Ghosts of Marriage

Propers: The Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 27), AD 2024 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 the product of divorce. I feel like I should lead with that, so you’ve some idea of where I’m coming from. Had my Father’s first wife not left him, I never would’ve been born. And my half-brothers have often told me that my Mom was the best thing ever to have happened to our Dad. He started over in his forties, and was a better man for it.

These verses on divorce today are considered part of the “hard teachings” of Jesus, hard because they touch so many of us so very close to home. We all have friends, colleagues, neighbors,  parishioners, who have suffered through divorce. Perhaps we have ourselves. And to hear this Gospel passage read upon a Sunday feels more like a kick to the teeth than any sort of Good News. But we can’t ignore it either, because once we hear Jesus say that divorce is a sin, we’ll be darned if we hear anything else for the rest of the service.

We have this persistent notion that marriage is some eternal, abiding, unchanging edifice. But it’s not. Marriage today is not the same as marriage 2000 years ago. Heck, it’s not the same as marriage 50 years ago. In these United States, a married woman had no right to open a bank account in her own name until the Year of Our Lord 1974. Tell me that didn’t change the game. Marriage as an equal partnership is about as old as I am.

In the time of Jesus, things were worse. No big surprise there. The Hebrew Bible allowed for polygamy, for a man to have more than one wife. This was in large part due to high male mortality in the Ancient Near East, and subsequent need to replenish the population. It is clear, however, in every Old Testament story, that monogamy was the ideal, the divine plan since Adam and Eve. The only happy marriages in the Hebrew Bible consist of one loving couple. More wives mean more problems, every single time. Even so, the first broad ruling against polygamy in Ashkenazi Judaism didn’t come about until a thousand years after Jesus Christ.

If monogamy is the New Testament norm, as indeed it proves to be, this has much to do with the fact that Second Temple Judaism was firmly rooted in the classical culture of the greater Roman Empire. And Romans were monogamous—sort of. They could only have one wife at a time. They could have many lovers, many concubines, and they could certainly change out their wives on a fairly regular basis. But still only one wife at a time; that’s the rule. And this, of course, had to do with ghosts.

No, really. Every Roman household had a family priesthood, a paterfamilias responsible for propitiating the ancestors and household spirits. In order for that priesthood to function, to ensure the family’s fortunes, the male bloodline had to be maintained.* That’s in part why husbands weren’t expected to be faithful, while wives were: because he had to know that the kids were his. The ancestors had to know. Such is also why betrothal periods of a year or two were common—such as Mary’s espousal to Joseph—to make certain that she wasn’t carrying someone else’s child. If she were, all bets were off.

If this doesn’t sound terribly fair, that’s because it wasn’t. Roman men regularly married women half their age, and the household ritual for welcoming a new wife into the home was the same one used for welcoming a new slave. The reason why Roman law treated wives as children is because they often were. Monogamy was not equality, not by a long shot. The only silver lining I can see is that women could reasonably expect to outlive their husbands, as respectable and independent widows.

Such is the Empire in which Jesus lives. And in the midst of this messy milieu, we have the dominant rabbinical schools of Jesus’ day: the Houses of Hillel and Shammai. These were Israel’s recognized authorities on all matters religious and legal. One of them allowed divorce for literally any reason. According to Hillel, if your wife burned your dinner, you could kick her to the curb. Hasta la vista, baby.

And let’s be clear on what this entailed. A woman without a husband, without a household, had no legal standing, no financial support, and no social protections. If she were lucky, she might have a living relative willing to take her in. Like as not, she’d be destitute. Hillel husbands could utterly abandon their wives, on a whim, with the blessing of the religious and legal establishment. This was institutionalized conscientious cruelty.

Shammai was a little more hard-nosed. He didn’t think that women were disposable. He didn’t think that marriage was a whim. He allowed for divorce, but only as a last resort, in dire and tragic situations. And it seems pretty clear that Jesus sides with Shammai. Matthew’s Gospel records Jesus allowing for divorce in cases of porneia, an admittedly broad and ambiguous term that covers all manner of sexual immorality. But let’s be honest: by the time you get to that point, the marriage is already over.

This teaching is set within the context of Jesus’ insistence that we care for and support the most vulnerable people among us: children, immigrants, widows, the destitute, the alien, and the oppressed. It’s about protecting women, not trapping them in abusive situations. And note that Jesus’ disciples seem to think He’s gone too far. They press Him on this. Who would want to get married if they’re stuck with the same person for life? But Jesus says no: discarding your spouse is a sin, the breaking of both a promise and a Commandment.

Yet here’s an interesting bit: He says that women do it too. Did you catch that? Jesus says that it’s wrong for a man to leave his wife in order to marry another, but that it’s also wrong for a woman to abandon her family in order to marry another man, to get an upgrade. And what’s funny about this is that she couldn’t. Women couldn’t inaugurate divorce, not under Jewish Law. But under Roman Law she could! John the Baptist recently lost his head when he criticized Rome’s puppet king, Herod Antipas, for marrying his sister-in-law. And she took that kind of personally. She got him killed for that.

So what we may have here is another instance of Jesus’ opponents trying to trap Him in a ruling, to force Him to say in public something that’ll get Him killed. They did this when they asked Him about taxes. They did this when they asked Him about capital punishment. And here they’re trying to get Him into trouble over celebrity marriage and divorce. As usual, He’s too clever for them. When people cite to Him the Law of God, Jesus tells the story of God. He goes back before Deuteronomy, to the beginning, to Genesis 2.

He reminds us that Adam and Eve were of one flesh and one bone, that Eve was taken from Adam’s side—that she is, in fact, a half of him—equal in every respect. Only by being split into two can humanity learn to love one another as our own self. This is before the Fall of Genesis 3, before wives became subject to their husbands only as a consequence of sin, as a result of the brokenness of our world. Jesus hearkens back to His original design, to the foundational equality of the sexes, and of all human beings.

If we loved one another, He says, husbands wouldn’t abuse their wives. People wouldn’t get kicked to the curb. Families wouldn’t be sacrificed upon the altars of our egos. That’s what Jesus is getting at. He isn’t reverting to legalism; He’s answering Law with love. If we but understood, if we could only remember, that every other person is indeed a part of us—ribs from the same Adam, members together within the one Body of Christ—then we wouldn’t need to argue about when we have permission to sever our relationships.

Look, marriages end, for all sorts of reasons. Some should, some shouldn’t, but they do. Divorce and remarriage have been contentious issues within the Christian community from the get go. I could bore you with all the debates and their wackiest solutions. Poor St Paul just threw up his hands and said that we should all stay single if we could have the stomach for it. Marriage is a mess, it has always been a mess, because human beings in general are a mess. The Bible’s pretty clear upon that point. But God loves us anyway.

Whatever our state—single, wed, divorced, or remarried—we’re all sinners here. And we’re all striving in the Spirit to fulfill Christ’s one Commandment: to love one another as He has first loved us. Love your neighbor, love your spouse, love your kids, love your ex. And know that you have never been alone. In Christ there is always forgiveness. In Christ there is always new life. In Christ we find the healing of our every weeping wound. Alleluia.

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

*When the paterfamilias had no direct legitimate heir, the heads of noble families could resort to adoption in order to maintain succession, typically of an illegitimate child or other blood-relative. Later Emperors would popularize the adoption of worthy men regardless of relation.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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Nidaros Lutheran
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