For Sunday
Proper 22B
Collect
Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve: Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Savior; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
This is one of the most vexing gospel passages because it doesn’t make things very easy for anybody.
On the one hand, it seems like Jesus offers a rebuke of divorce, but such a reading scrubs the text of its context and guidance. Because such a reading doesn’t then deal with the transgressive character of Jesus’s teaching.
The main thing here is that Jesus thinks that, in God we are made one—and because we struggle with such a vision of unity, we have been given a means of disentangling ourselves from such commitments.
What strikes me, however, is just how much “traditional” teaching doesn’t even try to define unity in the way Jesus does. Complementarianism, for example, attempts to define husband jobs and wife jobs—which isn’t singularity; one flesh—but two flesh living next to each other in the most efficient (and gendered) manner possible.
Jesus acknowledges divorce as something we might call a necessary evil. But I think this is at once too pessimistic and fatalistic—and perhaps too judgy, especially from the married side of the conversation. We need to preserve divorce for you poor people who didn’t get it right is some condescending ridiculousness.
What we need to parse is what it would actually mean to be one flesh. And I think it has a lot to do with being of one mind with another. Much like we pray that we are of one mind with God. Jesus’s vision of neighbor, kinship, beloved community are far more than identity, and mean far more to him than marriage, too. There is something here to being one with those around us, in divine love and trust.