Let the Children Come to Me... Unless they are Divorced.
Mark 10:2-16
I freely admit that if I was supposed to be preaching on this passage, I would consider skipping it to go with something a little less heavy. If you haven’t read the passage yet, you can click the link above to see it in full. You’ll need to in order to follow along today. Heavy or not, this is not a passage that we can shy away from, because love, marriage and divorce are all part of being human. We are the way God made us to be, and that was all part of the package.
Diving into the scripture, we start off with another familiar scene of Jesus being questioned by some Pharisees. They ask him a question that they already know the answer to: whether a man can lawfully divorce his wife. Jesus knows this, so he turns the question back on them. They explain the common practice at the time. A man could write a certificate of divorce to dismiss his wife. You may notice that sounds a little different than divorce in our time. Divorce was mostly a one way street that allowed men to abandon women at their pleasure. The situation for the divorced woman would then be dire. Being with a man was a necessity to function in their society, and a divorced woman would lose both her security and her food and shelter. The reader at this time would know that being a divorced woman was a terrible fate. Jesus responds that divorce exists because of the men’s hardness of heart, and he explains the holy connection between a man and a woman. “What God has joined together, let no one separate.”
This is a passage that has brought a lot of pain to a lot of followers of Jesus that I have spoken with. Many people have been denied full access to God because they have gotten a divorce, either literally in the form of the Eucharist or metaphorically in the form of shame that has kept them from attending worship services. Similarly, many people have been denied access to God because they have formed a bond with another person that does not conform to the man and wife language in this passage. Last week, we read that Jesus says that anyone who puts a stumbling block in front of one of his children is going to get a fate worse than being tied to a rock and thrown in a river. The practices that exclude some of God’s children from full participation from the life of the church community surely are stumbling blocks that the Jesus of the last passage would condemn, but in this passage he would seem to condone those practices. How do we square that circle?
For me, the key to understanding this passage is the phrase “What God has joined together.” Weddings are a celebration of a couple that we all have faith that God has joined together. Marriage is the word we use for both the legal structure of pairing in the eyes of the government, and what we call the spiritual bond, blessed by God, that we have faith exists. In a wedding, it is not the minister that binds the couple together in the eyes of God, it is God. While most couples do go into their wedding vows with the best of intentions, for many this does not work out. We are humans. We make mistakes.
Sometimes couples do not feel that bond of being joined together, and sometimes attempting to “make it work” can be physically dangerous for one partner. I believe that, while we have faith that God may have bound two people together, it just may not be so. We certainly can’t know from outside of that relationship. Just as we must not separate what God has joined together, we must not keep together what God has not joined. I spoke to Father Taylor Tracy at Christ the King Church in Kansas City, who put it very succinctly, “It is simply not just to deny the Eucharist to a woman leaving a difficult relationship. It is an injustice on top of an injustice.” I do not believe that God would bind a person to another person who would hurt them, no matter how nice a celebration we threw here on Earth. We must trust people when they tell us that bond is not there, and we should especially trust women, who the structural power of marriage has been used to control for Millennia.
What Jesus argued against was nothing like what divorce is today. What Jesus argued against was an unjust system that kept women as the property of their fathers until they were given over to be property of their husbands. This system allowed the men to abandon women to shame and deprivation at their will. This was not justice, and Jesus was right to be against it. But, in today’s society, divorce does not have to lead to ruin and does not present the same kind of danger for those without power or agency. Today, divorce can be a recognition that perhaps it wasn’t God’s will, and sometimes it is best to move on. Sometimes it is dangerous not to move on. This situation has very little to do with the divorce that occurred in Jesus’s time, and I think it would not be just to exclude or shame anyone who goes through a divorce today. If anything, this simply tries to recreate the system of the past which controlled women through marriage.
Similarly, while Jesus talks about a man and a wife, it is undeniable that there are many millions of couples who feel God’s bond of love and do not easily fit into those two boxes. The idea of a same sex couple that was blessed by God to be together was just not a thing that was up for debate at the time. It would have not been something Jesus would have even considered when having this discussion, so we can’t take any real lesson from Jesus using specific gendered language about marriage. What we can take is that Jesus tells us not to separate what God has but together. If two people believe that God has joined them as one flesh, who are we to say different. That would be unjust.
The ending of the passage sums it up pretty good. Once again the disciples try to deny someone access to Jesus, and once again he rebukes them, as we saw in previous passages. Let them all come to Jesus, and put nothing in their path. To exclude anyone from the love of a Christian community or from the Lord’s table is not only unjust, but it fails to follow this radical call to let everyone in. We must come to Jesus like a child, and we must serve everyone as if they were God’s children, because they are.