This Week: Proper 22B
Gospel: Mark 10:2-16
This week’s gospel is deceptive. It seems like it is about divorce. It seems straightforward. And we might be lulled into thinking it encourages a prohibition on divorce or else defends a Christian opposition to divorce.
This is a pretty weak take.
This gospel story concludes with even more talk about children, as we’ve already heard about the last two weeks.
If we’re just skimming, we’ll think this is anti-divorce, pro-kid, so this is just a pro-family passage. Or else we think these are two unrelated doctrinal commands. Let’s resist these temptations, shall we?
Divorce, meh. Marriage.
While the first part of the gospel captures our energy, we should pay close attention to what is actually said, not what we think the church should want to care about. In this way, Jesus doesn’t condemn divorce. But neither does he endorse or encourage marriage.
The gist of Jesus’s response to a question about divorce is to say that Moses came up with divorce because you suck at marriage.
Then Jesus goes into describing marriage like a sacramental transformation, rebirth. Like baptism, folks. Not just the end of a previous life, but rebirth as a new creation. A creation that makes two people be one.
Here is where, I think, most people take the easy route and avoid the true meaning here. Primarily because we have always struggled with getting this.
One is one.
The problem is that I think we better understand the stakes than we do the conditions.
Many people (rightly) worry about losing themselves when they get married. Losing, not just independence, but their personal identities, their personal nature. Who they are! And this is a justifiable fear because couples have a way of acting alike over time. We watch it happen!
It is also a justified fear in Jesus’s telling. He’s the one who consistently preaches about losing yourself to gain the Kin-dom.
It is also true to what Jesus is saying here—and for the same reason. He is speaking about transformation. Marrying will necessarily lead to change. And one of those changes is to your sense of self and identity.
But here’s the part we struggle with. We lose ourselves, not to the other person. Because they too are transformed. But to something new. Something that resembles us, that contains us, and is still a lot like us. It just stops being me and you. We are something new.
We must resist the modern impulse to define a group, a people, and in this case a couple, as a product of two individuals—as if the group itself isn’t a thing. This is quite literally the opposite. The group is the thing, and the presence of individuals becomes problematic.
The problem of Two.
In seeing a married couple as two people inhabiting a single space, we fundamentally reject what Jesus says is the central principle at the heart of marriage, to be one flesh.
This is a perplexing notion for people in the U.S. Our obsession with individualism can make it impossible to see a marriage as anything but a container for two individuals. This, however, is a dead-end in our imaginations and a distortion of logic.
I, like most people, reject complementarianism as a confining view of relationship and a fundamental misunderstanding of the gospel. It is sexist and enforces a way of life that doesn’t allow most people to flourish.
It is also incompatible with Jesus’s teaching.
When enforcing a code that women must stay at home and raise children and men must go out and work, we aren’t offering a picture of oneness. We are painting a picture of individuals cohabitating. One that is not much different than having a roommate with a gendered task list.
Jesus argues that we have a problem with divorce because we have a problem with marriage. And I would argue that we have a problem with marriage because we have a problem with individualism.
Honestly, do we even know who we are?
Until we can comprehend what it means to be a we, to live as a we, to embody and love as a we, let’s give each other a little more grace.
And the Kids.
There’s a good chance preachers will avoid talking about divorce and marriage at all this week. Because the gospel offers a bit about people bringing children to Jesus and the disciples trying to stop them and Jesus saying
“Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”
So we’ll no doubt have a bunch of Pro-Kid sermons this week. Or variations of encouraging childlike awe and innocence. That latter being a real temptation with those for whom the idea of the gospel being practical, tangible, and material in the lives of people is too threatening.
In short, we’re going to have people stumbling over divorce, people trying to get the congregation to acknowledge that children are actual Christians, and some trying to encourage adults to act like we assume children are—naive and ignorant.
I don’t envy anyone this week.
But let us consider the challenge in Jesus’s statement as something that is both material and metaphorical. And as something directly connected to the teaching so far.
Jesus has just said that the disciples must not cause children to stumble. Then they try to stop a stranger from exorcizing demons in the name of Jesus, who Jesus compares to a child and the disciples to a stumbling block. Then they literally do the same with actual children brought to him.
The disciples are screwing up (which raises an interesting parallel with Moses giving divorce because people keep screwing up their marriages).
They keep trying to fix something that they keep breaking. And they can’t. The powerlessness of the moment for them has built over time by their selfishness.
Because they are taken up with individualism!
They argue about greatness, place in the Kin-dom, who is allowed to participate, assuming they should shut people out—none of this is stuff Jesus wants, they assume he does, and they do it for themselves. Because it is they who are mad.
There is a powerful sense of the material and the metaphorical here. It really is about encouraging and lifting up children. And it is about that selfless awe of children. And our response ought to mirror the response Jesus encourages from his disciples:
Stop
- blocking the innocent
- obsessing about yourself
- assuming Jesus would restrict the gospel
Because none of these is an act of faith; it is fear. And none of it actually reflects the gospel. But it does reflect power, control, and order.
Marriage fits into that bigger theme.
The evangelist brings the children back in here because each of these elements is related. These aren’t separate: they are one.
The kind of unity Jesus speaks about in marriage, of being one flesh rather than two flesh living together requires a mutual sacrifice and communication. We have to listen to each other and care about the other person. We have to want what they want. And when we both are postured toward the we, we stop being me. We then exist.
We all suck at marriage for the very reason that the disciples have started to suck at being Jesus. They keep thinking about themselves. How awesome they are, what stuff they have to do to protect the mission. They have become good lieutenants in an army, but terrible disciples in the Jesus Movement.
Jesus manages to take this ungenerous question from his critics and turn it to a teaching his followers need to hear. One we all need to hear—hear and give far more of our attention to working through.