An Unadulterated Jesus

Imagine, for a minute, that you were King of the world, or Queen of the world. You control it all. Your word is law. Your wish is everyone’s command. Your heart’s desire rules.
Is there anything you’d change? Would you:
• end world hunger
• stop all wars
• raise the minimum wage
• forgive the debt of third world countries
• abolish N / B / C weapons
• offer universal health care coverage
• restrict gun ownership to protect school children & teachers
• hand out antiviral medications to people with AIDS for free?
As you think about a lengthening “to do” list, when would you decide you need to make laws protecting the sanctity of marriage? What actions would you prescribe?

Despite a long list of social issues that still oppress and marginalize millions of Americans, the State’s interest in protecting the sanctity of marriage seems to be a high priority. As of November 2005, nearly 29 million Americans, in 19 states have voted on a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage. And more voters in more states will have that same opportunity in four weeks.

Let’s suppose that’s the right thing to do – define marriage as the union between one man and one woman. Should we stop there? What about establishing a suitable age for marriage and a proper bloodline boundary? Should we stop there? Could we argue that common: race, ethnicity, religion, intelligence, genetic traits, income and education levels, are helpful for protecting the sanctity of marriage? What about shared hobbies and tastes in music, fitness, and diets? Where should we stop?

The goal, say the politicians, is to protect the sanctity of marriage. So, do we set boundaries at the beginning, or do we put up barriers that prevent marriages’ ending? We could say you can’t get a new marriage license until you’ve been single one month for every year of your prior marriage. Or, how about a law saying a divorced spouse can’t marry someone else unless his or her first spouse is also ready to enter another marriage?

Maybe this is all too much for either the King or the Queen of the world. Apart from what we hear Jesus say in Mark’s Gospel (10:2-16), what say we see what the Bible says? When we ask, "What does the Bible say about divorce?" we come up with a number of different answers.
• Moses says that you can divorce a wife (Dt 24:1)
• In Ezra, it is the sign of a good husband to divorce his foreign (unbelieving) wife (Ezra 10:2-3, 44)
• Paul says that it is the sign of a good spouse not to divorce his or her non-believing spouse (1 Cor 7:12-13)
• Paul also says that divorce is permitted in some instances -- when an unbelieving partner requests it (1 Cor 7:15)
• Joseph, a "righteous man," felt believed it was his obligation to divorce Mary (because he thought the child she carried had been fathered by another) (Matt 1:19).
I’m not hearing lots of clarity.

What if, instead, we ask, “What does the Bible say about marriage?” Well, of course, we get first, and early, the piece we read, and which Jesus quoted from Genesis 2. We also get Genesis 20, where, fearing for his well-being, Abraham claimed his wife, Sarah, was his sister. 1 Kings 11:1-3 tells us:
1 King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh's daughter
—Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. 2 They were from nation
about which the LORD had told the Israelites, "You must not intermarry with them,
because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods." Nevertheless, Solomon
held fast to them in love. 3 He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three
hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray. (NIV)

Not much help, huh? How about the New Testament? Well, there’s Paul’s saying that wives areto be subject to their husbands and Peter’s charge that husbands have authority over their wives. Maybe we need to regroup. How did we get here, or better, how do we get out of here? Where is here?

Mark is usually good about providing locations as Jesus journeys toward Jerusalem. At this point Jesus is back in the territory of Judea, not far from the Jordan, where Herod ruled. The same Herod who beheaded John the Baptist for preaching that Herod should not have divorced his wife and married his brother’s wife, Herodias. Are bells goin’ off?

Who’s asking the original question; why might they be asking it? Mark says the Pharisees are testing Jesus. They ask, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Jesus says, “What did Moses, as in the author of Torah, the book of the Law write?” And they told him. They already knew the answer. More bells?
We heard, in Mk 3:6, that the Pharisees began plotting, with the Herodians, to destroy Jesus, because he healed a man on the Sabbath. What’s going on here is more of the same. If Jesus says what John says, Herod will do the Pharisees’ dirty work. But Jesus doesn’t go there.

Jesus’ offers, instead, two observations. First, God’s vision for humanity sees both oneness and harmony between male and female (husband and wife) as image of God. Second, humans always seem to find a way to put a wall between our hearts and God’s desires. Jesus calls that, in Greek, sklerocardia, hard-heartedness. We get arteriosclerosis from the same root word.

Once alone with the disciples, Jesus speaks of remarriage as adultery. Matthew says Jesus preached on this topic in the Sermon on the Mount (5:27-28). You remember,
27"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery. 28But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

There’s not much more to say. Not many believers I know would disagree with that ideal vision of marriage. Likewise, not many believers I know would say we’ve found a sure cure for sklerocardia. We bring much the same hard-heartedness to most other insights about living in the Kingdom God that Jesus proclaimed. We still find it extremely hard to:
• love our enemies
• forgive one another
• be generous with our wealth
• do good to those who hurt us
• and on, and on.

Our hard-heartedness is a topic Jesus’ speaks to often. It comes again next week when the rich young man asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. After saying that he’s kept all the commandments, including not committing adultery, Jesus seems to say that’s not a sufficient claim. Jesus also refuses to condemn the woman caught in adultery, and, yes, I remember Jesus telling her to go away and not to sin anymore. But I still don’t hear, either, Jesus saying, “If you do, I will condemn you.”

Where does that leave us? It should, I hope, cause us to stop parsing sin. Again, from Matthew’s Gospel, “For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you” (Matt 7). What hard-heartedness are we holding when we say Tammy Wynette and her seven marriages is a worse sinner than Enron executives are? Are the 18,270,000 citizens who voted to ban gay marriage more righteous than the 7,830,000 who voted for the rights of gays and lesbians to marry?

The key here, I think, is in verses Mk 10:13-16, the episode with Jesus’ overzealous, hard-hearted disciples and the parents of these children. “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it."

Remember the status of children in the first century. They aren’t the dear cherubs we dote on today. Children caused spouses to work less efficiently, strained resources, crowded your house, and after all that, many died before puberty became a personal issues or a public problem, just about the time they might begin returning something on your investment.

Children are completely dependent, of little worth, and less value. These are they whom Jesus takes up compassionately in his arms, touches tenderly with his hands, and blesses anew and again with that belonging breath God breathed into the man made from clay, and the woman drawn from the clay-man’s rib.

These, taken, touched and blessed, to such as these belong the Kingdom of God. Jesus invites us to see ourselves as dependent on God, and God’s mercy alone, for our status, our worth, our value, our belonging and our becoming.

Inside that reality, protecting the sanctity of marriage begins with protecting the sacredness of life. That means standing against systems and structures that use oppression and injustice to deal death to dreams and destruction to opportunities. Protecting the sacredness of life begins with protecting the holiness of personhood. That means giving clear witness that who we are when we build up relationships and what we do to preserve relationships comes by our will and desire to live in all of God’s grand vision. The world has little interest in any of that.

But here, together, here, where the clear vision of God in a Word that reconciles us to the whole truth about ourselves – that our hearts are hard until God gives us a new heart - here, in the Meal that restores our souls for the journey - here, in the cross and resurrection that redeems us, here, where the clear vision of God collides with the walls of our personal and collective sklercardia, God offers us, again, our unearned place under God’s rule, where the least are taken up, the lost are touched, and the under-valued are blessed with dignity and worth as children of God.

What say, we all vote “Yes” to that holy truth, in the world, for the world, where God is King of all, for all, with more than a check-marked ballot, but with heads, hearts, hands and feet, everyday?