Genesis 24: 34-62; Song of Solomon 2: 8-13; 1 Corinthians 7: 1-16; Matthew 19: 3-11

Introduction

Our society has moved a great deal in relation to marriage. Today, we have an unmarried couple living in the Prime Minister’s lodge in Sydney, and no one, as far as I am aware, is scandalized b y this or calling for some kind of moral redress. Many Australians, both within and outside the Church, experience the pain of separation and divorce, and what has the church to say to them? Is there any longer such a thing as “Christian marriage” and what theological guidance can the Church give to those either contemplating marriage or divorce?

Jesus’ words come to us ringing with authority and conviction.

For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.

The final phrase has been translated in a way to be inclusive, but in so doing its essential contrast is obscured. Older translations get that better.

What God has joined together let no man separate.

This phrase is picked up in Mark and Luke, and quite possibly lies behind Paul’s statement in I Corinthians 7 that the Lord’s Word stands behind his own prohibition of separation in vv. 10, 11.

How are we to understand this strong and often quoted statement of Jesus today?

Uniting Church Theology?

When in living memory of many of you here I was minister at the Floreat Uniting Church, I married a great number of couples. Always at the services I would read the words from Uniting in Worship.

Marriage is the sacred and life-long union of a man and a woman, who give themselves to each other in love and trust. It signifies the mystery of the union between Christ and the church.

It’s a lovely statement, suggesting a rich theology of marriage. But as the years progressed, and some of the couples I married ended their relationship in divorce, I began to wonder about its suitability. Then in 2000, the Worship Working Group of the Assembly came out with a new version.

Marriage is a gift of God and a means of grace. In the life-long union of marriage we can know the joy of God, in whose image we are made, male and female.

A gift of God, a means of grace. “Life-long union” is still there, but rather as a possibility, in which we may know the joy of God. No doubt, this restatement is a response to just the kind of pastoral reality I was beginning to encounter. So well and good. But it does not amount to a new theology of marriage. And in the absence of a clearly articulated theology of marriage, most Christians are likely still to be guided by the seemingly clear and unequivocal words of Jesus: What God has joined together, let no one separate.

Teaching of Jesus in Matt 19

The tragedy is that these words of Jesus are often taken right out of the context in which they occur, and given a status which Jesus never intended for them. The context is a dispute with the Pharisees where they sought to test him in relation to the question of marriage. Their question is deceptive in its simplicity: Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause? The answer is at one level obvious. “Of course it is lawful, because Moses has decreed it." Perhaps the key lies in the words “for any cause”, because among the Rabbis there was a debate about the legitimate grounds for divorce, and Rabbi Hillel had argued that man could indeed divorce his wife “for any cause”. Or is it that the Pharisees also had in mind the scripture from Malachi in which God declares: I hate divorce (Mal 2: 16), and wanted to test this apparent contradiction with the law of Moses.

Either way, Jesus characteristically refuses to fall into a trap or get caught on the horns of a cleverly posed dilemma. He offers one of his pithy sayings which drives his hearers to seek the deeper meaning of the law. “Whom God has joined, let not humans cause to divorce.” This is akin to sayings of Jesus like, “The Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath”, which Jesus used in a similar circumstance. Jesus is pointing to a deeper truth about God’s will and purpose for human persons. And we need to put this saying in the wider context of his teaching about the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God, in which the original intentions of God will once again find their fulfilment.

You want to know about the meaning of the law, and I tell you it points to the purposes of God which will find their fulfillment in the Kingdom, which even now is breaking in among you. For the meantime, because of your hardness of heart, the law of Moses is operative, but don’t mistake that for the final indication of divine purpose and mystery.

Now to turn this rich and suggestive saying of Jesus into a new law, as unfortunately our Catholic and Anglican brothers have done, represents a gross misreading of Jesus` meaning. Jesus wasn’t setting up a new law to take the place of that of Moses — if the Pharisees had heard him to be doing that, there would have been no end of controversy, you can be sure. Rather Jesus is drawing us back to the original purpose of God in creating humans as man and woman.

Restating a Theology of Marriage

A theology of marriage could go back to Genesis 2, as Jesus suggests, but it could equally well go back to the Song of Solomon. In this remarkable book we find a celebration of human sexuality. Generations of Christians have puzzled over this text — what is it doing in our bibles? The mystics see it as an allegory of the love between the soul and God, and others see it as a kind of liturgical text for Christ and the Church. In my view this is all too clever by half — it seems to me that the text simply celebrates the human joy of sexuality. Why do that? Why put it in the bible? Well, of course, it is part of God’s good creation, and like very other part, deserves to be celebrated.

But beyond that, there was in the ancient middle east many strange views of sexuality. In the pagan cults, sexuality was often divinized, so that it became part of the religious cult, a celebration of divine energies. Then later, of course with the Greeks, sexuality was seen as somehow demeaning, less than spiritual, a temptation to be avoided. It seems it’s very hard for humans to get a balanced view of sexuality. So, right in the middle of our bible, is a celebration of sexuality, not as a divine eros, not as a shameful aspect of life in the flesh, but simply as a cause of joy and satisfaction.

The older marriage service adds

Marriage is given that with delight and tenderness
They may know each other in love,
And through their physical union
They strengthen the union of their lives.

The other day I was speaking to a young woman who had been married for 11 years. She told him how offended she was that the marriage service made so much mention of children. I was not getting married to have children, she protested. That’s not why I married my husband. And here again there has been an inappropriate theology of marriage in some parts of the church, as if the point of marriage is procreation. This woman has since had children, but they were more like a gift, an overflow of the gift of their marriage, than its ground or purpose. I think our marriage service does pretty well there.

Conclusion (spoken)