27th Sunday of Ordinary Time—Jeff Johnson, S.J.
Yesterday, in this church, 9 people were ordained deacons. Many
of them today are fanning out across the Boston area to serve in
parishes. You may remember that I served here at St. Ignatius as a
deacon: preaching, serving at mass, and baptizing babies. There
were lots of babies to be baptized, and that’s one of my enduring
memories of St. Ignatius is assembling with families around the
font in the back to celebrate and welcome new life. I am really
grateful to you and Fr. Bob and the Fathers Lofti for the formation
I received here. Now I live and work in Houston at a Jesuit High
School. I’m not exactly around the corner, but Bob flew me up
here to celebrate with my friends who were ordained yesterday and
to celebrate with you today. At least that’s what I thought he was
doing, but after seeing the gospel for today, I suspect he flew me
up from Houston so he wouldn’t have to preach. The good news in
this one is not readily apparent.
This passage on marriage and divorce has been so misread and
misused, causing so much suffering and pain, that it’s hard to see
any good in it at all. But let’s see if we can make some headway.
First of all the passage isn’t really about marriage. Oh, sure that’s
the topic of discussion between the Pharisees and Jesus, but
placing it within the larger story of Mark’s gospel, this passage is
clearly about Jesus’ rejection at the hands of the Pharisees. They
intentionally set a trap for him—for they very well knew the
answer to their own question. They wanted him to contradict
Moses, the Torah, and the Jewish faith and expose himself as a
radical blasphemer. If they could expose him as a radical who
alters the ancient teachings, then they could persecute him to no
end.
However many people throughout history have chosen to read this
passage in a very different and strange way. They treat it as if it’s
one part of a big checklist of do’s and don’ts. In fact, they treat the
gospels as if they were almanacs, and they thumb through them to
see Jesus’ opinion on this or that. It’s like they go to the index of
the bible, search for divorce, ah, see marriage. Page 1230. Flip to
that page, ok, Jesus on marriage and divorce—got it.
We just can’t treat the gospel like that.
So the Pharisees wanted Jesus to expose himself as a radical and
that’s exactly what he does. But he’s radical not for what he says
about divorce, but for the reason he says what he says. Divorce
was permitted in ancient Israel and in Jesus’ own time. But it was a
one way street. Men were in charge, men said when the marriage
was over. Marriage was not a covenant between equal partners.
The woman—in the eyes of the law, and no doubt in the eyes of
many husbands—was nothing more than property. It was a brutal
system and easily manipulated for the benefit of the man.
So here comes Jesus and his run in with the Pharisees—they sort of
suspect that he’s got a soft place in his heart for women. They sort
of suspect that he treats women as equals, or certainly treats them
as disciples, they sort of suspect that he flies in the face of the
patriarchal conventions of their day. And so they devise the perfect
trap, a question about divorce. They want to see if he’s going to
mess with or change a man’s privilege to kick his wife out of his
house on a whim. And they’ve dressed it up as theology by
wrapping it up in the Torah. And so they ask, what about divorce?
Nope, he says. And then he plays into their hands, offering as
justification his radical ideas about women. “He says, Whoever
divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against
her.”
Against her? Discussions about marriage and divorce in Jesus day
just didn’t take the woman into consideration. Jesus was
challenging the unjust and cruel practices surrounding marriage
and divorce that exploited and victimized women. Divorce was
basically the end of life as the woman knew it. It was brutal and
harsh. And Jesus had had just about enough of it. His no to divorce
was a no to exploitation. When those Pharisees asked, “can men
just keep on doing like they’ve done for centuries,” Jesus said no.
There’s a new kingdom coming and we don’t treat people like that
in my kingdom. In Jesus kingdom, marriage is a covenant of love
between equal partners.
And so for centuries this passage has been read as a flat-out
prohibition against divorce—no need to dig deeper and figure out
what Jesus was up to just pure no. What had started as a pastoral
approach by Jesus to correct an injustice became an unfeeling,
uncaring prohibition that trapped and exploited people. The very
opposite of Jesus’s original intention.
Before Vatican II, the church could not even think about divorce. It
was taboo. But the second Vatican Council came a rediscovered
pastoral approach to the very real things that people go through. As
the church came to rediscover who it was—the people. It also
discovered that people live complex and challenging lives that
require real pastoral approaches and solutions.
Men and women trapped in exploitative, abuse, and deadening
relationship no longer have to suffer because “Jesus said no to
divorce.” Jesus said yes to life, to love, and justice.