ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
The Seventeenth Sunday of Trinity, 4 October 2009
Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at High Mass
Readings: Genesis 2:18-24; Hebrews 1:1-4 & 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16
Mark 10:9 Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.
Those are the sacred words of the marriage service, when the priest joins the right hands of the bride and groom. Now we know where the words come from: an argument with the Pharisees about divorce, of all things. The Pharisees say that Moses permitted divorce; Jesus says no to divorce. Or does He? The traditional way of reading this Gospel is to sit back and have a good old Pharisee grumble about other people's marriages, the ease of divorce, civil partnerships, marriage breakdown, single mums and on and on we go. I'm going to push all that outside this building now, because those Pharisee arguments (and we all have opinions on everything), that chatter is always at the expense of other people, never me. In contrast, the Gospel is for me and for you and for us together as the people of God. The subject which Jesus brings into the open before us today is not other people's divorce, but the hardness of our hearts.
In St.Mark's Gospel, which we are reading across several weeks, one quality marks the people of God. They are those who will offer a cup of water to one who is thirsty. There is no distinction between those who are chosen and those who are not. What binds people together is their relationship with God, and what God does for them, and what they do for God. Jesus uses the institution of marriage, the most intense and intimate unity in God's design, and divorce, the destruction of that unity, to explain how things will be for you and me in the world of the spirit to which we are called. Remember, marriage was very different in those days. Attraction didn't come into it. Marriage bound families together. The couple remained children of their parents, and had to do what they were told. The idea was, that just as children do not choose their parents, God does, neither do they choose their wife or husband, God does it again, through the parents. So divorce was unacceptable. It split the two families, and everyone would be covered in shame. But Moses, to whom the Pharisees were greatly attached, had permitted a sort of quickie divorce suited to his primitive and illiterate society. You just said Go, and off she went. The wife was cast aside. Moses commanded that some record of the shouting match was taken down in writing. Jesus was against that divorce. And that, you will be pleased to hear, is all I am going to tell you about the marriage customs of the ancient world.
Jesus cuts through all this with a message for us. Why do we have these messy divorce laws anyway? 'Because of your hardness of heart'. Hardness of heart, a closed mind, a refusal to accept the other. Two people have a contract, a friendship, say, between anybody; then, for whatever reason, or under whatever pressure, they break the contract. It happens. But Christians live with a new vision of what the world can be like. Marriage is not just a contract between two people, or even just a relationship between two people. It is a covenant between two people and God. The binding force of a marriage is not the vow, nor the couple's love; the binding force is God's own presence in the relationship, and that is what sustains it. What God has drawn together, let nobody separate. And that insight, illustrated in the institution of marriage, applies to all our relationships, all our friendships, deep or shallow. They are sacred; God is present. And then, beyond our own little circle, we can see that that which God has brought together is literally all of us, that the relationship between the one and the other of us is also divinely ordained, infused with the Spirit. Marriage therefore becomes a sign of what God has done for his people, drawing them closer to himself with bonds of love and a promise. Likewise divorce, inevitable really in a world like ours, is a sign of what people can do to one another, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. The pain of divorce, in a wider sense, is felt in my life, in any one of a thousand ways that human beings distance themselves from other people and from others' well-being. Whenever I spoil a friendship, or allow a relationship to fall into disrepair, I am separating what God has joined. We have to see ourselves as part of the big picture. When we examine our lives, and acknowledge how hard it can be to accept all those who enter our lives, how difficult it is to bring friendships to fruition, we shall be very reluctant to condemn those who have borne the cross of a divorce.
The life of Jesus Christ shows us a way of living without hardness of heart. In story terms it's a reversal of getting thrown out of the Garden of Eden. For St Mark the Kingdom of God is like Eden remade.That's why we had a chunk of Genesis this morning, about God's creation of man and woman. It is the Catholic Faith that Creation is good, and that Adam's disobedience did not destroy human nature; it was damaged but not destroyed. Our humanity, our desires, our relationships are not evil, human nature is fine, we are OK as God created us, and our salvation is the perfecting of that nature, that's what will be. So there is an unbreakable connection between who I am and who I will turn out to be. In today's Gospel Jesus sees us as we are, with that hardness in our hearts, and shows us how we will become one flesh. In my beginning is my end, wrote T.S.Eliot. We don't have to become someone else. God takes us as we are, and joins us to himself and his work of creation. Those whom God hath joined together let no one put asunder.