Pentecost 20 B: The Issue

Posted by DJL on Oct 2, 2018 in Dear Partner | 4 comments

Mark 10:2-16

Dear Partner in Preaching,

Sometimes the issue isn’t really the issue.

Do you know what I mean? Someone comes to you with an issue – perhaps a criticism of something going on in the parish or, more personally, of something you’ve done – but the real issue isn’t that at all, but rather that that person wasn’t invited to join the committee working on that project… or wasn’t visited in the hospital (even though they didn’t let anyone know they were in the hospital!)… or is experiencing a rupture in an important relationship… or just received a terrifying diagnosis and can hardly make sense of it. And sometimes it takes a little while to figure out what the real issue is.

We all do this from time to time, of course. For whatever reason – sometimes conscious, many times unconscious – we don’t want to address, or perhaps find it incredibly difficult to address, the issue at the heart of things, and so we latch on to something more manageable. Which is why sometimes the presenting issue isn’t really the issue.

I tend to think there’s some of that going on here. The Pharisees come with a question about divorce. Maybe they’re looking for Jesus to take a side on a controversial issue. Or maybe they’re hoping to induce Jesus to say something about divorce that will offend the powers that be – like John the Baptist did – and suffer a similar fate. Maybe.

But I wonder if the issue behind their question is less about divorce proper and more about order. That is, after all, the primary function of the law, to lend order to chaotic world, to put in place structures that serve to protect us in a dangerous environment. For this reason, law is incredibly helpful, even necessary. Order, too. Yet up to this point, at least from the point of view of the Pharisees, Jesus has been regularly transgressing much of what seemed to lend order to their world. Feeding everyone, not just some (notice the first feeding story in Mark 6 comes right after Herod’s exclusive feast); healing those with illness normally attributed to sin; challenging traditions about Sabbath; praising the faith of a Syrophoenician woman (even if, at first, he himself couldn’t have imagined doing that); and criticizing the Pharisees themselves, the community’s regular arbiters of the law. So maybe the issue is divorce, or maybe divorce is just an example of the order the law creates and the Pharisees ask about it so as to “test” Jesus and see just how far he’s willing to go.

Jesus takes up their challenge, examining both the law itself and accepted exceptions to it by citing God’s intent behind the law: human flourishing. That is, law and order are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. His stance on marriage isn’t simply bolstering an institution, but rather supporting an institution that respects and supports the integrity of relationships.

But even that, I think, isn’t quite the issue. In fact, I’m not sure we can understand Jesus’ issue if we don’t read the whole story in light of the end of this passage, when Jesus welcomes children and their parents. Actually, Mark doesn’t specify that it’s parents any more than he specifies the generic “people” the NRSV uses. It’s just an implied “they,” a “they” occurring just after his words to the disciples, “and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery” (v.12). Then, Mark continues without taking a breath: “[They] were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them.”

Now, I think there are two super-interesting things about these juxtaposing verses. First, up to this point the Pharisees – and Jesus, too, for that matter – have only been talking about men divorcing their wives. Which makes sense – that was the law; men could divorce their wives under certain circumstances. And, more often than not, the result for the women whose husbands divorced them was pretty much total and complete disenfranchisement and economic ruin. Which helps to explain Jesus’ response. God intended marriage to be a union, a partnership, a supportive and mutually inter-dependent relationship. (Keep in mind, when reading the Genesis story, that no other creature within God’s whole creation was a fit partner.) And so God’s intentions should not be shortchanged by convenience, or by a law that allows one member of the partnership to abandon and ruin another. Yet when speaking with his disciples, Jesus first reinforces what he just said about men divorcing their wives, but then also goes on to give identical instructions about women divorcing their husbands – which, quite frankly, would have been something that would have been much more difficult to imagine, something no one had even thought to ask about, something that implies a certain equality of status and parity of opportunity (whether it existed or not).

Second, it’s immediately after this exchange that Mark recounts the story of people – parents, single-parents, women, divorced women? – bringing children to be “touched” by Jesus. Most often in Mark, when someone wants to be touched they want to be healed. So it may be that these children are sickly, which may explain a bit, if not defend, the disciples’ reaction. Yet Jesus is indignant, instructing not only that these people – parents, single-parents, women, divorced women? – be allowed to bring their children to him for a touch of blessing and healing, but that it is to precisely these children – suffering, dependent, and vulnerable – that the kingdom of God belongs.

And it is likely this last assertion that would have shocked the community listening to Jesus then… and probably should shock the community open to listening to Jesus today. Law is important. Marriage is important. Divorce represents a tearing and sundering of something God had blessed. Everyone whose been divorced or part of a family of divorce or close to someone who has been divorced knows this. So it’s not exactly news. But what is news – indeed, the good news – in this passage is that God regularly shows to care for precisely those who have been sundered and torn apart, those who are alone, dependent, vulnerable, suffering, disenfranchised, and hurting.

Perhaps, Dear Partner, our call this week is to focus the attention of our people on what is really the issue here – and indeed, the central issue in all of Scripture: that God is most reliably present among the vulnerable, the hurting, and the dispossessed. And if that’s where you find God, then that’s probably where you should find God’s Church – extending grace and help and support and understanding and love for those who are down and out, those the culture is prone to leave behind, those without power, those who are easy to miss or dismiss. For it is to such as these, Jesus says, that the kingdom of God belongs. And only when we recognize our own dependence and vulnerability and see ourselves in those who suffer, he goes on to say, can we imagine aright – and thereby receive – the reign and presence of God.

Your words matter, Dear Partner. With a week like this past one, with this challenging and often misinterpreted passage in front of us, with all the hurt in the world, your words of grace matter more than ever. For through your words God becomes present once again to those who most need God. Thank you. Even more, thank God for you.

Yours in Christ,
David

Post image: From a small sampling of artwork drawn by immigrant children in a foster home who had been separated from their parents.