A sermon on Mark 10:2-16 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

This past week, when Iran fired around 180 ballistic missiles at Israel in retaliation for the killing of the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, there was a little line in their public comment about it that came back to me as I considered the words of Jesus in tonight’s gospel reading. Jesus was speaking about divorce, which doesn’t really have much to do with launching missiles, at least not literally, but hear me out here. 

The report I read said that “Iran says its actions were legal, proportionate and a response to Israel violating its sovereignty and killing Iranian officials.” The bit that really caught may attention was the line saying “Iran says its actions were legal.” Like, we’ve launched 180 ballistic missiles in an attempt to blow as many people to smithereens as possible, but it’s okay because it is all legal. I’m not taking sides here. Israel has similarly been claiming that their destruction of Gaza and their attacks in Lebanon are “legal”, despite the contrary opinions of many major experts in international law.

If you haven’t spotted a connection with what Jesus says about divorce, I’m sure you’re not alone. It’s a bit obscure, though it is definitely there. You see, what Jesus has to say about divorce does not arise from a conversation about marriage. It is a response to a group of Pharisees coming to test him out with a curly gotcha question, and the question is, “Is it legal for a man to divorce his wife?”

Just like the Iranians and Israelis launching missiles, their question is not “Is this a good thing?” or even “What moral guidance would you give to people in this situation?” Their question was just, “Is it legal? Regardless of how hurtful and destructive this action is, could we defend it in a court of law?”

If Jesus had been willing to play the game on their terms and thus avoid the gotcha trap, he could have just said, “Yes.” As the follow up lines reveal, the law of Moses did provide for the possibility of divorce, so yes, it was legal. But Jesus is not willing to take the easy escape from the gotcha and then leave it at that, as though he had said that divorce was a perfectly fine thing. I suspect that, had he been asked about the legality of launching ballistic missiles, he wouldn’t have been willing to offer a legal opinion without going on to say a bit more about the morality of it either.

I am going to look briefly at what Jesus says about divorce, but since so many of our lives have been scarred by divorce, either our own or that of someone close to us, and since nearly everyone has heard these words of Jesus repeated by people who were being aggressive, judgemental and condemning, let me start with four preliminary comments to calm your anxieties.

Firstly, I have been divorced and remarried, so anything I say about divorce here is said by someone who has been there. Secondly, both the legal and social understandings of marriage and divorce in Jesus’s day were so different from our understandings that it is difficult to directly apply any teachings about it from then to now. Thirdly, as I’ve just implied, what Jesus says about divorce here is in response to an attempt to trap him with a question about interpreting the law. It is almost certainly not what he would have said in the context of an encounter with a fragile person in the midst of a painful marriage breakdown. And fourthly, divorce is not the main point of this passage. Jesus is primarily addressing the attitude that underlaid the trick question, the attitude that imagined that questions about what is and isn’t legal was a good way of evaluating our relationship with God and our relationships with one another. 

So I’m going to aim to do the same, to touch on the issues around divorce, but to then move on to the bigger issues that Jesus was addressing.

When we look at this conversation about divorce, the first thing that strikes many of us is how sexist it is. The Pharisees ask whether it is legal for a man to divorce his wife. Whether it might be legal or even possible for a woman to divorce her husband isn’t even on their radar. Women were understood as being the property of men. Wives had higher status than slaves, like a Ferrari has higher status than a Mazda, but they were understood as property in much the same way. Marriage transferred this property from a father to a husband.

So when Jesus replies, one of the biggest shocks for his original hearers would have been that his answer equalises the marital rights and responsibilities of men and women. That would have been almost unimaginable in those days. That’s important, because in trying to understand what Jesus’s words mean for us in our day, we need to see what direction he was pushing and ask where a similar direction might take us from the very different starting place of our day.

That’s somewhat similar to what Jesus is meaning when he is so dismissive of their question about the legality of divorce. If we read Jesus’s words as law, they can take us no further than the prod he gave to the Pharisees that day. When lawyers argue over what is currently legal, they are arguing over something that is fossilised and fixed. Sometimes lawyers argue over what should be legal, and that’s always a whole lot more interesting, but the question they asked Jesus was simply what is legal. No expectation of change. But Jesus’s vision of the kingdom of God, of the fullness of life for all, was a whole lot bigger and more far reaching than the answers to any questions about what’s currently legal.

The other thing that Jesus said here that would have been a huge shock to many of his hearers was that what the law of Moses said about divorce has nothing to do with God’s desire for us, but is simply a concession that seeks to put some safeguards in place so that when we’ve already stuffed things up beyond repair, we are deterred from making them even worse. The reason that that is such a shock is that it immediately opens up the possibility that the same was true of much of the biblical religious law. It doesn’t really tell us what God hopes for; it just functions to help prevent broken, dysfunctional and destructive people from getting even worse.

So instead of being content to debate the current legal constraints around marriage and divorce, Jesus wants to point us towards a vision of a world in which divorce laws would be unnecessary because nobody would ever want to use them because marriages would be flourishing and life-giving and beautiful and fulfilling. He does that by reminding people of a vision of the origins of marriage in a vision of creation. Those who approach faith as a matter of laws misinterpret this badly as Jesus reaching back to find an older legal precedent to overrule the current one, much like lawyers asking whether the constitution invalidates a new piece of legislation. But that’s not what Jesus is doing. He’s asking us to ensure that our primary vision is of the world going right, so that discussions of what to do when it goes wrong are never mistaken for the big picture, the main game.

So Jesus is not outlawing divorce. But he is saying that in a perfect world, it wouldn’t exist. But the mistake that far too many of us Christians make is too foolishly imagine that if that is the case, then we can advance towards a perfect world by outlawing divorce. That’s like saying that since there would be no sickness in a perfect world, we should outlaw medicine and close down the hospitals. We don’t live in a perfect world, and Jesus is very dismissive of the idea that making and policing laws might help us achieve one. Laws exist to help us minimise the damage of our imperfect world, not to show us the way to life in all its fullness.

But we keep making this mistake, and we keep dividing up over the best way forward and entrenching ourselves in stupid and fruitless positions. So Christians end up being portrayed as either anti-divorce or pro-divorce. I’m not pro-divorce, but I am pro the right to divorce when things have gone irreparably wrong. There are lots of cases where divorce is vastly preferable to leaving people locked in a house destroying each other.

It’s the same craziness we see in the abortion debate that is being cranked up again in the USA election. Those of us at the conservative end of the spectrum declare ourselves anti-abortion or pro-life, as though those two things were automatically the same thing, while those of us on the left or progressive end of the spectrum are labelled, or often even end up proclaiming ourselves, as pro-abortion. I’m not pro-abortion, but I am pro the right to abortion. Perhaps even more than divorce, abortion is always a devastating tragedy, but we are broken and dysfunctional people living in a broken and dysfunctional world, and banning abortion is not going to make that better, it’s just going to remove one of the ways we can hit pause and stop tragic situations getting even worse.

And if you think that I’m over complicating things and we really could do better now if we just enforced the right laws, then ask yourself how come so many of the so-called pro-life people are still in favour of bombing the crap out of women and children who live too close to middle-eastern terrorist groups. How is that pro-life? And what sort of laws are you proposing in order to sort that out?

I opened with comments about the war in the middle east which again illustrates the powerlessness of laws as a mechanism for building genuine peace and harmony. We don’t even seem able to agree over the laws that are designed to regulate the war, so both sides keep arguing for the legality of their respective atrocities. 

Tomorrow will be the first anniversary of the barbaric Hamas attacks on Israel. Even if we seek to understand what motivated such barbarism, nothing can justify it, let alone arguments over legality. And however horrific the ongoing atrocities on both sides may be, nothing justifies our tendency to erase all nuance and compassion from the discussion and just descend into taking sides and pretending everything is clear-cut and black-and-white. You see it happening over a divorce, when friends and family divide up, for and against, and our failure to recognise the anguish and suffering on both sides of a war is the same unhelpful divisive thing writ large.

We don’t have evidence of Jesus expanding out this conversation in the immediate context of the question from the Pharisees, but the gospel writer Mark points us in the right direction with the way he frames this story with other stories. Immediately before this encounter with the Pharisees, Mark tells us about Jesus saying that true greatness would be found in serving children and outsiders, and that the worst thing you can do is put obstacles in the way of their approach to Jesus and his circle. Then there is this criticism of reducing the human tragedy of broken relationships to a legal calculation, and then, as we also heard tonight, comes the incident where the disciples want to turn away the children who are trying to get close to Jesus, and Jesus ripping into them and saying, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for … truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

So what we have clearly got is this Pharisaic attempt to reduce complex human relationships to legal arguments set inside, and in contrast to, this vision of an expanding and open edged culture that is embraced with the joy and delight and enthusiasm of little children leaping into the arms of their favourite rabbi seeking a hug, and don’t dare anyone put obstacles in their way.

If we approach friendships, relationships, marriage, as things to be governed by laws and regulations, we will drain all the joy and delight out of them, and render them lifeless, disappointing, unsatisfying, and eventually broken and full of pain. If our vision for international relations is nothing more than a legal framework, the underlying hostilities will never be overcome. And if we approach our relationships with God and God’s coming culture as matters of complying with laws and regulations, we will drain all the joy and delight out of them, and render them lifeless, disappointing, unsatisfying, and miserable.

But that is not how Jesus approaches any of these things, or how he calls us to approach these things. Instead Jesus sets before us the vision of joyous children wanting to bounce into his lap to laugh with him and poke their curious fingers into his beard and delight in being close and safe. I once heard the artist Ken Done say that his aim as an artist was to become as good an artist as he had been when he was five years old, and that ambition is a lot like what Jesus is trying to awaken in us here. It is that sort of childlike joy, delight, hope, grace and creativity that will set us on the path to the kingdom of God, the culture of God.

Yes, for now we continue to need laws to help prevent us from responding to things we’ve already screwed up by screwing them up even worse and multiplying the hurt and distress. We continue to need good laws around divorce and abortion and war to try to minimise the damage when things have already gone wrong. We even need good laws to protect those same children from jumping joyously into the wrong laps and being destroyed. 

But let’s never mistake those laws and compliance with those laws for a vision of the kingdom of God. They might help stop us descending further into hell, but to find the pathway forward to the kingdom of God, we will need to surrender instead to the joy, delight, hope, grace and creativity that we see most naturally in children. Let’s embrace that!