Marriage and Other Sins

Adam and Eve, by Misha Dragonov

Propers: Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 27), AD 2021 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.

From seminary on down it is drilled into us as clergy that there are certain troubled texts which we must address whenever they come up in the lectionary. One cannot read Jesus’ hard teachings on divorce, for example, and then not preach on them, precisely because divorce affects so many of us, our families, our homes. It doesn’t matter what else we read or what else we preach. People’s heads are going to be stuck on what they just heard Jesus say about divorce and remarriage.

Marriage today is not the same as marriage 2000 years ago. Heck, marriage today is not the same as marriage 50 years ago. Did you know that in the Roman Empire in the time of Christ the traditional ritual for welcoming a new bride into her husband’s household was the same ritual used to welcome a new slave? Typically that bride would be half her husband’s age. The reason why Roman law treated wives as children is because they often were.

It was important that the bride remain chaste. That’s why betrothals, like Mary’s to Joseph, lasted for a year—to make sure that she wasn’t carrying another man’s child. Husbands didn’t have to be chaste; they could have all kinds of dalliances. And this is because, for the Romans, the family priesthood was patrilinear. Ancestors and household spirits could only be propitiated by one who shared their blood. Paternity was everything, religiously, legally, socially—all in order to the feed the ghosts.

Earlier in the Bible, polygamy was the norm. One man often had multiple wives, in part due to extremely high male mortality in the violence of the Ancient Near East. But note that in the Hebrew Bible, the only happy marriages are the monogamous ones. To have more wives is to have more troubles, always, always, always.

By the time of the New Testament, one wife was the norm, though this is due more to Hellenism, to Greco-Roman influence, than to the rabbis. Yet here’s the thing: there were different takes on monogamy, different takes on divorce. Of the two rabbinical schools dominant in Jesus’ day, one allowed divorce for literally any reason. According to the school of Hillel, if a woman burned your dinner, you could obtain a religious divorce. You could kick her to the curb. Adios, Sandy.

And let’s be clear what this meant. A woman without a husband, without a household, had no legal standing, no financial support, and no social protection. If she’s lucky, maybe her father or a brother might still be alive to take her in. But there aren’t a lot of options for divorced women in the first century. They were effectively abandoned, quite possibly destitute. And there were men who would keep divorcing and remarrying whenever they came across the latest model. It was serial polygamy—all with the blessing of the legal and religious authorities.

The other rabbinical school, the school of Shammai, said no: Women are not Kleenex to be used and cast aside. Marriage means something. Love means something. And divorce should only be pursued in dire and tragic situations. This, mind you, is how Matthew records Jesus’ teaching on the subject: that divorce may be pursued in cases of porneia, a broad and unsettlingly ambiguous term for any sort of sexual immorality. At that point the marriage is effectively done already.

The Apostles all complain that this sets too high a bar for marriage. Who would want a bride if you were stuck with her for life? Paul, who in his letters has little patience for relationship drama, just says that it’s better to stay single if you can manage it. Needless to say, romance—as we understand it—isn’t even on the radar. I mean, sure, the Bible’s no stranger to love and to lust; such are human universals. But romantic love as a core value didn’t surface until the medieval courts of France. And even then, it was usually romantic love directed toward somebody else’s wife.

So, no, we cannot read the Scriptures, shorn of any context, as a handbook for morality. Times change. People change. Luther wrote that the laws in the Bible regulating marriage simply could not apply to sixteenth-century Germany because their women weren’t property.

And here’s the kicker: Jesus’ teaching on divorce—which in context is clearly a passage about protecting and upholding the dignity of women in a society that did not value them as it ought to have—is regularly misused in our own day and age to keep women subservient, obedient, and trapped in harmful and abusive situations. Ain’t that a kick in the teeth?

How many wives have gone back to wife-beaters because their pastor told them to? Because he claimed that divorce is immoral, but physical and emotional abuse are excusable? Forgive and forget. Turn the other cheek. Go back home. A teaching meant to elevate women is used to keep them down, and it’s all because Christians misuse the Bible as an excuse to perpetuate structures of power that would have sickened Jesus.

Can you imagine Joseph hitting Mary? God, it curls my toes even to say that. But if he had—which he would not have—if he had, do you think Joseph would have had a prayer? I wouldn’t want to be the man who raised a hand to the Mother of God. And if we wouldn’t do it to her, why would we do it to anyone? Why do we excuse it so readily, so damned easily? We forgive abusers and shame the abused. It’s satanic.

Marriages end. That is just the way of it. Some should, some shouldn’t, but many do. And we have to square with that. You don’t need to lecture people who’ve gone through a divorce; they know firsthand the damage it can do. But we are people of resurrection, are we not? We know that death leads to new life. Nobody, I hope, goes into a marriage expecting it to end. But divorce has been an awkward reality for the Church from the very beginning.

Some said it’s okay to divorce, so long as you don’t remarry. Some said it’s okay to remarry, so long as your ex was pagan. Some said you could divorce and remarry if you could annul the original marriage—prove that it wasn’t truly a sacrament. John Calvin, psychopath that he was, thought people should be allowed to remarry because ideally government magistrates ought to be executing the partner responsible for the divorce, and it wasn’t your fault if the state didn’t do its job.

The Eastern Orthodox Church, I think, has always had a rather sensible approach. Everyone gets one divorce as an allowance for human sin. You confess; you are forgiven; you get remarried. A second divorce necessitates investigation before allowing for a third marriage. And a fourth marriage is right out—unless of course someone has died somewhere along the way. That can open up your dance card a bit.

All of which is to say that marriage is no joke, yet divorce is a reality. I myself am the product of divorce, as the child of my father’s second wife. My half-brothers often told me that my mother was the best thing to ever happen to our dad. I have friends, I have colleagues, I have family who have all survived divorce. For some it is a tragic wound; for others, a near escape. But Jesus loves them all.

You know, in the second chapter of Genesis, “Adam” isn’t really a name, properly speaking. It means something like earth-critter, mud-man. Adam is humanity, made from earth to tend and steward the earth. But as much as Adam is like the other animals, he is as much unlike them as well. And it isn’t good for him to be alone. Of course, up to this point, Adam isn’t a “him.” Adam isn’t male: for what could male even mean, when there is as yet no female?

So God puts Adam asleep and removes a rib—which can also be translated as “side.” God removes a side of the earth-critter, splits us in half. And half God calls “Eve,” which means living, or life, or mother. Eve is the mother of the living. And they are equals: bone of bone and flesh of flesh. At last we are not alone. Humanity now is myriad. And it isn’t until after the Fall, as a consequence of sin, that wives become subservient to their husbands. It is a sign and result of our brokenness.

How significant it is, then, that when Jesus speaks of marriage He turns to this image, to this story, from before the Fall, when men and women were equal, two halves of the same whole. That’s what marriage ought to be. Indeed, that’s what all relationships ought to be, are meant to be, and will be once again. Until that day, we as Christians are to be for all a foretaste of the feast to come.

So God bless you if you’re married. God bless you if you’re single. God bless you if you’re divorced. God bless you, period! For all of us are fallen. All of us have sinned. And all of us are raised to life in Jesus Christ our Lord.

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