet. And we see God in verse nineteen immediately, and many commentaries added, rather humorously, go to work trying to come up with a solution to the problem of man’s aloneness.
One complicating factor in understanding this problem is the word “man.” Because man is a gendered word, it’s very definition requires it to be different from something else, from woman. But the Hebrew word here is adam, which is an abbreviation of another Hebrew word, adamah, which means ground or earth. The word that in Hebrew ends up meaning human male, thus translating man, quite literally translates “dirt part.” As in, not the whole ground, but a thing formed out of part of the ground. Adam doesn’t become a name until the end of chapter four. And even then, he’s never really formally named, it just seems to have become inconvenient once there were more dirt parts in the story to keep referring to this particular dirt part in the abstract while everyone else got a name. So the writer of Genesis simply capitalized it, and suddenly man/dirt part became Adam. Eve also didn’t get named in this section, though when she did, her name derives from the Hebrew word for “living” as a nod to women as the bearers of children and thus the propagators of life.
The point of all this is that the problem God recognized in verse eighteen was not that man didn’t have woman, but that dirt part was alone. Because when there was only one, it wasn’t gendered. The very idea of gender requires another thing to compare it to. When God saw that dirt part was alone, God created another dirt part so that dirt part would have another like it to be in relationship with. This second dirt part was different then the first, for differences are what make relationships interesting, but also the same, from the same part of dirt. Which, friends, is there a better metaphor for humanity as a species then that? We are a multiplicity of shapes and sizes, colors and hues, skills and abilities, hopes and dreams. And yet, in all this vast array of differences, our DNA is something like 99.9 percent the same. All of the differences we think of as being so massive, all that variation is contained in point one percent of our DNA.
All this to say, we are a relational species, we need to be in relationship to survive. God saw that when God first saw dirt part alone and said, “it is not good for dirt part to be alone,” so God created another dirt part, similar but different, to help dirt part, and for dirt part to help, so that those two dirt parts could thrive. Because it is not good for us to be alone. And anything that breaks that relational need, that forces someone to be without the relational connections that we require as humans to survive, that thing is not what God wants for us.
The good news I hear in both of these challenging texts is that God cares deeply about our lives now, and specifically about the quality of our relationships. Often we lump questions of faith in a very long-term view of eternal salvation, and that’s not to say Jesus doesn’t care about that, certainly Jesus does, that was after all the whole point of the resurrection. But in this text we see that Jesus cares about more than just eternity, Jesus cares deeply about the quality of our lives as we are still living them. Yes, in the scope of God’s time they are fleeting and temporal and whatever, but in the scope of ours, they are all we have, and Jesus knows that and Jesus cares about that. Jesus cares about our relationships. He cares that they are full, that they are rich, that they are rewarding and healthy and life-giving. That they nurture us, sustain us, help us and support us. In the model of dirt part one and dirt part two way back in creation, God cares that we have people in our lives who are our partners and our helpers, and we them, so that we may live rich, fulfilling, and whole lives.
Dear, beloved dirt parts, shaped from the earth of God’s creation, formed in God’s image, by God’s own hand, it is God’s will for you that you have other dear, beloved dirt parts, also created by God, in your life. Dirt parts who are like you, in that all of us were created in God’s image, but also different, for no one dirt part could encompass the whole of God. You are not alone, no matter what struggle you face, what pain other dirt parts may have caused you, for God knows that it is not good for us to be alone, so God created us, many of us, for each other. Thanks be to God, who gave us one to another, weird, beloved, beautiful and diverse, dirt parts of God. Amen.
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