Readings for the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Genesis 2:18-24
Psalm 128:1-2, 3, 4-5, 6
Hebrews 2:9-11
Mark 10:2-16 or 10:2-12
As Eve to Adam in the purity of Eden, as bride to groom in the joy of a wedding: it is a primeval holiness – the holiness of a woman in love with a man – in God’s providential ordering of things. It belongs to the mists of the beginning of everything. It is a love repeated pristine in each new pure love. It is love jealous for its holiness, rightly so. It is unashamedly an ideal, a perfection, a grace given in original grace.
Which is why Jesus doesn’t give in. It’s why in this passage from Mark’s Gospel, Jesus appears to be so unyielding, so uncompromising. The Pharisees were “testing him” (Mark 10:2). Really, they were initiating Jesus into an age-old argument about marriage and divorce.
They wanted to know Jesus’s opinion on Deuteronomy 24, the passage where Moses allows a husband to divorce his wife if “he finds in her something indecent” (Deuteronomy 24:1). What does Jesus think about that, the Pharisees want to know.
An old debate, some interpreted this passage broadly; “indecent” could mean anything, bad cooking even. Could a husband divorce his wife for something as silly as that? Should divorce be as easy as that? Or should “indecent” here be defined in a narrower sense? Should we understand indecency to mean only adultery?
Where does Jesus stand? If he dismisses the passage out of hand, he could be accused of dismissing the word of God. If he sides with one or the other prevalent schools of thought on the matter, he’ll be consumed in an interminable and divisive moral squabble like some fight on social media. That’s the trap as the Pharisees imagined it, the corner they think they’ve painted him in.
But Jesus isn’t cornered. Rather, he transcends the argument by reminding them of the larger context, the original plan of God’s creation. “But from the beginning of creation,” Jesus says. Moses may have permitted divorce, but that was due to sklerokardia, the hardness of human hearts. But that’s not what God intended; he didn’t create marriage to be something renegotiable and impermanent.
He was pointing to the ideal, to the perfection, to the grace given in original grace, that “what God has joined together, no human being must separate” (Mark 10:6-9). Mark’s account of Jesus’s teaching is plainly more uncompromising than what is found in Matthew. Matthew’s Gospel includes parenthetically an exception for porneia, a highly debated term to say the least (Matthew 5:32).
Mark gives us no such wiggle room. Unfit for any category, neither liberal or conservative or permissive or rigid – we could attach to Jesus all of these labels but also none of them – Jesus simply reminds his listeners of the love of Eden, what God really wanted for his creatures, and that is indelible love, like the love that is God himself.
Thus, the question Mark’s Gospel in particular poses is what do we make of ideals? To let go of an ideal, even in the name of “realistic” compassion, Jesus suggests is the fruit of sklerokardia. Here we’re talking about the Edenic ideal of marriage. Is that something you believe in? Is it something the Church should hold up? Is the idea of man and woman married and one flesh forever something we should cherish and strive to live out faithfully? At least as we encounter him in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus would say clearly yes.
Now none of this ignores the brutal realities of human brokenness and sin and horrible things like abuse and doing what sometimes you have to do. Yet it does remind us that the ideal, the perfection, the grace given in grace, nonetheless remains part of reality, part of our moral thinking no matter the magnitude or frequency of our sins and imperfections. Even for those who have suffered from broken loves or who have been hurt so much they wonder whether any of this is true, the pristine love Jesus speaks of here includes everyone. It is a light shining always as truth, mercy and hope.
Yet this still holds: that as Christians, it is clear from the Gospels that we should not in fact settle for a degraded understanding of marriage as something impermanent and renegotiable; but instead we should hold on (just as Jesus did here) to the ideal of Eden. For that is more like the kingdom Jesus talks about – not the normalizing of sin and the reduction of our moral vision but the idea of a life and love that, after mercy, is so beautiful it’s almost angelic.
Father Joshua J. Whitfield is pastor of St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas and author of “The Crisis of Bad Preaching” (Ave Maria Press, $17.95) and other books.
