Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
“Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife?” Mk 10:2
Listen to these heart-rending words of a 43-year-old mother:
“’Are you trying to tell me that my husband is dead?’” I asked the surgeon. ‘Yes.’ In that harrowing moment of my first marriage’s dissolution, I finally grasped in my bones the reality of these words: ‘They are no longer two but one flesh.’ Half of me had been torn off, and what remained was pouring out onto the floor in a pool of tears.’”
Mark’s gospel reading today gets personal.
It reaches into a world in which many people live – the world of marriage. In doing so, it addresses an issue that lies at the heart of community life. And, again, as Mark has consistently done all along in his story about Jesus, he pays particular attention to those who are vulnerable to the abuse of power – in this case, women.
In Jewish society at the time of Jesus of Nazareth, there was an ongoing dispute over the issue of marriage and divorce – much as there is in our present day society. From the very beginning, it was also an issue that challenged the Christian community as a whole.
Mark’s gospel passage which we read today, for example, offers the most stringent, and possibly the earliest, tradition of Jesus’ teaching on divorce: “ … what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”
This position was based on two convictions: God’s original intention for creation in which the “two become one flesh,” as described so beautifully in today’s first reading from Genesis, and the reality of the marriage situation in Jewish society at the time of Jesus, namely the option for men to “dismiss” their wives legally. This created an opportunity for women to be tossed aside without any legal recourse and left them abandoned to fend for themselves.
Jesus’ determination was to honor both realities: God’s original intent for the “two becoming one,” as well as God’s original desire that men and women are to be equals in their partnership.
Consequently, embedded within Mark’s larger theme of empowering the “disinherited” of the world is the reality of the economics of divorce. In Jesus’ time, women depended upon kinship and marriage ties for livelihood, as is still the case in some societies. Jesus wanted to put an end to the dismissal of wives, an end to the dismissal of equality in Jewish society.
In the writings of Paul, who was preaching within the context of the Gentile world, we find a significant exception to the rule of never allowing divorce: it is permitted in the case of a marriage with an “unbeliever,” a person who has converted from Judaism or paganism to Christianity.
Matthew’s gospel, which was written some twenty to thirty years after both Mark and the original writings of Paul, makes another allowance: divorce is allowed in cases of porneia – a Greek word used to indicate the presence of adultery, unchastity, or perhaps polygamy.
In other words, the New Testament gives evidence of alternate traditions and pastoral interpretations from the earliest times. The reason is obvious: people found that living out the ideal that Jesus presented created difficulties so great that the communities to which they belonged had to find ways of trying to balance the absolute prohibition of divorce with the pastoral realities the early church was faced with.
The same is true to this very day.
In the contemporary world we live in, while women today have relatively more economic independence, divorce still has a greater negative economic impact on women and the children who depend on them.
For example, in America today there is a marriage failure rate of over 50%. That means one-third of our children are born to mothers who are not married. Over one million children are affected by divorce each year. Children living with a single mother are six times more likely to live in poverty as those who live with two biological parents.
And yet, there are many cases in which divorce is justified: violence, addiction, adultery, child abuse, severe mental health issues, and abandonment, to name a few.
The Catholic Church has struggled mightily to address the complexity of this issue through the development of a process designed to provide annulments of marriages deemed invalid from the beginning. The effort is always to try to balance the teaching of Jesus in today’s gospel with the realities in the lives of people who are not able to fulfill the ideal due to extreme circumstances.
This issue is so prominent these days, in fact, that Pope Francis entered the fray. Three years ago, he called together a special Synod of Bishops to discuss the most important concerns touching on family life. Prominent among these were those of divorced and remarried Catholics.
When all is said and done, however, the radical teaching of Jesus in today’s gospel is no more daunting than many others he proposed: forgive 70 X 7, love God with your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole mind, love your neighbor as you love yourself, love even your enemies!
Jesus is continually calling us to a faithfulness that is above and beyond the everyday morality of the world we live in. He’s calling us to be the salt that enlivens our world, the light that motivates it, and the heart that moves it.
To do that we are also asked to not take promises lightly. As a consequence, to enter into a marriage relationship requires a drastic commitment that causes us to rely fully on God and our faith community to live it out.
Perhaps the blessing at the end of a Catholic wedding ceremony is one that can be a source of prayer and meditation for all married people who are daily attempting to embrace the full dimension of living “in the Lord”:
May the Lord bless you both and keep you.
May your children bring you happiness, and may your generous love for them be returned to you, many times over.
May the peace of Christ live always in your hearts and in your home.
May you have true friends to stand by you, both in joy and in sorrow.
May you be ready and willing to help and comfort all who come to you in need.
And may the blessings promised to the compassionate be yours in abundance. Amen.
Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.
