Some Pharisees came and, trying to test him, they asked, “Does the Law allow a man to divorce his wife?”

Jesus answered, “What did Moses command you?”

They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a divorce certificate and to divorce his wife.”

Jesus said to them, “He wrote this commandment for you because of your unyielding hearts. At the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. Because of this, a man should leave his father and mother and be joined together with his wife, and the two will be one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, humans must not pull apart what God has put together.”

Inside the house, the disciples asked him again about this. He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if a wife divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

During my senior year of high school, in the late 1980’s, I moved from rural East Texas to rural West Alabama along with my sister to live with my aunt and uncle during of particularly tumultuous time in my parent’s lives. At the time I was a Southern Baptist, as were my aunt and uncle, and so I went with them to Gilbertown Baptist Church to worship and I got involved with their youth group, which was about 15-25 kids. Youth group meetings always happened on Sunday night, and was usually led by a young, vibrant couple who were probably in their early thirties, at the oldest. I liked them, and I think all the youth liked them – they were easygoing, positive, and a good looking couple, the very picture of a young, promising Southern Baptist goodness. But one Sunday evening, after whatever activity or lesson we had for that time, the couple as well as one of the deacons of the church called us together into a circle to announce that this couple wouldn’t be leading the youth group anymore. There were looks of shock on the faces of the youth, and the couple had tears in their eyes, as the news was announced. No reason was given for their departure, though we hugged on them, and thanked them – but I do have to say that we never saw them again, or at least not during the time I was there – poof, they kind of disappeared from our lives, and seemingly from the life of the church. Eventually, the rumor mill explained why they had been “disappeared” from the youth group and perhaps the church – they were getting a divorce, and seemingly the thought was if they had “failed” at their marriage, they couldn’t possibly be in any kind of leadership in the church, and especially with the youth. After all, Jesus was really clear about divorce - it was right there in the Bible, right there – Jesus said that divorce was impermissible, and so the church, if it wanted to uphold godly standards, could not allow them to lead us youth because they did what Jesus told them not to do. I remember being surprised by it, and then saddened, and maybe, even then feeling as if their expulsion felt graceless, a particular cruelty exacted upon them, and perhaps a signal to us youth about what was to be expected if we too ended up having to make the decision to end a marriage. We too would likely be disappeared out of the church for good.

Certainly, things have changed some since those days, even among the Southern Baptists – divorce is actually more common among evangelicals than it is among those have no definitive religious beliefs – and so even they have had to adapt to this new reality. You sometimes see “divorce care” support groups in those same churches that would have disappeared a divorcing couple a generation ago and that change is a good thing. But Jesus’ words are still there, his almost fierce condemnation of divorce, and they are troublesome to many of us, because, frankly, there are times when it’s obvious that the best thing for a couple and their children would be a divorce. It’s not just us modern types that have struggled with Jesus words – even Paul struggles with them, because he both endorses Jesus’ words about divorce, but thinks it’s OK for a believer and non-believer to end their marriage, if the non-believer wishes to do so, all for the sake of peace between them. So, there are circumstances when even the earliest followers of Jesus left a little wiggle room around Jesus’ blanket condemnation of divorce. And interestingly, unlike the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Matthew has Jesus giving at least one reason why a divorce might be allowable – sex outside the marriage – which is something Jesus doesn’t say our Gospel reading today from Mark. Nonetheless, whatever the outs given in certain other texts, it’s clear that Jesus had a negative view of divorce, and, unlike his otherwise liberal interpretations of Jewish law, he actually is more stringent and conservative than even the people asking this question, the Pharisees.

And that questioning of Jesus here needs to be noted, this attempt to get Jesus to say something controversial or heretical or even silly, something that would discredit him and tamp down on his popularity with the crowds. The Pharisees are often portrayed as his theological enemies, and so on this day they come to Jesus with a long-standing disagreement between different schools of Judaism around the issue of divorce. One side argued that a man – yes, only a man – could divorce his wife, issue her a certificate of divorce and he could do so for any reason, even for something so trivial as burning some food. The other view was the only reason a man could divorce his wife was for un-chastity, again, the sexual unfaithfulness of the wife. Now, note that there was no equivalent permission for a wife to divorce her husband for his un-chastity – in fact, in general, Jewish Law only allowed the husband to begin divorce proceeding, unlike the larger Roman world they lived in, which allowed both women and men to initiate a divorce. This is the background of this question, and Jesus lands squarely beyond even what Jesus Law allowed – unlike the Jewish Law, which allows for divorce, he declares divorce to not be an option for his followers. Jesus grants that the Jewish Law does indeed technically allow for divorce, but God allowed it be so because of our unyielding hearts, because we were stubborn, at least in Mark’s telling of this moment. And then Jesus goes into why he thinks divorce is impermissible, citing two verses from the book of Genesis about the union that happens when a couple marries, they become one flesh, and humans should not tear apart what God has put together. You sometimes hear the familiar wedding words in this texts, filled with beautiful imagery of becoming one with your mate – and then a word of warning in there, telling us that one should not tear apart what God has put together.

It has to be asked why Jesus went in this direction, with such a strict prohibition of divorce that far exceeds anything found in Jewish Law or interpretations of that Law, or at least he does in Mark’s telling of this moment? I don’t want to dismiss the theological reason he gives in this text, of this union between a married couple having importance, but it does seem almost over the top, and shows a kind of rough absolutism that Jesus rarely practiced. Now, to be frank, there has always been a rich symbolism of the Jewish people being God’s bride, and the church being the bride of Christ, so you can see why you wouldn’t want a central metaphor of this union between God and God’s people to be challenged by divorce – could God ever divorce God’s people? Still, though, it’s interesting that Jesus often said that the Sabbath, the holy Day of Rest, was made for humans and not humans made for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27), which hints that practical reasons may sometimes compel one to violate the letter of the law for the sake of compassion, justice or simple common sense – don’t let your animals lay stuck in a ditch on the Sabbath because technically you’re not supposed to be working on that day. And surely he knew of marriages that were toxic, for everyone involved, marriages that needed to end because of abuse, incompatibility, whatever – for goodness sake, probably most of the marriages he saw were arranged ones, where the couple really had no real choice of a mate. Some of those marriages were probably very happy ones, but others, well, surely, there were ones that were a simple misery for everyone involved, including the children. Does Jesus’ ideal of two becoming one ring true in those cases, when it becomes clear much later in a marriage that a couple shouldn’t have been put together by their families or by their own choice? In fact, often parents and match makers didn’t put people together for love, but for social and economic reasons – and sometimes love flowered in the marriage despite that and sometimes it didn’t. God didn’t necessarily put them together – their status in the community and their dowries made them seemingly compatible for each other, at least initially. Obviously, we’ve moved on from arranged marriages in the West, and though one can argue perhaps that when we marry for romantic reasons, we are not always ready for the hard work that comes after the romantic feelings lessen, I don’t think anyone wants to go back to the model of arranged marriages that Jesus and his peers experienced, or at least not giving persons the right to opt out of an arranged marriage, if they so wish.

But maybe, maybe that very model of couple hood and arranged marriage are the reason why Jesus seems to slam the door on divorce so forcefully. In that world, where women were especially vulnerable to the whims of men who were given the sole right to initiate a divorce, Jesus wanted to make sure that women were protected. You see, if a woman in the religious world he lived is was divorced, they were highly, highly vulnerable economically. Women were loved, surely, by their families, but they were also seen as property, transferred from one man to another, to the household of a father to the household of a husband. You can see vestiges of that idea in some of our marriage ceremonies, where a father walks down his daughter to greet her soon-to-be husband, and the preachers asks – “who gives this woman to this man?” And the father replies, “I do,” or sometimes, “her mother and I do.” In Jesus’ world, a father of a daughter pays a dowry to the man who will marry her or to the family of that man, and not the other way around. The would-be husband has to be paid for taking on this new economic burden into his household, so to speak. So, when a man divorces a woman during that time, there is no alimony for her or her kids, no house for them to stay in, and often divorced women were quite literally kicked to the curb to fend for themselves economically. They could not go back to their father’s household, since she would have disgraced the family by such a scandal, the scandal of her divorce. Often women turned to begging and prostitution in desperation. Again, another clue of how vulnerable women were when not in a man’s household is how often both in the New and Old Testaments God directs Her people to take care of the widows and orphans, ones without the patriarchal protections found within a male-led household. I have no doubt that Jesus really did feel that there was a spiritual union of sorts within a married couple, and certainly there is, for the ones who are happily married, but I think his primary reason for forbidding divorce was to protect women, and to not allow men, or at least his own followers from simply dumping their wives and sending them into extreme poverty. I’m not going to argue that I am 100% sure of it, but I can’t imagine that Jesus didn’t see couples that shouldn’t be married to each other, because of abuse, because of simple dislike of each other, because of incompatibility in so many ways. I do know that Jesus was always concerned about the poor, the vulnerable, the outsiders, and divorced women in his times were all those things. Jesus saw the unfairness of it, and interestingly, he assumes the Roman position on who can initiate a divorce in his words about adultery and divorce only a few verses after the ones we just heard this morning – in Jewish Law, only a man can initiate a divorce, while Jesus opts for the more egalitarian Roman assumption that women can also initiated divorce. Again, it’s a clue about how he understood women in far more egalitarian terms than most in his religious milieu.

Of course, Christians have divorced for thousands of years, when it was legally allowed, despite Jesus’ seemingly clear prohibition of it. The church assumed that the answer Jesus gave to the Pharisees and his disciples two thousand years ago, which was likely an attempt to protect women from social and economic disaster, was to be for all time, no exceptions. When divorce happened in the secular courts over those two thousand years, it still made women vulnerable, or at least more vulnerable than the man. My grandmother got divorced in her twenties from an abusive husband, and received no court ordered alimony from him, and so she worked three different jobs, almost seven days a week. Certainly things have gotten much better when it comes to spousal support, so Jesus words meant to protect women are not so pressing, so absolute anymore. And yet, the church sometimes treats the divorced so poorly, even now – I have clergy friends who lost their careers when they got divorced, and certainly you see how my former congregation in Alabama treated that young couple – it practically shunned them out of the church. Even now, some Christian traditions, including Catholic and some Protestants exclude divorcees from leadership, and exclude them most heartlessly from the Communion Table. Look, sometimes things end, and sometimes that ending is for the best, and sometimes it’s not, of course, but they do end, and I’ve counseled a few people in my time to end a marriage because it was really clear that the toxicity was so deep in the marrow of a marriage there would likely never be a cure, no matter how much one or both of the couple tried to find their way back to each other. Marriage is hard work, and it needs to be taken seriously and worked hard on – and hopefully that hard work is enough, but sometimes it just isn’t and couples find themselves more happy and whole when they decide to part ways. That is a reality – and I don’t think people should be shunned because a marriage ended, either in church or society. And that certainly goes for this Table, the Communion Table, this reminder of God’s goodness, God’s grace and God’s relentless mercy, a mercy that included Judas, when he too took from the bread and wine offered to him by the Christ, right before he headed deep into the night to sell out his Master for 30 coins. Worldwide Communion Sunday is a reminder to us that all of us are welcomed at this Table, and that we have a connection to Christians across the world, who are as imperfect, broken, sinful, strong, wise, and beautiful as we are. Even if one believed that divorce remains a sin in God’s eyes, the idea of excluding a sister or brother from this table because of that means all of us are not worthy to come to the Table – who is without sin that comes to this Table? I love Dorothy McRae-McMahon’s words from our Modern Lesson today, the pain she reflects in her words, and letting go of all those expectations she and other people had around her marriage, ones she and her ex-husband could simply not live up to. We know there are costs that come with divorce, emotional and spiritual, to the whole family, and I believe Christ knows that as well. But there are for some a chance to heal and become whole that comes with a parting of ways, and that must be noted and blessed as well. I believe that Christ sees what we see, and his words around divorce were meant for a time when women always paid the heaviest costs when it came to the whims of men, as they still do today, in many ways – and Jesus said what he said about divorce to mitigate that harm. And to exclude each other from this table of a divorce, well, I do not want to answer to Christ on Judgment Day for doing something like that, and so today, in a few minutes we’ll do what we think Christ is calling us to do at this church, which is to welcome all to the Table, wherever we are on life’s journey, and to be reminded that we worship a God who loves us all, includes us all, and welcomes us all.