MARK 10.2-16 follows Prayer Book priorities: marriage first, children afterwards. One conclusion that stands out from each sections of this Gospel is that there was disagreement — then, as now — concerning the proper order and management of family relationships.
There is a conspicuous hole within the dialogue. Where is the teaching on women divorcing their husbands? This omission was not problematic for the primary Christians, or for his or her Jewish forebears. The Jewish author Josephus remarks that “it is just the person who’s permitted to send a document of divorce,” while “even a girl who has been divorced may not remarry without her [ex-]husband’s consent” (Jewish Antiquities 15.259).
What Jesus tells the Pharisees about divorce is that Moses allowed it as a concession to weakness, but that they need to follow a superior ideal as an alternative: “What God has joined together, let nobody separate.” If divorce isn’t any longer permitted for any reason, by either party, then all objections that the teaching discriminates against women fall away.
In modern society, marriage and divorce remain sensitive matters. In no other aspect of human existence are we as quick to detect judgement or censure within the reactions of others as we’re in terms of intimate relationships. Is our life partner the proper race, or color, religion, or sexual orientation? What about their socio-economic and mental background?
To read that our Lord — the Lord of forgiveness — accepted no justifications for the dissolution of such relationships is greater than just “difficult”. It is excruciating. We all know good people whose marriages and life-partnerships have withered and died. Not all of them had fault on either side, or were attributable to a scarcity of commitment. There could possibly be elements of neglect, or abuse, or exploitation; or the sheer unendurable hardness of living together under pressures that we’re in no position to assume. What is more, not all damage is visible.
Many of us accept that some marriages have to end. When it involves history (not less than the kind concerned with the doings of “the good”), the long run of our nation once rested on finding an answer to the “failure” of an ageing wife to supply a son. Irresistible force (human passion; the hunger for posterity) met immovable object (dynastic self-protection; hierarchical inflexibility).
Yet, it shouldn’t be only grand divorces that fracture the intricate patterns of our interlocking existences. Within the family unit, too, pressures on fault lines turn once firm ground into crumbling sand, rippling outwards in waves of turbulence.
There is another choice, in fact: to annul a wedding, sneakily sidestepping Jesus’s hard teaching. But I’m unconvinced that pretending that a wedding was not a wedding is someway “higher”, on a practical and an ethical level, than admitting the breakdown and accepting the need of divorce. The word “divorce” (divortium) once meant the dissolution of a wedding by consent (the choice, dissolution without consent, was repudium). But that reflects Roman, not Bible, law. No help for divorcing Christians here.
When Jesus asks what Moses taught, the Pharisees seek advice from the concession that Moses had allowed due to human weakness. But Jesus trumps the prophet’s authority by pointing to God’s. One commentator concludes that “Mark’s Jesus allows us no lower aim” than “God’s design for unbroken, lifelong marriage”. How many preachers can be brave enough to tackle that this Sunday, as an alternative of the better lesson in Mark 10.13-16?
Jesus is condemning divorces that result in remarriage slightly than divorce per se. It is left open whether divorce without remarriage is permissible. Matthew’s Jesus provides a possible exit clause (5.32). But these exceptions are small comfort to those whose marriages are over. Like my commentator, I see no method to reconcile my adherence to Jesus’s meaning here with the non-judgemental, accepting attitude to divorced people which I (together with most Christians I do know) think is a greater reflection of the entire “excellent news of Jesus Christ the Son of God” (Mark 1.1).
Readers may now expect an “Aha!” moment, a rabbit-out-of-a-hat solution. I even have none. I understand what Jesus taught. I accept it as a Christian ideal. All I can offer is an appeal to Augustine’s principle that any interpretation of scripture which doesn’t fit with the love of God and neighbour can’t be right — and my conviction that Milton was right to place this promise in Christ’s mouth: “I shall temper so Justice with Mercie” (Paradise Lost 10.77-8).
