Sermon: Is It Lawful

Texts: Mark 10:2-16

Date: October 8, 2006

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church

            First things first.  If you’ve ever been divorced, I want you to sit up and take a deep breath…let it out….relax.  When I read this text or the version in Matthew, I always imagine millions of good people who have been divorced innocently going off to church on a Sunday morning getting ambushed by preachers who thwack them over the head with the gospel and make them heartily wish they’d stayed in bed that morning.  While they may not show it on the outside, I imagine on the inside some who have been divorced are cowering like a dog who sees its master lift a hand as if to strike them as soon as they hear this familiar text.  I wouldn’t want to do that to you.  So if you felt any sense of dread when you heard the text, shake it off.   It is not this preacher’s intention to make you feel any worse about a divorce than you already do.

            It’s not the subject of marriage and divorce that I find most intriguing about this text.  It’s the question that the Pharisees asked Jesus and the way Jesus ends up re-framing their question.  The Pharisees, who were trying to gather evidence that would allow them to discredit or attack Jesus, approached him with this question: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”  Is it lawful?  That’s the question I’ve been ruminating on.  I’ll come back to that, along with Jesus’ answer, but first, some background.

            The question sounds pretty straightforward, so we have to ask ourselves why it could be construed as a test, a method of gathering evidence against Jesus.  One possibility raised by biblical scholars is that there were different interpretations of the law about divorce, stated in Deuteronomy 24:1: “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; she then leaves his house.” [NRSV]  The controversy at the time was over what constituted “objectionable”—a narrow interpretation held that only adultery was objectionable enough to justify divorce, while a broader interpretation said anything a man found objectionable at all about a woman, from the taste of her soup to the shape of her hips, qualified as a reason for divorce.  Most held to the broader interpretation of objectionable; all a man would have to do to get rid of his wife in Jesus’ day was write a bill of divorcement, get it witnessed, and turn the lady out of the house.  Maybe the Pharisees were fishing for where Jesus stood on his interpretation of “objectionable.” 

            There might have also been a political agenda buried in their question, since the regional governor, Herod, had recently been through a controversial divorce.  John the Baptist had criticized the governor for his divorce, telling him it was not lawful for him to do what he did, and John famously ended up with his head on a platter because trophy wife Herodias was enraged by his criticism.  The Pharisees might have hoped to lure Jesus into a similar criticism of the rulers which would lead to a similar fate.

            Jesus, cagey as usual, sidesteps the trap.  First he gets them to admit they know the answer already by asking them what Moses commanded.  They know the law; “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.”  But this is what Moses allowed, not what he commanded.  Moses didn’t command anyone to get a divorce.  The law allowed it.  Why?  Jesus says it was because of “hardness of heart” that he wrote the commandment.  In other words, at least in this case, the law conformed to the character of the human beings that it was being written for.   The law was shaped or adapted to the character of those for whom it was being written.  That doesn’t mean it was ideal.  To prove his point, Jesus holds up the ideal, God’s original design for marriage, which was that two should become one flesh and should not be separated again. 

            Now it may seem like Jesus is the hard-hearted one, lifting up this spiritual ideal as the foundation of every marriage.  He seems to want to talk about the covenant of marriage without any footnotes, provisos, sub-clauses, or asterisks, which could sound a bit harsh to someone who is not married to the ideal spouse.  Who’s the hard-hearted party here?  Jesus or the Pharisees?

            One crucial sociological detail to keep in view was that divorce laws were almost completely one-sided in Jesus’ day.  A man could give his wife the boot over almost anything, as we’ve already seen.  It was impossible for a woman to divorce her husband, although there were a few protections in the law that allowed her to go to court and force him to divorce her if he was a tanner by occupation, had certain diseases, or took vows that were detrimental to her.  When a woman was divorced, it was disastrous for her status and financial well-being.  She couldn’t just go out and get a job; she might well end up out on the streets or in a brothel.  So you can certainly read Jesus’ critique of divorce as a soft-hearted attempt to protect women who were vulnerable to their husbands’ whims. 

            We can also hear Jesus saying clearly that the fact that something is legal doesn’t mean it is right.  It was legal to divorce, but not necessarily right, particularly if the reason behind the divorce was something trivial.  I believe Jesus wanted to remind people that there was a spiritual element to being joined in an intimate relationship that is neither created by law nor dismantled by law.  God’s ideal is that there would be a covenant between two people so deep, so rich, that it would be as if they ceased to be two people and became one.  Kicking somebody out because the sound of her voice irritates you, legal or not, doesn’t make that spiritual covenant null and void. 

            We don’t live in an ideal world, and none of us are ideal spouses.  Sometimes divorce is necessary.  It still ought not be taken lightly.  One preacher I read compared marriages to children born on the day of the wedding.  Just like with real children, some die before they become mature.  Marriages that die should be grieved just like we grieve for dead children.  But, the preacher said, one problem in our day is that too many marriages are buried when they are just sick or injured, not dead.  When a marriage might yet be healed, it is our obligation to make an effort to bring healing to bear.  That makes a lot of sense to me.  Try to heal the relationships that might yet be healed; grieve those that are beyond saving, receive God’s grace and forgiveness and move on. 

            That said, I think there is more to be considered in the gospel text than the relationship of marriage.  Jesus is raising an issue that applies to other human relationships than that of husband and wife.  Laws are written to regulate all kinds of human relationships.  There is a large body of law that covers relationships between spouses.  And there are other laws that deal with relationships between employers and employees, between businesses and clients, parents and children, government officials and the governed, and so on and so on.  When there is conflict in a relationship, we often end up asking some version of the Pharisees’ question: Is it lawful?

            I’m grateful to live in a human society that has laws to cover a vast array of human interaction.  If, for example, a person is fired or denied housing because they are Christian, I’m glad we live in a state where religion and creed are protected from discriminatory action.  We can ask the question, “Is that lawful?” and hope for justice to be done when someone has been discriminated against.  I’m delighted that the Washington state legislature added “sexual orientation” to that list which will make it more difficult for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people to be legally discriminated against. 

            It seems to me that if Jesus were commenting about our anti-discrimination laws, he might say something similar to what he said to the Pharisees about the divorce laws: it is because of your harness of heart that such laws have been written.  We can’t count on people to automatically treat each other with respect and courtesy, so laws are written to protect the vulnerable.  In this case, the law is a sort of remedy for hardness of heart.

            But that’s not exactly the point he was making when he was talking about the grossly one-sided divorce law of his era.  He was saying in that case the law conformed to the shape of a hardened heart and enabled the hard-hearted to do legally what they wanted to do.    In that case, the law did not protect the vulnerable but covered for the person who had the power.  The fact that there was such a law did not annul the spiritual covenant underlying the marriage; and having such a law to duck behind did not make a trivial divorce righteous.    In other words, for a person of faith, asking the question, “Is it lawful?” may not be sufficient.  It may not go far enough.  Not all laws are holy.  Some of them protect against hard-heartedness, and some of them enable or cover for hard-heartedness. 

            I believe we are as a nation currently caught up in a struggle over the soul of the law dealing with combatants in the “War on Terror.”  The United States has approximately 14,000 people who we have identified as “enemy combatants” in custody.  The vast majority of these—13,000 or so—are held in prisons in Iraq.  There are between 400 and 500 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the remainder in prisons around the world, some of whose locations are secret.  These 14,000 prisoners do not have access to the kind of legal processes we have long taken for granted—the right to a lawyer, to know the charges against them, to have a speedy trial.  There have been some horrifying tales of abusive treatment that have come out from these detention centers. 

            There has been in the last few weeks a lot of debate over whether we can or should carry on with this program.  The law passed by Congress last week spelled out some protection against certain kinds of torture—protecting against some manifestations of hard-hearted treatment of prisoners.  It also stripped enemy combatants of the 900 year old right to habeas corpus, the right to challenge their detention in court—covering for a different manifestation of hard-heartedness.   Because the net has been thrown wide, we have ended up detaining some unknown number of people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time for years; their families have had no idea where they are, and they have had no recourse.  An Associate Press article published in the Seattle Times September 18 included an interview with released prisoner Waleed Abdul Karim, 26, who recounted how his guards wielded their absolute authority.  "Tell us about the ones who attack Americans in your neighborhood," he quoted an interrogator as saying, "or I will keep you in prison for another 50 years."[1]

            Is it lawful?  As a nation, we have, for the moment, answered “Yes.”  It is lawful.  But is it a sign of hardness of heart that this law has been written?  Asking if a practice is lawful may not go far enough.

            I know this is terribly complex.  I am sure that among the detainees there are people who wish nothing but harm for people like you and me, who would kill us as soon as look at us.  Who knows how many should be charged, tried, and separated from the rest of the human community for the sake of the safety of the innocent?  I don’t know or pretend to know.

            I do have a strong sense, though, that if we were talking about this with Jesus, asking him if it was lawful, that he would raise the question not just of the enemy’s hardness of heart but of the callused hearts that beat in the land of the free, hearts hardened by fear.  I suspect he might put the question of lawfulness in a larger context, just as he did when discussing marriage.  He might raise that uncomfortable question, “Who is your neighbor?”

            As God-lovers and Jesus-followers we have a spiritual covenant with our neighbors.  That covenant is summed up with one word, “Love.”  The covenant of love is not created by law, though law can be a vessel that carries love to the vulnerable.  The covenant of love is not annulled by any law, either, though law can stand in the way of love and cover for a lack of love.   

            This is my prayer for us: that we will not allow fear to harden our  hearts or harden the heart of the law that governs us.  I believe God can strengthen our trembling love if we turn toward the Light.  Listen to this poem by the mystic poet Hafiz:

How

did the rose

ever open its heart

and give to this world all of its beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light against its being,

otherwise we all remain too

frightened.[2]

Perhaps one day the poets will ask of us, “How did the Christians ever open their hearts and give to the world all of Love’s beauty?”  And we will answer: We turned, we turned, we turned toward the Light.

[1] http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003263628_prisons18.html

[2] Hafiz, “How Did the Rose?”  Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West Daniel Ladinsky, ed.  New York: Penguin Compass, 2002