Sermon 20th Sunday after Pentecost Year B October 6 2024
Today’s gospel focuses on the issue of divorce and a call to be like children. This surface question about divorce seems normal however there is deeper message and a key underlying issue… POWER… More specifically who has power and who does not have power.
When the Pharisees approached Jesus with their question on divorce, they didn’t want to learn more about the issue, but to expose Jesus as a heretical teacher. By this time, the religious leaders had already plotted his death, wondering “how they might destroy him.”
In response to their supposed legal question, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Jesus asked another question. “What did Moses command you?” Notice the shift in pronouns. Jesus reframes the Pharisees’ general question about “a man” by posing it to them directly: “What did Moses command you?” Knowing the answer, the Pharisees reiterate that Moses allowed men to write a certificate of dismissal to divorce their wives—a simple note jotted on a piece of paper would do. Jesus then explains Moses only made that concession because of their hardhearted ways. This was not the legal clarification the Pharisees wanted in order to trap Jesus.
Instead, Jesus responded pastorally. He didn’t really discuss divorce. He discussed how human beings were created to live in intimate relationship with one another. He described not divorce, but holy union—when two become one flesh and form a new unity—the way God intended for us to live and love.
In our understanding of marriage, we set the goal as aromantic love that sweeps us off our feet. Unlike the economic and social transaction of marriage in ancient times, our contemporary hearts’ desire is to fall in love and live happily ever after. And when it doesn’t happen not only do men but women also have every legal right to file for divorce. Not so, of course, for women in Jesus’ time.
When the disciples ask Jesus again about divorce and he says, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery,” he is leveling the playing field. Jesus is including women, naming them specifically—something that had never been done before! —giving them the same power, rights, and responsibilities as men. In one short phrase, Jesus subverts the patriarchal and exploitative structure of marriage.
Immediately after the questions about divorce, in which Jesus discusses healthy relationship, Mark shifts to the scene where Jesus blesses the little children. This sudden shift seems out of place. As the disciples attempt to shoo the children away, Jesus refuses to do so. Instead, he opens his arms, embraces them, and blesses them, reminding the disciples that the Kingdom of God belongs to children like these.
Just as he honored the power of women who were otherwise perceived as property, Jesus places children “at the very center of life in the kingdom.” In God’s realm, the vulnerable take center stage. Women and children—the meek—the weak—the marginalized—the poor and the powerless—are not last, but first.
This idea of God speaking through those on the margins is both biblical in both Hebrew and Christian scriptures and in moral theology. In moral theology the term is The Preferential Option for the Poor. God continually throughout salvation history speaks to the wider world through those coming from the margins to teach about the Kingdom of God. I have often wondered why this is so. I have come to understand it to mean those who are on the margins of society… those with less power in the eyes of the world are less encumbered by the trappings of the world and therefore more reliant on God. On October 4 we celebrate the Feast of St. Francis who is the perfect example of one who followed Christ by abandoning any of the trappings of the world… who in truly surrender all to Christ and taught us all that through weakness is true strength… Francis reminded us through his life what following Jesus is all about… and to whom God’s Kingdom belongs.
Perhaps that is what the Pharisees in the gospel were really hoping to figure out in testing Jesus: “To whom does the Kingdom of God truly belong?” After all, weren’t some of the Pharisees themselves divorced? Does the Kingdom of God belong even to them, despite their hardhearted ways?
And, Jesus shares the good news that the Kingdom of God belongs to women who live in fear, to women still treated as though they are less than, and lack agency. It belongs to children afraid in of divorce that the other parent might leave them, too; and to all the children who long to be held and blessed.
And yes, it belongs to the divorced—because the Kingdom of God belongs to the broken and the broken-hearted. It belongs to the betrayed, the unfaithful, and the rejected. It belongs to the abused, the unwanted, and the incompatible. It belongs to the fooled and the foolish. The Kingdom of God belongs to those with hardened hearts and to those recovering from hard heartedness. Divorce happens not only between two people. It happens between nations, and it happens within the same nation. In these volatile, uncertain, complex, and divisive times, holy unions seem illusive. Our hard heartedness is human, yet Christ provides another way.
God’s intention, God’s will, is for all of creation to live in healthy, loving, and life-giving relationships with one another. God’s divine design is for us to experience the intimacy and fulfillment of living together in unity. However, God never promised it would be easy. Unlike our feeble and fickle attempts at human love, Jesus shows us a love like no other—a love that heals our brokenness, that transcends social and economic and political barriers, that beckons us forth and forgives, and that lifts up the lonely, the lost, and the least of these.
Because there is not one of us who has not experienced separation, betrayal, rejection, loneliness, conflict, or the fracturing of a relationship. Like Jesus whose arms scooped up those little children… Jesus refuses to abandon us or send us away, instead taking us up in his arms as he lays his hands on us and tenderly tells us that the Kingdom of God belongs, yes, even to us, the broken and the broken-hearted longing for the holy union of God’s unconditional love.