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Like You’ve Never Been Hurt
A sermon by Dr. Jim
Somerville, Pastor
Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
October 4, 2009
Mark 10:2-16
Those of you who have
been worshiping with us in the last year or so know that our Sunday morning
services are planned around the weekly readings from the Revised Common
Lectionary, with one passage each from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the
Gospels, and the Epistles. “The Lectionary,” as we call it, is really nothing
more or less than a plan for reading through most of the Bible in public worship
over a three year period. It is used by an estimated one billion Christians
around the world, and on this Worldwide Communion Sunday it serves as one more
way to draw us together rather than drive us apart. But on every Sunday it is
a good way to take Scripture seriously, since we build our services around the
Bible and not around whatever happens to be on the denominational calendar or
whatever whim comes into the preacher’s head. And in that respect it is also a
good discipline for the preacher, who must sometimes deal with passages he or
she would never choose to preach. This morning’s Gospel lesson is a good
example. Although I love the Gospels, and the Gospel of Mark in particular, if
it were only up to me I would not have chosen this passage, from the first part
of chapter 10:
Some Pharisees came,
and to test him they asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?"
[Jesus] answered them, "What did Moses command you?" They said, "Moses allowed
a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her." But Jesus said to
them, "Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But
from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female.' '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."
Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to
them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against
her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits
adultery."
Often, when I finish
reading a passage from the Gospel, I say, “The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ,”
and everyone is invited to respond, “Thanks be to God,” but even if this is the
Gospel of our Lord Jesus I can’t imagine anyone saying “Thanks be to God” for
it. Here we are, in a church that has just kicked off its annual Divorce
Recovery Workshop, a church that tries to make divorced and remarried people
feel especially welcome, and our Lord Jesus Christ has just told us that divorce
violates God’s intention for humanity and that those who remarry commit the sin
of adultery. It presents a real challenge to the preacher, and when I mentioned
it to my staff last week some of them hinted that it might be a good Sunday to
preach the Old Testament lesson or the Epistle instead. I appreciate that.
They’re looking out for me. But if we’re going to take the Bible seriously, and
if we’re going to say that Jesus is Lord, then we cannot skip over the parts of
the Bible we don’t agree with or stop up our ears when Jesus says something we
don’t want to hear. The challenge is to lean in close, to listen carefully, and
to see if there is any way we can say by the end of the sermon, “Thanks be to
God.”
It helps to notice
that much of what Jesus says in this passage is said in response to a question
from the Pharisees. Mark says they “tested” him by asking, “Is it lawful for a
man to divorce his wife?” The word in Greek is peirazo, which is
sometimes translated “to tempt.” It is the same word Mark uses when he says
that Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by the Devil. So, here come the
Devil’s advocates, testing Jesus with this tricky question. What they’re hoping
to do is trip him up, make him fall flat on his face right there in front of the
crowds and in front of his own disciples. They ask him if it’s lawful to
divorce knowing full well that it is: it’s right there in Deuteronomy 24:1,
where Moses says that if
a man enters into marriage with
a woman, but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable
about her, he can write a certificate of divorce, put it in her hand, and send
her out of his house. It sounds cold—and it was!—but it was also
perfectly legal. If Jesus said that it wasn’t the Pharisees would have him
right where they wanted him, rejecting the Law of Moses. It would be the same
thing as a Baptist preacher saying he didn’t believe the Bible. The crowds
around Jesus would vanish like the morning mist.
But listen to what he says: he
doesn’t deny the legality of divorce, but he sees it as a concession on Moses’
part. “It’s because of your hardness of heart that he wrote this commandment
for you,” Jesus says, “but that’s not the way it was meant to be in the
beginning.” And then he invokes the story of creation, describing how God made
us male and female. He hints at that moment when God brought the woman to the
man in the garden, when the man said in a voice full of wonder, “This at last is
bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” And then Jesus quotes the Scripture
that says, “For
this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.” If they really are one flesh, Jesus
argues, how will you separate them? You’d have to cleave them right down the
middle. In effect, that’s what divorce does, and often it is just that painful
and messy.
You can see why it
was never God’s intention.
But to be fair I
don’t think it is ever anyone’s intention. No one gets married in the hope of
getting divorced, do they? I stand beside young men at the altar again and
again. I look at their faces as their brides come down the aisle. I can almost
hear them thinking, “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.”
Whatever happens between that moment and the moment when one or the other of
them says, “I want a divorce,” is almost too tragic to imagine, whether it is a
hot-blooded act of infidelity or the slow, sputtering sadness of a fire going
out. “It’s perfectly legal,” Jesus might have said, “but this is not what God
wanted for marriage.” God dreamed that two people could come together in a
relationship of such intimacy that one could not weep without the other tasting
salt—a relationship in which the two really did become one flesh. What becomes
clear in the tragedy of divorce is that not even God always gets what he wants.
If that were the end
of the lesson we could swallow hard and shake our heads, but we could hardly
say, “Thanks be to God,” could we? Still I hesitate to go on, because in the
next section Jesus’ disciples ask him again about this matter and he says
something even harder. He says, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another
commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries
another, she commits adultery.” It’s interesting to me that when we begin to
discuss sin in the church we often pull out our pew Bibles and flip back to the
Book of Leviticus to point out the sins that we find particularly offensive. We
turn to the Law of Moses just like the Pharisees did, but we don’t turn to the
Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ to see what offends him. Apparently these
things do: divorce and adultery. And if you pressed him for why I think he
would say it is because of God’s dream that two people could become one flesh.
It is a dream of
indivisible unity: the same kind of dream we have in mind when we pledge
allegiance to the flag, the same kind of dream Jesus had in mind when he prayed
that his disciples might “all be one.” How do you think the founding fathers of
this country would have felt to see the United States divided by civil war,
drawn up in battle lines against each other, Americans shooting down their
fellow Americans? How do you think Jesus feels when he sees his body, the
church, divided into a thousand different denominations, each behaving as if the
others did not exist? Those large-scale tragedies are reflected in the small
scale tragedy of divorce. It breaks God’s heart to see couples fighting with
each other or cheating on each other or neglecting each other until they give up
and go their separate ways, and to the extent that they are responsible for
their actions they are responsible for violating the will of God: we call that
sin.
But let me say a word
about that.
In the eighth chapter
of John the scribes and Pharisees bring to Jesus the most obvious sinner they
can find. They say,
“Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. I5n
the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now, what do you say?” Jesus
says, “Let the one who is without sin throw the first stone.” Eventually all of
the woman’s accusers drop their stones and slink away, because none of us is
without sin. But here is the good news: sin is not a problem for Jesus; he has
a way of dealing with it. This is why he is not afraid of sinners and why they
don’t seem to be afraid of him. In the Gospels he is often surrounded by them,
so that the scribes and Pharisees complain, saying, “This man welcomes sinners
and eats with them!” (Luke 15:1). Which means that even if the worst were
true—if divorce were a sin, remarriage were adultery, and all of us were
divorced, remarried, adulterers—Jesus would set a table before us and invite us
to eat with him. Now, this is the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Thanks be to God!
It’s not that Jesus doesn’t
take sin seriously. He does. He takes it very seriously. But when the
Pharisees set before him the most blatant sinner they can find he chooses to
respond with compassion rather than condemnation. He asks the woman, “Has no
one condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she answers. “Then neither do I condemn
you,” Jesus says. “Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” At First
Baptist Church we are trying to follow that example. While we acknowledge that
sin can and does lead to divorce we choose to see divorce itself as a tragedy
rather than a sin. We try to respond like paramedics at the scene of an
accident who don’t spend a lot of time talking about who’s to blame but instead
try to pull people from the wreckage.
And when it comes to Jesus’
harsh words about remarriage I think he has in mind those who divorce in
order to remarry, who practice what might be called “legalized adultery” by
doing the necessary paperwork to swap one spouse for another. I don’t think
he’s talking about the spouse who is left behind. That’s the one we try to help
through the Divorce Recovery Workshop. And if he or she recovers enough to
think about getting married again we will celebrate. We will even preside at
the wedding. We want to reflect the spirit of the One who welcomed all people
and in whose presence all people felt welcome.
At the end of today’s
difficult reading is that delightful passage about people bringing little
children to Jesus in order that he might touch them. His disciples tried to
send them away, thinking that Jesus wouldn’t want to be bothered with such as
these. But
when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them,
“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.” And he took them up in his arms,
laid his hands on them, and blessed them (Mark 10:13-16).
Why does the Kingdom belong to such as these? I believe it is because little
children’s lives are fully open to the love of God. If they are fortunate,
their hearts have never been broken; they know of no reason not to open them
wide to the world around them. Not so with us. There are very few among us
whose hearts have not been broken. The people in our Divorce Recovery Workshop
tell stories that make me weep, and of course they are not the only ones. The
wounded are everywhere among us. Hearts that were once wide open have closed up
like clam shells. And so, even when God comes knocking, we are skeptical. How
do we know he means it? How can we be sure we won’t get hurt?
Well, we can’t be
sure. But Jesus seems to believe we can do this: we can receive the kingdom of
God like a little child; we can open our hearts to him and love like we’ve never
been hurt. At the end of this passage Mark tells us that Jesus was lifting
little children up into his arms, laying his hands on them, and blessing them.
You can almost hear them giggle as he does it, can’t you? You can almost see
the smiles on their faces. And you can almost see the smile on his.
This is the Gospel of
our Lord Jesus Christ.
Thanks be to God.
—Jim Somerville © 2009
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