Reading: Mark 10:2-12
These days we have come to recognise that marriages do not always work and that sometimes the most creative solution is divorce. People are then free to remarry. At best they engage the process in a way that leads to greater self-understanding and often to the development of skills and insight which make for a better foundation for marriage in the future. This is the wisdom both of the church, inspired by the gospel of reconciliation, recognition and new beginnings, and, at its best, the wider community. It is therefore somewhat confronting, indeed, jarring, to listen to a gospel reading which declares unequivocally that divorce is forbidden and accordingly any new marriage has to constitute adultery. Those committed to seeing all biblical statement as authoritative sometimes seek to reassert the prohibition or may try to interpret away its meaning, but even they have come largely to pass it by without all the upset that parallel behaviour in interpreting texts, for instance, on same-sex relations, engenders. Some seek to ameliorate the harshness by explaining that in those days the options for divorced women (husbands were mostly the initiators of divorce) were poverty or prostitution, so that the teaching seeks to protect women. This fails to convince because the two most common and usually very adequate options were returning to one’s original household or/and remarrying, the very thing the gospel passage forbids.

We cannot of course be absolutely sure that Jesus ever gave such teaching, though probability lies with it reflecting his own stance. It is possible that the original anecdote of his encounter with the Pharisees on the issue simply had him counter their interest in how to divorce by provocatively telling them not to try to unstick what God had stuck together. The earliest tradition certainly saw this as more than provocation and took it as a ruling, perhaps supplementing Jesus’ initial response with scriptural proofs, but that is uncertain. It is probably better to acknowledge that from early times Christians saw divorce (and so any remarriage) as forbidden. When Matthew’s version notes an exception, namely where adultery has taken place, he is probably just stating what everyone assumed (and was Jewish and Roman law), namely that adultery automatically made divorce mandatory. That was their world. They saw things differently. When, therefore, the church came to realise that to follow the teaching of Jesus about love, forgiveness, and new beginnings, meant that we had to recognise the validity of divorce as an option, and so act contrary to this specific teaching, it acted with integrity and acted very much like Jesus himself, who commonly let obedience to the biblical law of compassion override other biblical laws.

While it is important to sense the distance between our stance and theirs, there is a danger that we can spend all our energy distancing from a text like this and miss other aspects of what it says which have abiding value. These include the affirmation of human intimacy, including sexual intimacy. Modest but explicit, it speaks about becoming one flesh, which might originally have meant one kin, but here has clear sexual connotations. So it affirms such human intimacy as something good. We have come to recognise that in a range of combinations where genuine union occurs, more recently including between both people of different sexual orientation and those with the same. We also recognise its existence in formal marriage and de facto marriage and ensure through legislation that the rights of such partnerships are upheld. Rightly the passage has been taken as an affirmation of marriage, but it does more than that in principle and certainly more than that if the focus falls on marriedness rather than on the ongoing development of intimate partnership in which all areas, including sexual fulfilment, there is dignity, respect and fulfilment for both. Marriage as marriedness, institutionally, has been bad news for many people and hidden much that has been abusive and destructive,. Our text not only affirms human intimacy; it challenges us to work at it, nurture and treasure it, and not abandon it at the slightest adversity. Jesus shifts the focus, indeed, from how can I run away to how can I engage. This should not be read as a rule never to abandon a marriage, but as a challenge to engage the ups and downs of human intimacy with the utmost seriousness because it is an essential component of what it means to be human and the best context in which to create and shape new human beings. The passage does then call us to attention and to reflect on our own engagement in such relationships.