Scripture texts: Genesis 2:18-24, Mark 10:2-16
There are times when the lectionary railroads you into preaching on one text in particular, even if you’d rather preaching but that passage of Scripture. This is clearly one of those times; One cannot have the infamous “divorce” passage from the Gospel of Mark as the Gospel lesson and not address it in some fashion. It cannot be helped, not matter what else is going on that day or what other texts coincide with hit. The moment this passage is read it becomes the only thing people are thinking about.
And that’s sad. It’s sad because this has become one of those classic texts we Christians have often used to abuse one another. Ah ha! A chance to revel in our supposed moral superiority over someone else. And yet the moment we do that, we utterly miss the real point Jesus is trying to convey here and become guilty of the very sin he condemns in these words.
How so, you might ask? Well, let’s unpack this passage somewhat. To understand it fully, one has to remember the context in which it was first spoken. This is 1st century Palestine, 2000 years and an ocean away from us. This is a society steeped in patriarchy, where women have no rights and privileges that are not granted to them by men. Women are dependent on men for their whole lives in this society. And along come these Pharisees looking for sanction for divorce, looking for permission to dissolve the one institution in society that gives women any recourse at all.
Jesus goes right to the heart of the matter. “It is because of your hardness of heart...” he says in his explanation. He could just have easily and rightly said, “It is because of your cruelty...” To abandon those who most depend on you. To turn your back on those you have pledged to take care of. To discard those who need you most. That is what you are looking for permission to do.
When we realize that is what Jesus is truly condemning here, it becomes a whole lot harder to use this text to bludgeon others. Divorce in our modern context is often far more complicated than what is presented here. It happens due to abuse, abandonment, infidelity, and a whole host of other issues. And when we use a text like this to spew venom at those who have gone through that, are we not also guilty of that same cruelty as these Pharisees who seek to abandon their wives to the whims of fate? Are we not also turning our backs on those who need us most in their times of struggle?
“It is because of your hardness of heart...” Boy, if those aren’t words that condemn all of us, I don’t know what they are. Look at our society. What we’ve become over the generations. We are divorced in so many ways from one another. It’s a dog-eat-dog every-man-for-himself world that we’ve created here in our nation. So many get left behind. So many are abandoned. So many who depend on us are left to their own devices.
#BlackLivesMatter! What a nonsense statement, or at least it should be. Of course, they matter. But we’ve gotten so bad at taking care of one another that we honestly have to be reminded of such a common sense reality. And that’s just one manifestation in recent memory of how we turn our backs on one another. Too often, those of us in positions of privilege want to pretend that our cruelty isn’t real. But that becomes yet another excuse we use to continue our abandonment of others. Racism isn’t real anymore, we claim, and in the next breath we start looking for excuses as to why this person of color or that immigrant deserved the abuse or neglect they’ve received. Hardness of heart indeed!
Perhaps one of the most dramatic ways this cruelty manifests is in what happened this very week. Yet again, as we have seen far too many times before, a human being has violently taken the lives of school students in a mass shooting. “It can’t be helped. These things happen.” People say. I question that.
Is it our proliferation of guns? Other places have guns. Canada has guns. They don’t have this problem. Switzerland has guns. They don’t have this problem. Is the violence of our entertainment? Japanese media is just as violent as ours (perhaps more so). They don’t have this problem. Is it a mental health issue? There are crazy people the world over, and they don’t have this problem. What the hell is wrong with us that we do?
It because we don’t take care of one another.
We’re full of excuses. They’re criminals. They’re different. They sleep with the wrong people. They don’t deserve help. It’s too expensive. And more and more people fall through the cracks, abandoned by those who could help them if they chose. Abandoned by us, as we so often chose. Violence quickly becomes the only option available to them and every night our TV screens are filled with their stories.
“Because of our hardness of heart...” That’s really what it boils down to. We don’t care and as long as we don’t care, this is the way things will be. We laud our Christian bona fides as a nation and yet this is how we treat one another. Thousands dead each year from gun violence. Half a million people sleeping on the streets each night. One in five children go to bed hungry. Does that sound like a Christian nation to us? We should be ashamed.
This is not how it’s supposed to be.
Genesis shows us what life is meant to be like. “It is not good that the man be alone.” God says about Adam, so he seeks to find a companion for him. From that quest comes the first family and from that family comes the basis of human civilization. We are meant to live together. We are meant to build each other up. We meant to take care of one another. Because that’s what God does for us. This story highlights that. Adam can’t fix his loneliness. God intervenes. God takes care of him. God provides him with a companion, one who is suited for him.
God does this all the time. The Bible is full of stories of times when God intervenes to take care of his people. He provides spouses, children, friends, food, shelter, water, military victory, good leaders, wisdom, guidance, and ultimately his own son for our salvation. Time and again, God goes out of his way to take care of those who depend on him. To take care of us.
God does not stop even remotely to ask whether we deserve this aid or not. We don’t and he knows it. That doesn’t matter to him. He knows only that we need and what we need he provides without question or judgment. That’s grace. That’s compassion. That’s love. And we meant to pass the same on to one another.
In the Genesis story, God first provides the animals to Adam before he discovers Eve is the suitable companion for his human. Despite the fact that they are not our true “helper as our partner,” there is something they can teach us about how life is meant to be. I’ve owned a half dozen or so dogs over the course of my life. When I walk in the door each day after being away, they run to me. They could care less about what I’ve been doing, how a good a person I’ve been, whether I’ve been righteous or upright in my morality. They don’t care what color my skin is or who I sleep with. They don’t care about how much money I have or don’t have. All that matters to them is that I’m home, the one they love, and they fall all over themselves to express their excitement at that.
Like this!
They care about me. I’m the most important thing in the world to them. They would give their lives without hesitation to defend me from a threat. Imagine if we treated one another the way our pets treat us? They can teach us what life looks like when we do not have “hardness of heart.”
Like this!
That perhaps is why they are such a blessing, a reminder of what life is really supposed to be about. When we do care for one another the way God cares for us. Amen.
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