Bone of My Bones

Hikaru Hirata-Miyakawa

Propers: The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 27), A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I am a product of divorce. Let’s get that out of the way up front, as I know this morning’s texts have a tendency to raise both eyebrows and blood pressure. I was my father’s sixth child and my mother’s first. Had my Dad’s first wife not left him, I would not exist, nor would any of our children. So I know, firsthand, that there is life after divorce, and that sometimes ending an unhealthy marriage for a healthier one works out best for all involved.

Any discussion of marriage in a Christian context is going to go back to Genesis. But we have to be careful with Genesis because we’re so used to it—we think we already know everything it has to say—that we tend to mistake our assumed, inherited interpretation for the actual Word of God in the text.

Our reading this morning starts off with almost a note of comedy. “It is not good,” sayeth the Lord,” that the man should be alone.” Now, up to this point, every time God has made something, every time He has unfolded a new depth to Creation, He has stated unequivocally, “It is good.” Light and dark are good. Sky and seas are good. Earth and trees are good. Fish and flies and birds and beasts and humankind are all good, but now—now He says it is not good that the man should be alone.

Adam is unique. Like the animals, he has been fashioned from earth to tend and steward the earth. Like the angels, he is filled with the spirit of God. He sits poised between two worlds, Heaven and earth, the material and the ethereal. He is, as C.S. Lewis puts it, an amphibian, a bridge between the unseen and the seen. Adam means “earth-critter,” and he is surrounded by companions good and true: animals to be his servants and his friends and his providers and his charge. Yet he is alone, in that he is set apart from them. None are quite his equal. None are found to be his helper or his partner.

A few notes on language here: helper, in the Old Testament, does not imply subservience or inferiority. Indeed, the word helper is used most often to describe God. As for partner, this clearly implies an equal, not a lieutenant, not a junior partner. Adam needs someone who is just like him. And so God causes him to fall asleep, removes from Adam one rib, closes up its place with flesh, and from this piece of Adam makes a woman.

When he awakens, he sees at last his equal, one like him yet who makes him more than what he was alone: “This at last,” he says, “is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” This at last is one with whom I am no longer alone.

This story is more radical than at first it may appear. The word we translate as rib can in fact mean side, or half. We can read this, believe it or not, as God splitting the Adam, splitting humanity in two.

Indeed, up to this point in the story, the word Adam does not mean male. It means “earth-critter,” remember, one made from the earth to tend and steward the earth. Scholars have pointed out that there is no explicit reference to gender in Genesis 2 before the creation of Eve—which makes sense. How can there be male, after all, when there’s no such thing as female? Key parts of our anatomy beg explanation. We are so clearly designed, male and female, to complement each other. And I say that as a matter of biology, not ideology.

The woman and the man are equal. The woman and the man are two halves of the same whole. The woman is as God to the man: his helpmate, his partner. She is neither beast nor angel: she is human, as human as he is, as human as God has made her. Keep in mind that a thousand years after this story was written down, Greeks were still arguing that a woman was a malformed or stunted man. Religious rituals in Athens portrayed women as “little bears” who had to be tamed by marriage.

But Genesis asserts that it was not this way in the beginning. It was never God’s intention for one gender, one partner, to be subservient to the other. Indeed, later in Genesis the fact that men come to dominate women in history is explicitly listed as a result of sin, a manifestation of the brokenness, the fallenness, of this world. So when Jesus says, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh,” He is hearkening back to the original intention of marriage: complementarity, equality of dignity, that God has made us male and female so that we might together become more than the sum of our parts, more than we could ever be alone.

For indeed, it is not good for any of us—male or female, young or old, married or single—to be alone. Animals help. But we need people to make us fully human.

So then what about divorce? By the time of our Gospel reading this morning, the tales of Genesis are already ancient, and biblical interpretation has come to be dominated by two great schools of thought: the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. Hillel and Shammai were respected religious sages active in the first centuries BC and AD. To vastly oversimplify, to the point of error, Shammai was a hard case while Hillel was a hippie.

Case in point: Shammai taught that if a bride looked ugly on her wedding day, we may not call her pretty. White lies don’t fly with Shammai. Hillel, on the other hand, said that it wasn’t a lie at all, because every bride is beautiful on her wedding day. See what I mean? Folks today would mostly side with Hillel.

But when it came to divorce, Hillel was kind of a jerk. You see, back then, marriage was an economic necessity. A woman could not earn enough to support herself or her family on her own—at least not in any reputable trade. When the Bible talks about widows and orphans, it’s referring to people who have no support, who have no protector, who are completely destitute in this world. Divorcing, back then, was akin to being a deadbeat dad. You renounced your responsibilities. You cast your family out on the street to fend for themselves.

Hillel was pretty cool with this. He thought that a man could cast off his family for any reason whatsoever. His school held that even a wife burning a meal was justification enough to kick her out on the street. Shammai said no. God always takes the side of the vulnerable, of the powerless, against the oppressor, against the callous tyrant. Marriage is more than personal preference, he believed. Marriage means putting the needs of another before your own. Family, for Shammai, trumps male prerogatives of power.

He recognized that marriages could be broken by serious sin, but they were not to be cast off lightly. They were not to treat women and children as somehow less than fully human. Only in the most grievous of circumstances could a man divorce his wife. If a husband cast his family aside simply because he wanted to marry a new and younger woman—well, that was no better than adultery. In some ways it might be worse.

When Jesus teaches that man and woman are not free to divorce and remarry except in cases of grave sin, He is siding with Shammai. He is siding with God’s original intention for marriage, that we be partners, helpmates, equals. Not all marriages work out, and there is grievous damage done in divorce. But you don’t have to tell this to people who’ve lived through it. They already know! They know better than anyone. Nobody goes into a marriage expecting it to end. But it’s a broken world, and we a broken people.

The Church doesn’t make it any easier. Like Jesus, we want people to take their marriages seriously. We want families to stay together if at all possible. For most Christians, marriage is nothing less than a Sacrament, the physical sign of God’s love for His people Israel, of Christ’s love for His Bride the Church.

But we must acknowledge that marriages end. In some cases they should end. First and foremost, it is never permissible to use marital vows as an excuse or as a cover for abuse of any kind. Terrorizing a spouse is worse than abandoning them. Sin breaks us, breaks what we hoped for, breaks the life we had intended and that God intended for us. But sin never has the last word! There is always forgiveness. There is always new life. There is always resurrection.

The last time this text came up, someone asked me, “Do you think my marriage is a sin?” because it happened to be a second marriage. I do not. More importantly, Christ does not, or I cannot imagine that He does. Abuse is a sin. Abandonment is a sin. Adultery is a sin. Marriage—marriage as God intended it from the beginning—is a miracle. And I am proof that there is life after divorce.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

There’s actually a legend that Eve was Adam’s second wife. But that’s a story for another day.