Transcript
Close Encounters: An Encounter with the Pharisees
First Baptist Richmond, October 6, 2024
The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
Mark 10:2-16
Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”
In the Gospel of Matthew, the story of the Feeding of the 5,000 ends like this: “And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, [not counting] women and children.” I’m not preaching from Matthew this morning. I’m preaching from Mark. I’m starting a new series called “Close Encounters” based on the Gospel lessons from the lectionary. But I wanted you to hear the last line of that story, “not counting women and children,” so that you will understand: Jesus lived in a culture where women and children were not counted, which may be only another way of saying they did not count, and for today’s reading from Mark, chapter 10, that seems especially relevant.
Because some Pharisees come to Jesus with a question: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Before I read another word let me point out that—according to Mark—the Pharisees asked this question to “test” Jesus. It’s not a real question. They already know the answer. They’re trying to see how Jesus will answer it. They’re trying to test him, to trap him, to trip him up. The Greek word Mark uses is the same one he used to describe how the Devil tempted Jesus in the wilderness, and that should give you some idea of how the Pharisees approached Jesus. Since the third chapter of this Gospel—when he healed a man’s withered
hand on the Sabbath—they have been looking for a way to get rid of him. Because he seems to have no respect for their tradition. He’s a lawbreaker, a troublemaker. So they come to him with this question: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”
They don’t ask if divorce is legal. They don’t ask if a woman can divorce her husband. They ask if a man can divorce his wife. And Jesus answers their question with a question: “What did Moses command you?” They say, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and divorce her.” And if you’re wondering where Moses wrote that, it’s in Deuteronomy 24, which begins, “Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her, and so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house.” In other words, yes: it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife. According to Moses a man can write his wife a certificate of dismissal and put her out of his house. That passage goes on to say that if another man marries her, but then begins to dislike her and decides to put her out of his house, the first man may not have her as his wife again, for she has been “defiled,” and that would be “abhorrent to the Lord.”
In a culture where women and children don’t count, a man can divorce his wife because she does not please him, because he finds something objectionable in her, or because he dislikes her. The only exception to this is rape. Deuteronomy 22:28-29 clearly states that if a man rapes a virgin and is caught in the act, then he has to give her father fifty shekels of silver, and he has to marry the girl, and he is not allowed to divorce her. Which means that she has to live with her rapist for the rest of her life. That, too, is the Law of Moses, and it may explain why Jesus sometimes felt that he needed to break the law.
There’s a story from the Gospel of John that most scholars think John didn’t write. The language and grammar sound just like Luke. I can almost picture John saying to Luke, “Are you going to use that? Because if you’re not going to use it I’ll put it in my Gospel.” It’s the story of the woman caught in adultery, and you know how it goes. “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,” John says, “so that they might have some charge to bring against him.” And Jesus was speechless. He bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger, “Dear God, how long will I have to put up with these people?”
No. He didn’t write that. Well, he may have. We don’t actually know what he wrote. People have been trying to figure that out for years. But he may have been thinking, “Oh, really? You caught her in the very act of adultery? Then where is the man who was committing adultery with her? It takes two, doesn’t it?” The Law of Moses is clear about this: “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death” (Lev. 20:10). “So, where is the man?” Jesus may have wondered. “Why did you bring only the woman?” But the scribes and Pharisees keep questioning him, asking him what they should do with her, until Jesus stands up and says, “Let the one without sin be the first to throw a stone at her,” and then he bends down and begins to write again.
As I said, you know how this story goes: everyone slips away from the crowd, beginning with the oldest, so that when Jesus looks up from his writing the
woman is standing there alone. Jesus says, “Woman, where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?” She says, “No one, sir.” And Jesus says, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more” (John 8:3-10). What most of us remember about that story is that Jesus said, “Go, and sin no more.” But do we remember that he also said, “Neither do I condemn you.” That is, do we remember that he dismissed one of the laws of Moses with a wave of his hand? What other laws might he break? What other traditions might he forsake? And that’s why the Pharisees were trying to stop him. Because he threatened their worldview; he challenged their authority. He seemed to care more about people than he cared about the Bible.
And so, in today’s reading, they test his orthodoxy by asking him a question. “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” And Jesus says, “What did Moses command you?” They say, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” And Jesus replies, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning [it was not so].” In her comments on this passage my friend Debie Thomas, who was born in India, in a culture that doesn’t always count women and children, and who grew up in a conservative Christian home, where men often get to make the rules, says that, “In the beginning, among all that freshly created goodness in the Garden of Eden, God saw a problem. He looked around and frowned and said, “It is not good for [the man] to be alone.”
“In response to the problem,” she writes, “God dreamed a wild dream. A dream of likeness. A dream of partnership. A dream of intimacy. When the dream was realized—when God brought Eve to Adam—the first human being cried out in a kind of joy that had never been heard on the earth before: ‘This at last is bone
of my bones and flesh of my flesh.’ Here at last is a true equal. A companion. A friend. Here is someone I instinctively recognize—someone obviously as precious, as singular, and as priceless to me as own bones, my own flesh, my own self.”i
Isn’t that beautiful? Every time I read Debie Thomas’ writing I wonder why I even bother. She says that in Genesis, “Human community began with complete empathy and mutuality. God’s model for the human family was a model of equality and nurture. What Adam noticed first was not difference. It was similarity. Bone of my bones. God’s initial dream for human relationship was so magnificent,” she writes, “that several centuries later, when a group of Pharisees tested Jesus with nitpicky questions about the legality of divorce, Jesus referred them straight back to Genesis. The question is not a legal one, he told them. Not at its heart. At its heart, the question of all human interaction, all human community, is spiritual. What did God originally intend? What is God’s enduring dream? ‘That the two become one flesh.’ That no one separates what God joins together. That we receive each other as equals, as partners, as intimates….”ii
But of course it doesn’t always work out that way. I don’t need to tell you that. This is a church that hosts a Divorce Recovery Workshop, and where almost everyone in the congregation has first or second-hand experience with divorce. It’s not easy to preach a passage like this in a church like this without offending someone. But it helps to know that what Jesus is holding up for closer inspection is not the reality we face all too often, but the dream God had in the beginning: that two people could become one flesh.
Sometimes that actually happens.
Allen and Charlotte Brown, who are members of this church, will celebrate 73 years of marriage tomorrow. I remember a few years ago, when they were
involved in an automobile accident, Allen was in tears because Charlotte had been injured. It wasn’t bad. He knew she would recover. But he felt responsible. He had been driving. He said, “I hurt my baby.” And that’s what Jesus is talking about: when two people become one flesh, one person can’t be injured without the other person feeling pain.
For him the idea of divorce—of ripping apart that one flesh relationship—and the idea of remarriage—of joining the ragged piece that remains to someone else’s flesh—is the equivalent of adultery (Mark 10:11). That’s a strong word, maybe strong enough to keep a man from divorcing his wife the first time she burns the toast. To make his point Jesus appeals to that beautiful moment in the Garden, and the realization that two people who are separate can become one flesh. How could a man put out of his house someone who was part of him?
To adulterate is to mix something with something else, usually something of an inferior quality. The example that was given in my dictionary was grinding meat to a fine consistency and then adulterating it with potato flour. You could define adultery as mixing the one flesh of your marriage with someone else’s flesh. And Jesus, who was never married, wonders, “How could you even do that?” In his close encounter with the Pharisees he concedes that what Moses wrote about divorce was not so much a commandment as a concession: it was because of their “hardness of heart.” Debie Thomas agrees. She says, “The reason human relationships fail, the reason we wreak such destruction and brokenness on ourselves, is not because God’s dream is naïve, idealistic, or fantastical. It’s because we human beings are hard of heart.
“But,” she adds, “Scripture also makes abundantly clear that God does not love any dream more than God loves us. His dream for marriage is not meant to
trap us, wound us, diminish us, or condemn us. Adam’s cry at seeing Eve was a cry of pure joy, a cry of ecstatic recognition. But sometimes joy dies. Sometimes the familiar becomes unrecognizable. Sometimes intimacy ends in betrayal. When these things happen, there is grace and there is freedom. Always, always, always—there is both grace and freedom.iii
Whatever else you may hear in this sermon I hope you can hear this: that in the mind of Jesus the partners in the marriage relationship are equals. The two have become one flesh. And in a one-flesh relationship one person is not more privileged than another, one person does not have more power than another: the two have become one. I think that’s what Jesus is objecting to as much as anything in this passage—not the idea of divorce, per se, but the idea that one person would have the power to put the other person out just because she no longer pleases him. “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” the Pharisees ask, and Jesus has to admit that it is. Moses said so. It’s in the Book. “But it’s because of your hard hearts,” he continues. “If God had his way the two would become and remain one flesh forever.” Which may only be a reminder that not even God always gets his own way.
And so we come to this closing scene where people are bringing their children to Jesus, hoping that he will lay hands on them and bless them, and his disciples are trying to keep them from doing it. Why? Because they live in a culture where women and children don’t count, where they are not important. And Jesus is the most important person they know. Surely he doesn’t have time to be bothered with all these little kids! But for Jesus, women and children do count. He says, “Let the children come to me and do not stop them, for the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” Why? Because unlike the Pharisees, who have
closed minds and hard hearts, children have open minds and pliable hearts. They have teachable spirits. They can sit at the feet of Jesus and learn something whereas the Pharisees can only defend their existing beliefs. “The Kingdom of God belongs to such as these,” Jesus says, making it clear that if we want to inherit the Kingdom, we need to become like them. We need to open our minds and soften our hearts. We need to sit at the feet of Jesus and receive every good thing he wants to give us,
Even if it’s hard to hear.
—Jim Somerville © 2024
