This week’s passage from Mark’s Gospel frequently gets called “The Divorce Passage” and for good reason: as soon as we hear the word “divorce” in the passage we don’t hear anything else! But that is an artifact of the way this passage has been misused to subjugate women and keep them in abusive marriage throughout the centuries.
I’ll say up front that I don’t really know what to make of Jesus’ prohibition of divorce. I have thoughts, but I’m not sure that divorce and remarriage are entirely the point of the passage. I will also say that we do have to take Jesus’ prohibition of divorce seriously because he is our Lord, but I also think we have come to the correct position in the Churches I serve that allows for divorce and remarriage. Being serious about scripture is not the same thing as taking its prescriptions and commands as literal and immutable.
And that, I think, is the point of the passage. When the interlocutors – we are only guessing that they are Pharisees – come to Jesus and ask about divorce, they are engaging in a rabbinic debate of the day. Hillel and Shammai, the leading figures whose philosophies ruled in among many Jews of Jesus’ day, debated marriage, divorce, and remarriage at length. These debates are recorded in the Mishnah if you’d like to read them. So Jesus is engaging in one of the big debates of the day. Jesus asks “What did Moses command you?” They tell him and then he launches into a teaching grounded in “the beginning of creation”. Jesus reaches back further to make a point about authority. Moses, as the argument seems to go, gave you divorce; it was God who gave you marriage, thus Jesus’ conclusion “what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Jesus reminds us that scripture, while an absolutely invaluable resource to hear God’s voice speaking today, is not in fact the final authority on all things. God, and for the Christian the self-revelation of God through Jesus Christ himself, is in fact the final authority. In another Gospel Jesus says that the Spirit of truth “will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). Jesus seems to be calling us to remember the One who called forth and sustains the whole Creation, is the One to whom we look. The words in the Bible are vital and “contain all things necessary to salvation” (BCP 526), but the Spirit of the Living God is the One who smashes anything we dare turn into an idol, even the Bible. God’s voice rings louder and we must discern what that call is and how God is calling us to live in the world in every generation.
I don’t have all the answers about human relationships, particularly marriage and divorce, but I know that hearing the Word and listening to the Word will lead us and guide us in the right paths. It says in the Psalms “God has spoken once, twice have I heard it…” (Psalm 62:13, BCP 670) The words of the Bible speak once, and in each generation the Word helps us to hear it anew.
St. Augustine's Chapel 