Proper 22 Year B 2024: Mark 10:2-16

When I was a hospital chaplain intern, I worked at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, VA. 45 minutes - without traffic - South of Washington, DC, this Episcopalian was firmly in Baptist country. Therefore, every so often, I was asked what my favorite Bible verse was. I liked to answer John 3:17. Not 3:16, 3:17. Most people who ask you what your favorite Bible verse is know John 3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life. The problem is, that verse gets used in a pretty aggressive way to try and scare people away from perishing into eternal life by believing. One of my favorite quips is, “I can do all things through a single verse taken out of context.” Which brings me back to John 3:17: Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Maybe 3:16 is about more than being afraid of death. Maybe, with some more context, it becomes about affirming love and eternal life. But we see how when John 3:16 is used for proof texting it can send us off the rails in our biblical theology.

In biblical theology, a “proof text” is a passage of the Bible a person appeals to when supporting a particular argument or position. The problem with proof texts is that their use often involves selectively using isolated passages to support a preconceived idea or argument without considering their original context, intended meaning, or the wider teachings of the Bible. The thing that makes proof texts so tantalizing is that it’s a piece of our sacred text that seems simple, as long as we don’t dig any deeper. But as we all know, life isn’t as simple as one sentence of scripture, taken out of context, would make it seem.

We see a common proof text in today’s Gospel. “Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart (Moses) wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”” It would be so easy if it were that simple. But of course, it never is. And, Jesus was speaking within a context.

To begin with in today’s scripture readings, we get the text Jesus quotes as our Old Testament reading. Although it is also taken out of the wider context of Genesis when quoted in today’s Gospel, having both Mark and Genesis to look to reminds us to look further than the proof text against divorce that Mark 10 is typically asked to be.

Jesus appeals to Genesis chapters 1 and 2 to form the base of his argument. Genesis 2 is the second creation story - there are two different stories back-to-back. We tend to pick and choose the pretty parts like we do with the Gospel accounts of the incarnation for Christmas pageants, but like with those stories, here there are key differences as well. The first story in Genesis 1 is where we get the beautiful language of In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, God created something, God said it was good, and there was evening and there was morning, the third, fourth, fifth day. In the first story, the male and female are formed at the same time - “God created mankind in the image of Godself, male and female he created them”. In the second story, mankind is created from the dirt: Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. and then after God discovers that none of the animals are suitable companions for the singular human, a second is created.

It’s interesting that there are no gendered terms until woman is created. Yes, Adam is Hebrew for man, but in more of a “mankind” sense. When the text says “male and female he created them”, za-char is used for “male”. While adam is a masculine word, its masculinity is  grammatical, not biological. When the person becomes people, both of them have changed - each is distinct from the original human. 

A theology of marriage does come from these sections. It’s the foundation of my theology of marriage, that my husband and I are one. Just last week my husband used the plural “our” and then the singular “life” to describe our decision-making as a couple - the way in which we shape “our life”. The idea that we are one is fundamental to us.

It’s also important to note that this text is not a history in the way in which we think of history in modernity. The writers of Genesis did not write this as a story of exactly how creation happened. It is not a modern history or a story of biology. Genesis 2 is often used as its own proof text about same sex relationships. Which kind of works if you take everything out of its context of being written down more than 3000 years ago and plop it into modernity. Remember that the idea of choosing your own spouse is relatively new, especially compared with the history of how long people have been marrying. In the time of the writing of Genesis, as well as the time of Jesus, the idea of marrying someone with whom you could not naturally procreate wouldn’t have made any sense. You married off your daughters as soon as they were old enough to conceive. That was a large part of the point of marrying: to carry on the family line. If a man married a woman who was too old to carry children, he was often marrying a widow for her own protection.

Divorce was also different in Jesus’ time. At the end of verse 11 and in verse 12, there’s the curious quote, “whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” First of all there is mixed evidence about whether Jewish women could initiate divorce. The wife could initiate divorce under Roman law, but different terms were used for the husband’s and wife’s activity for ending a marriage. Therefore the use of the same terminology is odd, particularly when you consider that, in Jewish law, it was assumed that adultery was committed against a husband, not against a wife. Greek and Roman law also defined adultery primarily as an offense against the husband’s rights. So, using this as proof text goes right out the window, as proof texts often do, as soon as we dig a little deeper. Jesus knew the Law but was also constantly re-interpreting and re-imagining the Law.

Theology surrounding marriage can be used in ways that affirms relationships and in a way that causes harm. Jesus pointed to Genesis 2, which was a time when humankind was at one with God. We were in perfect relationship with God. And if we were in perfect relationship with God, it would have included perfect relationship with one another, so there would have been no need to sever the two which had become one.

Using Jesus’ words and his reference back to Genesis as a proof text that no divorce should ever happen and if you divorce you are somehow lesser than is taking it out of context. And, it hurts people and keeps them in abusive marriages. It assumes unfair things about people who get divorced and sets divorce up as a straw man, while being dismissive of how painful divorce is. Because while Genesis 2 isn’t a history, it speaks an important truth to how marriage feels. In Christian marriage, your lives become linked in a way in which you are linked with no other person. You promise to take that one person “to have and to hold…for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death.” I have a colleague who is a retired priest, and he was teaching a class on the pastoral offices, which include marriage. When asked his thoughts on people wanting to write their own vows, he responded that he doesn’t say no, but he does say the couple needs to at least include everything that is included in those vows from the Book of Common Prayer…which practically becomes his saying no, because he has never had a couple who asked to write their own vows come back to him with anything written. These vows are comprehensive and demonstrate that we don’t enter into the covenant of marriage lightly. Which reminds us to treat those who need to separate what God has brought together with compassion. 

Again, we have to remember the context in which Jesus was saying this - he was being tested by the religious authorities, not providing pastoral guidance. He wasn’t talking to people who are struggling about deciding whether to divorce. He was talking to the pharisees. 

While the teaching on divorce is in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it is noticeably absent in John. What is in the Gospel of John is the woman caught in adultery in chapter 8. By the law, her punishment was death by stoning. But Jesus’ response was compassion, with the well-known proclamation, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” All the rabble went away, one by one. Jesus, who had been writing with his finger in the ground, straightened up and asked her, “where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you.” Amen.