Sunday Homily - October 7th, 2018 - Sorrowful Reality, Unfailing Mercy
Jesus's Divine Mercy Icon
I.
please recognize that I am going to be talking about divorce
this morning.
And my prayer for all of us here is that not my words,
but God’s Eternal Word speaks to us this morning
giving us light and truth,
grace and mercy,
love and faithfulness.
And because of this subject matter,
I feel that it is necessary for all of us to take a deeper look
into this thorny reality of life for many people.
We can’t avoid it, and it is not good for us to gloss over this issue.
We, as the church, have to be able to talk about hard stuff
with gentleness, grace, and quiet spirits.
Because if we can’t talk about painful issues,
where else can we go?
-----
With that said, there is a second Gospel passage that we need to hear today,
because often the focus of the Good News
is made so narrow that there is no room for nuance.
It is from the Gospel of John, chapter 8:2-11.
And it is the account of the woman caught in adultery.
Here is that account in its entirety:
Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”
II.
chapter 10:2-16.
The fact that our Gospel passage deals with divorce today
is a profoundly uncomfortable place to dwell with Jesus.
So, today, join with me in diving a little deeper into this hard passage,
and perhaps, we will find some things we did not expect.
Take a look at the setup for the interaction
between Jesus and the Pharisees in our first sentence
from the Gospel this morning:
“Some Pharisees came, and to test Jesus,
they asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce
his wife?’”
From the start, this conversation was not meant to be nice.
The Pharisees were looking for something very particular,
something that we miss without understanding
the historical and theological context in which
Jesus is asked this question.
Because, just like today, this question about divorce was a live topic,
with different theological denominations of Judaism
answering this question differently.
Just as Christianity has different schools of thought
and different denominations that hold to different interpretations
of the Bible,
so also in Jesus’s time was there not just one
interpretation of the Torah,
or the Law of Moses.
[see Craig Keener’s Commentary on the New Testament and The Oxford Commentary on the Bible for more specific treatment of the Jewish interpretive traditions around divorce]
What the Pharisees were after was not whether Jesus could instruct them:
they were trying to corner Jesus into a partisan sector.
They were trying to figure out and box him in to a
particular interpretive system,
thus being able to neatly sort him into
conservative or liberal.
Jesus doesn’t take the bait.
Instead, with a little bit of sass,
Jesus retorts with his own question,
“What did Moses command you?”
And the Pharisees, in turn, answer their own question
along with Jesus’s question:
“Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal
and to divorce her.” [c.f. Deut. 24:1-4]
-----
Now, let’s take just pause for a moment
and notice something going on in the conversation
between Jesus and the Pharisees.
So far, this has been a conversation about legality.
The Pharisees, experts in the Torah,
KNOW what the Torah says about divorce.
They already KNOW what Deuteronomy says
even before they ask Jesus about it.
And, leading up to this moment, the conversation has centered
around the legality of divorce.
I mean, it is smack in the middle of their first question:
“Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”
And the Pharisees are also not square-headed when it comes to nuance.
They are perfectly aware of the different interpretive traditions
within Judaism. They are experts in this stuff.
But what they are after is partisanship: where do you stand, Jesus?
Now, notice with me very carefully how Jesus responds.
Because, rather than legality or lawfulness,
Jesus is answering this question differently
than how it was posed to begin with.
-----
Jesus answers:
“Because of your hardness of heart
he wrote you this commandment.
But from the beginning of creation,
‘God made them male and female.
For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother,
and the two shall become one flesh’;
so they are no longer two, but one flesh.
What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.”
[Mark 10:5-9 NASB]
Jesus very deftly avoids the legality question than the Pharisees pose,
and instead quotes from the Creation account in Genesis,
the Creation of the World.
And the reason why this is so incredibly important for us to understand
is that Jesus refuses to get into these partisan battles
with the Pharisees and any others who are listening.
Instead, Jesus directs the attention away from legality,
and toward original goodness:
what is the original purpose, the original goodness
inherent in the marriage relationship.
And Jesus does not mince words.
He basically says the following:
“If it was not for hard-heartedness of humanity,
this question would not be an issue.
Instead, because humanity is imperfect, broken, selfish, sinful,
that is why Moses permitted it to be so.
But from the beginning, it was never meant to be this way.
III.
but Jesus has not finished.
He has one last punch to give,
and it comes in his discussion
with the disciples.
Like I said at the beginning, this issue of divorce was just as live
of an issue in Jesus’s time as it is in our time.
And maybe that should be noted in how Jesus
answers the disciples in these next verses.
When the disciples keep pressing Jesus about it,
I don’t think Jesus responds to them in frustration
or anger,
or irritation.
I think Jesus says the following out of sorrow,
sadness, turmoil about the brokenness of sin in the
lives of God’s creation.
I think Jesus says the following with no small amount of grief:
“Whoever divorces his wife and marries another
commits adultery against her;
and if she divorces her husband
and marries another,
she commits adultery.”
[Mark 10:11 NRSV]
Jesus says something beyond what Moses said in Deuteronomy,
beyond what the Pharisees ask in their questioning.
Because, if you read Deuteronomy,
if you listen to the Pharisees so far,
what have they said about the women
in these relationships?
In Deuteronomy, it is the MAN who has power to divorce.
For the Pharisees, they want to know if it is lawful
for a MAN to divorce his wife.
But for Jesus, it is not about a one-sided
relationship.
Rather, notice that Jesus has placed equal responsibility
on both parties in this relationship.
Even going beyond what may be expected.
Rather than only one party being culpable of the sin of adultery,
Jesus rather says that there must be equality in the relationship,
both the good and bad, even in that brokenness.
And this is where the story of the woman caught in adultery
from the Gospel of John fits in to the larger picture
of Jesus’s wider teaching on divorce.
Because, just as Jesus puts the focus away from legality
and instead zooms in on the original intention for marriage,
so does Jesus shift our focus away from condemnation
and zooms in on mercy and grace.
Jesus refuses to answer the question posed him in the John passage too,
about whether the woman should be stoned to death,
according to the law. Legality.
And instead, he holds up the mirror to the inherent brokenness,
selfishness, self-righteous pride of humanity,
and says, “Let the one who has not sinned
cast the first stone at her.”
[John 8:7 NRSV]
After everyone rightly puts their stones on the ground
and walks away,
the woman stands afraid, yet not scorned by Jesus,
broken, yet not crushed by the stones,
sinful, yet uncondemned by God.
And Jesus even says to the woman, “Neither do I condemn you.
Go, and sin no more.”
IV.
the whole interpretive story and background of his teaching
must be kept together.
Just as we cannot have a discussion about divorce
without mentioning Jesus’s forgiveness and grace,
so also we cannot simply skip over how seriously
Jesus takes marriage and the fidelity required
of BOTH parties.
Jesus isn’t going to get into arguments about when it is permissible
for divorce to occur, which is what the Pharisees and scribes
WANTED him to argue about.
Rather, Jesus steps back and says that divorce,
the breaking of a once-committed relationship,
always has a tragic side to it.
Jesus, with perhaps a sadness in his words,
instead says to the Pharisees,
to the disciples,
and to us today,
“It was never meant to be this way.”
And that, friends, is the place where I think we must dwell
whenever it comes to thorny, painful issues like this.
Instead of getting caught up with when it is permissible
or not permissible, to get a divorce,
instead we need to walk the path that Jesus chose.
And that path involves both the recognition of the seriousness of sin,
the seriousness of fractured marital relationships,
and the recognition of the seriousness of the grace
and mercy WE must show to anyone
who has been through these valleys
of the shadow of death.
Our job is not judgment of someone else’s sin
or even of our own sin.
That’s God’s job.
And thank goodness.
Because God has this tendency to be much more
merciful and gracious than we could ever be.
When we walk from this place,
where God’s mercy flows over us like gentle streams of water,
let that same gentleness define the way you treat others.
We all struggle with sin,
the brokenness that clings so closely to our lives,
and the remedy for sin is not the judge’s gavel:
the remedy for sin is Love.
And Love has a name and a face:
the face of Jesus Christ,
the very image of God.
So walk in love, as Christ loved us
and gave himself for us:
an offering and sacrifice to God.
In the name + of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
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