By Bill Leonard
Fifty years ago my parents got divorced after almost 30 years of marriage. A decade or so later, my dad remarried, this time to a “widow woman,” as Southerners say, whom he’d known since childhood. They remained together until her death some 15 years later.
Here’s what Jesus says about that sort of thing: “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery” (Mark 10:11-12).
In Matthew, Jesus gives the famous “escape clause” permitting divorce if the other spouse commits adultery; Mark offers no exception. Based on that “hard saying” it would appear that simply by divorcing, my parents broke a crucial gospel mandate; and my father committed adultery by “marrying another,” a sweet, Texas Methodist schoolteacher. Holy biblical literalism!
Truth is, most of us have experienced divorce directly for ourselves, or indirectly through someone dear to us — parents, children, grandchildren, siblings or friends. For Christians the “divorce texts” are among the hardest of Jesus’ hard sayings.
The effects are various. With some exceptions, divorced Roman Catholics can’t take communion without a church-approved annulment declaring they were never really married in God’s sight. (If Pope Francis loosens those restrictions he may split his Church.) Many Protestant ministers refuse to remarry divorced people at all. Some churches won’t permit divorcees to be deacons, teach Sunday school or serve on church committees. (If all else fails, they can usually still sing in the choir!) Other congregations could barely function without the assistance of divorced members.
We often don’t know what to do with the hard sayings of Jesus, so we spiritualize them, ignore them altogether, or use them to beat each other up in Jesus’ name. At best (or worst) we are selective literalists and there are plenty of hard sayings to go around. Remember? “If, when you are bringing your gift to the altar, you suddenly remember that your brother has a grievance against you, leave your gift where it is, and go and make your peace with your brother, and only then come back and offer your gift.” (That would kill a good offertory.)
“Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.” (Does this apply to every person holding cardboard signs at every stop light?)
Jesus’ hard sayings test us all with the things we “have done and the things we have left undone,” when rules we thought we’d never break collapse around us. Admit it; we all negotiate with Jesus and the biblical text. We formulate certain biblical mandates, while struggling with that “other” Bible, the one we cut deals with, minimize or disregard. Why? Because none of us can live up to all Jesus’ hard sayings, and must wait for unexpected grace.
It’s not that Jesus’ teachings are wrong; rather it’s that life can go wrong, sometimes forcing us to negotiate because of sin, (ours or some else’s), or because life does a job on us and we can’t go another 15 feet, let alone an “extra mile.”
The church has negotiated marriage from the beginning when St. Paul advised against it, using himself as the model, and adding his own escape clause: — “It is better to marry than to burn” — a negotiable I frequently remind single seminarians smoldering in my classes.
In their new Baptists in America text, Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankins write that during slavery time, “white Baptists struggled to regulate slaves’ marriages, which were commonly broken up when one partner was sold or moved away with his or her master. This put pious slaves in a bind: could they legally remarry if they had no reasonable hope of seeing their current spouse again?” One South Carolina Baptist association asked in 1794: “What shall be done with negro [Christians] . . . that have been married (in their way) and separated by compulsion: May they marry while their husbands or wives are yet alive?” They decided not to decide, observing: “We find such difficulties attending to this question, arising from the nature and existence of slavery, that we judge it best to leave it to the discretion of every church to decide on.” Christian marriage was renegotiated to protect the “existence of slavery!”
But sometimes we negotiate with Jesus’ hard sayings because life forces us to do so. Surely divorce is to be avoided if possible, but life can fall on us in ways we never anticipated when we first said “I do.” So we do what we must, and wait for unexpected, usually undeserved, grace.
In one of his strongest warnings Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God.” (Since I’m not rich I love that one.) Then, negotiating, he adds: “With God, nothing is impossible!” So if rich people can benefit from God’s unexpected grace, perhaps we all can. That’s a good thing to remember, especially in this election year. Amen.