ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

TRINITY 17, 2006

Fr Alan Moses

High Mass All Saints, Margaret Street

Proper 22 Year C: Genesis 2.18-24;Hebrews 1.1-4, 2.5-12
Mark 10.2-16

One parish priest in the diocese took a look at this Sunday’s Gospel and decided to have the harvest festival instead. I know this because my wife is preaching there. “We can’t have all that stuff about divorce!”, the priest of a very “catholic” parish said. He meant that it was not suitable for an occasion when the stewardship adviser was coming to preach, but I suspect he also recognised the sensitivity of the subject - even closer to many people’s hearts than their bank accounts are.

Today’s gospel is an uncomfortable one for many, painful for some. There can be few congregations which do not include the divorced, few families which do not have members who have experienced the breakdown of marriage, few of us who do not have friends who have gone through it. Some will themselves have experienced the tearing apart of a relationship which was “one flesh”.

Earlier this year, as some of you know, I had to preach at our son’s wedding. I had to preach about marriage to a congregation which I knew beforehand would include one woman for whom the wounds of betrayal and abandonment were still painfully raw; a woman whose wedding vows we had witnessed more than 25 years before.

What is the Church to do and say in an era in which the breakdown of marriage is so common; and as common in those churches which have traditionally taken a strong line against divorce as in others? Our own Church has agonised long and hard over the issue for many years. A hundred years ago, my predecessor proclaimed in the Parish Paper that whatever Parliament might decide about divorce and remarriage, he would never allow this church to be sullied by such a thing. Interestingly, Bishop Edward King - the great pastoral theologian and Bishop of Lincoln who is commemorated on the south aisle screen - who was persecuted by protestant bigots for his catholic principles - questioned the hard line regarded as de rigeur in catholic circles.

But let us begin with the Gospel. How is it good news? If we are to find an answer to some of our problems, we have to understand the context; to see where Jesus is starting from, which may not be the same place as us.

“Some Pharisees came, and to test Jesus they asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’”.

As on other occasions in the Gospel, Jesus is being set up. The most likely clue to this is provided by the conflict between John the Baptist and Herod Antipas over his marriage to his brother’s ex-wife Herodias. The intent of the Pharisees may have been to trap Jesus into saying something on the subject of divorce which reflect unfavourably on the royal marriage, enabling Jesus’ critics to denounce him the Herod. Herod had taken John’s criticism of his marriage as potential incitement to revolt. Royal marital problems, as we know, have a way of recurring throughout history.

In ancient Judaism, divorce was a right only for husbands; women were legally the property of their husbands and had no power to end the marriage. In Greek and Roman society, women could institute divorce proceedings - and the Herods, who had a foot in both worlds, clearly took advantage of that.

It was lawful in the Judaism of the time for a man to divorce his wife. The argument was about the legitimate reasons for divorce. There were two schools of thought.
• One, the disciples of the Rabbi Shammai, insisted that the only valid reason was sexual impurity in the wife. In Matthew’s version of this incident, this is the line taken.
• The other, the school of Hillel, argued that the wife could be sent away simply if the husband grew tired of her. The latter view was dominant, no doubt because it was more convenient for husbands. Abandoning a spouse for a new and younger model is not just a feature of contemporary life.

Jesus seems to respond to the questioners on their own terms, those of the Jewish Law: “What did Moses command you?” Their reply: “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.”

Jesus then makes a radical shift in the argument: “Because of your hardness of heart he write this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

The Pharisees refer to Moses’ commandment found in Deuteronomy 24.1-4, a passage that actually only presupposes the fact of divorce and is mainly concerned with prohibiting a divorced and remarried woman from remarrying her first husband. The passage was taken by ancient rabbis as giving sanction for divorce, and is the basis for a great body of discussion on all aspects of the matter.

In the light of this background, Jesus seems to be attacking the sanctity and perfection of the Law. It is certainly an attack on the use of this passage to justify the abandonment of wives whenever husbands felt like it.

Jesus goes behind the Law to the account of God’s intent in creation. The passages Jesus cites are from the account of creation in Genesis. His use of them has two effects.

• First, it challenges the view that the law of Moses was the perfect and final reflection of the will of God, asserting that it was adapted to fallen and stubborn humanity. By quoting the creation accounts, Jesus implies that the original will of God concerning marriage is both superior to the law of Moses and continues to be the proper guideline by which marriage should be conducted. .

• Second, both of the passages assert the importance of the woman in marriage. In the first statement, from Genesis 1.27, both male and female are emphasized as the creation of God, implying that both must be respected, indeed that they are equal partners. The second passage (Genesis 2.24) reaffirms this with its emphasis on the man’s forsaking of others for the sake of his wife, and its reference to the union formed by their marriage - “one flesh”.

In ancient Palestine, the absolute right of the husband to divorce often meant great hardship for divorced wives who might be cast off with little or no means of support for themselves and their children. The kind of cases dealt with by the Family Court round the corner in Wells Street and the ongoing problems of the Child Support Agency, should remind us that this is not a problem which had gone away. In the time of Jesus, divorced women might be rejected by their own families (as a source of shame) and be driven to prostitution to support themselves.

The effect of Jesus’ position forbidding divorce was to radically reject the notion that the wife was the man’s property and to insist upon the woman’s right in marriage based upon the original creation pattern.

This is reinforced by what Jesus says in private to the disciples, where he says that man who divorces his wife for another woman “commits adultery against her”. This idea is unparalleled in ancient Judaism. Adultery was an offence which could only be committed against another man, either by seducing a man’s daughter and depriving him of a marriageable girl, or by violating a husband’s exclusive rights with his wife. A man’s adultery was not an offence against his wife.

Mark’s Gospel is the one least friendly towards “family values”. Jesus’ calling seems to distance him from his family and he expects at least some disciples to abandon family to follow him. The claims of the kingdom are paramount. So, it is particularly significant that Jesus should so radicalise marriage as a form of Christian discipleship.

Even in the New Testament, we see the Church struggling to come to terms with the break-up of marriages - the results of our “hardness of heart”, our fallen-ness. The different solutions reflected there show us that the Church has to rely on the guidance of the Spirit in dealing with the consequences of this: whether it is by the recognition of the death of a marriage, divorce, or the conclusion that it never really happened in the first place, annulment. Both approaches are open to abuse. The Church has to face hard choices, to make decisions for example about when re-marriage might be permissible. The Church has also to go on caring for those whose marriages have failed.
But at the same time, the Church cannot lapse into an embarrassed silence about marriage. It has to go on learning and preaching and teaching about the nature of marriage, especially in very different social and economic circumstances; ones in which that equality between man and woman seen in Genesis and taken up by Jesus, is a given in our world in ways which would have been unimaginable in the time of Jesus or Paul.

The Church has to go on exploring and teaching what it means for marriage to be a sacrament, a covenant, a form of Christian discipleship, a sharing in the life and self-giving of Christ, and a “means of grace” by which we are enabled to do that.