Context is everything (Jesus on Divorce)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

‘You weren’t there… and it had udders!!!’

Context, is everything.

For the baffled among you, the context to that specific statement, is that I unexpectedly walked in to a rather long-running and it is fair to say, very specific, debate in the family kitchen once to hear my Father-in-law insisting (with some veracity) that my brother-in-law could not possibly know whether the animal about which he was speaking was a cow or a bull because apparently, he wasn’t there and it did, indeed, have udders!

So cue our Gospel reading on the rather tricky topic, and very specific issue of what Jesus says here in Mark, about divorce….

Many of us here this morning, will have lived-experience of divorce in our own lives, relationships, and families. It is rarely a painless experience and before we go any further, it is important that we remember there is context to every relationship, to every event, and to every decision.

God knows your context and God knows you, and what you need in order to flourish.

So when we hear Jesus say things like:
‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery’ without its proper context, it can be really unsettling, or it can even feel laden with judgement.
Judgement that I genuinely don’t believe is being made here in quite the way we might, at first, receive it.

This morning in our Gospel (much as this sermon began) we have been given a statement with very little context. There are some clues in the narrative, but certainly not the full picture and, without the full picture, there’s absolutely no sound way to judge this situation or anybody else’s lives by it.

Jesus is not simply giving life advice, or saying something which we should parrot back to anyone who has a query on the topic of marriage, divorce, or adultery. And he is certainly not giving us a stick with which to hit ourselves or anyone else.
Jesus declared that he had come to heal the broken-hearted and proclaim liberty to those held captive… so to tie anyone up in knots of guilt over getting divorced, or to hold anyone (who is not in a safe, healthy, or loving relationship) captive to their marriage vows would be utterly inconsistent with who we know Jesus to be, and how he interacted with real and individual people.

So first we need to see Jesus’ words here in the context of what we know about God, and what God tells us about who we are:
That he loves us so much, that nothing we (or anyone else) can do, can separate us from his love. Jesus knows what being human is like and he loves us for it not in-spite of it.

And next we need to see Jesus’ words in the context of what we know about human relationships and what the Bible teaches us about how they should be ordered.

That discussion is complex and multi-layered and does not lend itself to over simplification (ask me more about the non-binary ‘AND’ in Hebraic thought and interpretation of Genesis 2 over coffee…). And we humans are complex and multi-layered too, so I believe that we would be doing ourselves, and the text a disservice, if we simply swallow Jesus’ words whole here, and assume their meaning.

Because Jesus’ teaching here is answering a very specific question, about a highly contentious issue, in a very specific cultural context.

There was a long-running debate among Jewish scholars at the time of Jesus as to how the passage which Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy 24 (on Moses allowing a certificate of divorce to be issued by a man to his wife) should be understood.
This debate centred largely around the interpretation of the phrase ‘erwhaat debar’, (Ervat Dãbãr) which, taken-literally, means the ‘nakedness of a thing’ or in some modern translations, ‘something indecent’.

At the time there were two major schools of interpretation of this phrase, which came to very different conclusions. As Dr Jeannine Brown highlights, the school of Hillel interpreted this in a broader sense to mean that a divorce certificate could be issued for ‘any and every reason’ – essentially, if there was anything about the woman which the man decided he found displeasing.

While the school of Shemai interpreted it more-narrowly to mean that divorce could take place only in the case of ‘something indecent’ relating specifically to ‘sexual immorality’ or, in shorthand, ‘adultery’.

And we read in the text itself that the context to this question being asked of Jesus, is that the Pharisees came to him asking an intentionally loaded question: 
‘is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife’… presumably hoping to catch him out as subscribing to the rather more liberal school of Hilel on this issue and therefore being able to denounce him as unorthodox.

But Jesus surprises them and gives what appears to be an even more robust response: that it was only permitted by the Law which Moses proclaimed that a divorce could take place because of the ‘hardness of heart’ of the people. In other words, there was a concession made which departed from the ideal because people were not behaving in accordance with God’s ultimate law for their flourishing in the first place. Meaning if they were truly in right relationship with God and one another then they would not be going off and having affairs in the first place.

And Jesus looks back to Genesis to give an example of how God binds two people together in a Union of love which is not merely a contract, but is a covenant which has a sacramental quality to it: that is to say that it is supposed to make known the covenant of God’s love for humanity in the way those two people love one another and live out their vows in society. This is why we say at weddings ‘those whom God has joined together, let no one put asunder’.

Jesus is not challenging the reasons why someone might legitimately seek a divorce, he is challenging the Pharisees and, later-on his Disciples, on how they can live out the true ‘Law’ (the covenant between God and his people) in their lives and relationships in such a way that points others back to the source of love itself: God.

Jesus goes well-beyond the legalities, and instead homes in on what really matters: the intentions of our hearts, and how we demonstrate that through our actions.
The Pharisees and Disciples want to talk about the specifics of legal divorce…. but it seems Jesus wants us to set it in its broader context of righteousness and faithfulness.

So it appears that these few recorded words, are not so much Jesus’ blanket opinion on divorce for all circumstances, for all people, for all time, but that this, and its parallel in Matthew, are simply what we have recorded of Jesus’ response to one very specific question about the interpretation and exegesis of an earlier Scripture, set in a long-running and wide-ranging live debate in first century theology.

What Jesus says matters, but it does not give us a simple answer.
And it matters because it reminds us that no-one should be cast-aside for no reason. And, of course, it is worth noting here the agency of the men in being able to issue a divorce (and the helplessness of the women in being cast-aside) in this dynamic.

So what Jesus says about the moral consequence of divorce being adultery, is actually consistent with his socially-revolutionary approach of raising up those who had lower status and were oppressed in society, and giving them the dignity and security they deserved. He is challenging the common view, held at the time, that women were the ‘property’ of men. And he is also (if we take a more literal translation), regarding them instead as the victim, not necessarily the perpetrator, of infidelity if either they are cast aside by a man who then remarries, or if they are cast aside and then, themselves also go on to remarry.

So Jesus is saying ‘be faithful’ and, whether or not it is ‘legal’ to do so, you should not be casting someone aside and leaving them vulnerable over some minor perceived imperfection. We certainly cannot imply from this text that he is saying: you are stuck in a covenant, even if the other person breaks it by doing you harm… But we can confidently say that he is giving us the ideal to strive for in marriage and saying: uphold the covenant in the first place and treat each other right.

All our relationships have context, but when we speak of Jesus and modelling our relationships on his example, we can take comfort in the knowledge that, God is faithful to us, even through the times we cast God aside.
This is the New Covenant (which fulfils the old Law and all its questions) and gives us a pattern for exercising grace for ourselves and for our own human relationships too.

Whatever has gone before, and whatever lies ahead, God knows you and your context and will never cast you aside. And he promises us all a fresh start, through a covenant of grace which no one can ever put asunder.
Amen.