Love Over Law (Prop 22B, 2012)

Melissa Campbell-Langdell

All Santos, Oxnard

Prop 22 B, 2012

(Job 1:1; 2:1-10; Ps. 26; Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16)

"What are human beings that you are mindful of them,

or mortals, that you care for them?

You have made them for a little while lower than the angels;

you have crowned them with glory and honor,

subjecting all things under their feet." (Hebrews 2:5b-8 (from Psalm 8))

Human beings—a little lower than the angels—is this your experience?  For me I would say, sometimes yes, sometimes not so much.  Much of the time we don’t feel much like angels.  We have problems, like sin.  And even and especially in the relationships in our lives that are based on love, we often fall short.

In the movie “Hope Springs,” Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones are a couple who have been married for over three decades and have lost touch with each other, to the point that they feel just like housemates rather than partners.  They live in two separate bedrooms, which can be okay in some circumstances but in this instance demarcates how separate their lives have become.  They are living out the husk of a marriage. 

After some cajoling on the wife’s part, they end up in scenic but isolated Maine, meeting with a therapist who helps them attempt to rekindle some of their intimacy again. 

One of the key points in the movie is when the therapist asks either one or both of them—the editing was hard to read in that part of the film—whether the marriage is worth more to each of them than their pride.  This seems to really drive it home to the husband, who has grudgingly come along on the trip but seems to feel every moment is an injury to his pride.  He begins to see the stakes at risk—really losing his wife, and takes a risk to act much more open-hearted with his wife, no longer just sticking to the rules.[1]

In Jesus’ time, as in ours, marriages were a sticky business, and anyone trying to talk about them had to be pretty careful, even though it was apparently quite the thing for rabbis to talk about such things.[2]  (Don’t we clergy always like to stick our feet in our mouths?)  So there is a way in which Jesus’ questioners in today’s gospel are trying to get him into trouble, as is so often the case.  They want to see him either fall short of the Law of Moses or offend.

 They probably wanted to see if he was going to be all soft on those wishing to be divorced or whether he was going to take a hard line.  And his response, at first, seems awfully hard.  What do you mean, yes Moses said that, but I say…

Was he just kidding? 

But Jesus says, no, I am not hard, you are the ones who are hard.  You are hard-hearted, he says.  The word in Greek, is “sklerokardian”—literally, “hard-heart.”[3]  We are hard-hearted just like Pharaoh got back in Moses’ time if we are only looking at the rules of what the law allows and not listening to the justice of our hearts.

Because yes, Mosaic Law did allow for husbands to give divorce decrees to their wives.  But then you had all these women potentially without any social safety net—no income, etc., who had just been tossed aside, sometimes for no good or apparent reason.[4]  So this divorce question was really a justice issue—a question about not just following the law if you were ignoring the heart issue of just dumping someone you were considered to be one flesh with.

Now, we know that some marriages just can’t survive. 

 There are evils in the world—the obvious ones of abuse, the less obvious evils that harden hearts in other ways. But the system here was inherently abusive, and Jesus just might have been responding to this.

So this is about justice.  About living into the kingdom of God here and now.

And yet, as we know, we aren’t there yet.  We know that divorce must occur at times due to the reasons mentioned above.  As one commentator says, “In a broken world, divorce is sometimes necessary.”[5]  But when it does happen, we as Christians need to be thinking not just about the bare minimum of following the law, but we need to think from our hearts even if it gets more difficult at times.

Reading the passage again, I was struck by the “let no man separate” part of the passage—there is a piece here wherein we need to reflect on whether we ever emotionally separate (and I don’t mean in normal, healthy ways) from a partner or friend rather than engage because it is difficult to deal with messy emotions.  Another way to say this is that if you are not working on a relationship, you may be separating from it.  In this way, we always have to fight for love—be it romantic or just friendship love.  But if your relationship is a war zone, it is not a real marriage or friendship.  So we have a typically Anglican both/and here.

 In today’s world, the justice concerns about divorce are not the same as in Jesus’ time.  Although we still debate whether the sexes are equal, at least in the legalities around divorce, women are on infinitely more equal footing with men. 

If there is a question of injustice in today’s world that is similar to these cast-aside and voiceless ex-wives Jesus may be protecting, it is our nation’s young men of color.    To take just one statistic: “Just 26 percent of African Americans, 18 percent of Hispanic Americans, and 24 percent of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders have at least an associate degree.”[6]  In this should be taken in light of the fact that young women are consistently higher academic achievers than young men across the board.[7]  Now the voiceless, or the ones without much legal voice in this country, are the young men of color who are disappearing out of our schools and often into our prison system.  Quite possibly, when we go to vote, or otherwise exercise our legal rights in this country, we might think about the underrepresented and act not just on strict legalism but act from our hearts.

For Jesus’ statement, I believe, still resonates.  Do we approach our relationships faithfully?  Are we open-hearted rather than legalistic? 

 Because there is abundant good news in today’s scriptures.  The Kingdom is something we are already living into!  We are reminded in Hebrews that Jesus suffered for all of us—therefore we don’t have to stay in broken or abusive relationships, but we can live into kingdom wholeness with each other.  Sometimes, as is the case with Job, in suffering we ultimately get to a place of greater maturity in our understanding of God, but we do not have to take suffering on unnecessarily.  Jesus already died for us.  We are free.  Free to be whole people of God.

And Jesus wants that for us.  If there is anything about not being strictly legalistic in matters of heart, but focused on justice and love and mercy, it is all about all of us living into our wholeness.  As Irenaeus of Lyons said, roughly, “The Glory of God is the human being fully alive.”  And ironically, often it is our pets that remind us of this!
So the important thing here is to live into your almost angel self—the highest version of who you could be—as much as possible.  We get closer to Jesus when we don’t just follow the rules by rote but have a changed heart.  When we act like the new creation we are.  Not blind to the evils of the world, but neither letting them have the last word.  We aren’t held back by them, whether we are single, married, partnered, separated, widowed or divorced or whatever, we are still Christ’s own and we are living into the kingdom right now, striving to be fully alive in God!

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[1] "Hope Springs," 2012

[2] C. Clifton Black, “Exegetical Perspective: Mark 10:2-16,” FOTW Year B, Vol. 4.

[3] Ibid.

[4] David P. Howell, “Pastoral Perspective: Mark 10:2-16,” FOTW Year B, Vol. 4.

[5] Ibid.

[6] College Board, “The Educational Crisis Facing Young Men of Color,” http://advocacy.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/educational-crisis-facing-young-men-of-color.pdf, p. 2.

[7] Ibid.