Reflections from The Hill – Beyond The Boundaries. (Mark 10.2-16)

In one of my previous incarnations as the priest in a country parish, I encountered a lady who was too angry to come to church because she believed we “preached against adultery all the time.”

 

She spoke, not only with fire, but with a fair bit of hyperbole: I don’t recall ever preaching against adultery. Not once. The so-called hard sayings of Jesus aren’t my most productive source of preaching or encouragement.

 

Maybe we ought to rename them. Something like “painful” or “agonising” might be a better description than bland old “hard”. In any case, today’s Gospel raises the Jesus Cringe Factor by a whopping 200% with these Painful Sayings. We avoid them at our peril, even so.

 

My guess is that the number of church people for whom this Reading touches a sore spot could be quite large. With the increase in divorce rates, the days of long, monogamous, marriages are becoming an oddity both in the church and in the community.

 

In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear of men and women, as church members, who find this passage a bit like having a garbage bin emptied on their heads.

 

I’ve got to hand it to Mark, though. He has an extraordinary ability to make the place where Jesus happens to be, carry a meaning about Jesus’ purpose. Here, Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem but takes a detour through Judea and the region beyond the Jordan.

 

That’s simple enough as a piece of geography. What Mark does with it is to use that setting to tell us something about boundaries.

 

Jesus is now in a place, physically and emotionally, where the status quo can be challenged and the proclamation of God’s mercy can be directed to everyone, not just to a specific few.

 

In a world where wives could be divorced for burning their husband’s toast, what Jesus has to say about divorce is really important. I kid you not about the toast. Leave aside the adultery, which is an issue, just continually messing things up for the husband was enough for him to get out his ‘Divorce Her’ pen and paper.

 

The result was devastating for the wife. She was shamed. She was disgraced. Economic hardship was her best future; prospects of any future for her children were, at best, limited. This is 8-ball country and it’s no place for a woman.

It was a man’s world even then, but Jesus wasn’t about to stigmatise divorcees. He was about to provide a new basis for the care and protection of those vulnerable ones.

 

Talk about riding outside the fences. Is it any wonder the authorities killed him.

 

The thing that intrigues me, though, is the way Jesus turns the question about divorce on its head, moving away from the legal interpretation to the relational. He’s elevating, maybe even restoring, marriage to its right place.

 

For the most part, marriage in history was not about romance or fulfilment, as it is today; rather, it was viewed as a legal contract, the lawful exchange of property, of which the wife was but one piece.

 

By taking that view by the horns, so to speak, and giving it a good hip-toss, Jesus takes us back to the start, to God’s Big Idea, and provides some safeguards on the way.

 

All this takes place while Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. This takes him beyond the usual boundaries in order for him to bring the Good News to everyone. When Jesus gets to Jerusalem, he himself will be taken beyond the boundaries of the city to be hung on a cross in the middle of a garbage heap.

 

As David Lose remarked, “All this he endures in order to witness to God's abundant mercy, steadfast love, and amazing grace for all people, …” divorcee or not.