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Sermon for Sunday, October 18th, 2009

Sermon Theme: Christ speaks to us about Marriage

Sermon Text: Mark 10:1-16

In the Gospel of Mark we deal with family, marriage, divorce, and children and many other things as well. I would like to offer a brief disclaimer about this text before I enter into it. I realize full well that I am not perfect and hence I do not always interpret scripture perfectly and I realize that this text affects all of us in fairly direct ways. And with this being said I will attempt to preach this text in a way that ultimately ends in Gospel but knowing full well that I will miss-speak somewhere. So let us listen together and hear the word of the Lord as He speaks to us even through a sinful pastor.

The Pharisees came up to Jesus and asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Sometimes in our reading of our text we fail to appreciate how loaded a question this was even for Jesus. We often think that Jesus was simply the Son of God and He had no verbal land mines to worry about. We think He just completely had everything under control up to and including His cross. In a way this is true.

But if we take a second to ponder this question from the perspective of the Pharisees then we see a very different situation. They were asking Him a question to trap Him or test Him. This was the perfect question to do it. We get this, because even today when we start talking about marriage and children and family we are dealing with very difficult issues.

At the time of Christ there were two main speakers of Jewish thought. These two people were huge in Israel. They would have been comparable to the popularity of Billy Graham and Joel Osteen. Everyone who is a Christian in America basically knows the names of these folks and so too in Israel every one knew the names of those two gentlemen. The two popular rabbis back then where Shammai and Hillel.

Shammai said concerning divorce, “the man is not to release his wife except he has found something indecent in her.” Shammai of course meant that that something was to be something like adultery and so Shammai’s voice would be like Billy Graham’s. He would have been comparable to the voice of conservative Christianity.

But Hillel he was a little more smilely and happy and lax and he said that one of the charges a man could level against his wife, that was reasonable for divorce, was that her husband found something indecent in her like she couldn’t do the normal wifely duties, like cook. So if the wife burned the bread one to many times that was a good enough reason for releasing her in divorce. I am sort of joking but not really. Burning the food was one of the reasons listed by the rabbi. I know many of you woman out there have never burned anything but it still doesn’t leave a lot of room for error.

So this question about divorce and family was in many ways a political question. Imagine that family issues being brought up in politics, amazing. Because if Jesus favored one rabbi over the other then that would immediately label him as just part of the conservative faction or part of the liberal factions in Judea.

But there was even something a little more insidious going on here too. For if Jesus bucked both Hillel and Shammai and said that divorce was just 100 percent wrong then the Pharisees could come back at him and say, “Then why do you keep on eating with those sinners, and meeting with that woman at the well who has had five husbands and is currently living with someone who is not her husband? Why did you not let us stone that one adulteress? Or why do let prostitutes be continually in your company?”

We tend to think that our issues as a society are new issues, but they are not new at all. Jesus had just as many cultural, societal, personal, and political issues facing Him as we do today. Those who say other wise need to read more history of the ancient world. So the Pharisees thought that they had Him. They thought that there was no way out of this conundrum and that they could come back at Him no matter what He said.

This is why Christ’s answer is so intriguing for them and for us today. They asked a Law or legal question, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Jesus starts by giving them a Law answer. He says, “What did Moses command you?”

See what is interesting about this response is that Jesus does not guide or direct them. He gives them the entire Torah to make their response from. They have all of the Old Testament to go to describe marriage and the family and life. By their selection of verses they show exactly where their heart is. They go to the negative loophole passage in Deuteronomy 24 that says, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorces and to send her away.” They have all of scripture to turn to and they went to a rather obscure passage that allowed them to do what their heart desired, which again is not all that different with how people deal with Scripture to this very day.

Because they have revealed themselves Jesus responds that it was “because of your hardness of heart Moses wrote you this commandment.” But this is not the commandment concerning marriage. Jesus immediately does not stay with the negative loophole but goes to the positive gift and says, “But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.’” Then Jesus Himself explains just to make sure they get the point. “So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Jesus likes what He created in Genesis 1 – 2. Jesus supports the gift that He gave us from the foundation of the world. This is why Genesis and the creation of Adam and Eve is such a neat passage. We often make jokes and I usually make them during pre-marital counseling and it often really catches them off guard.

"God found Adam in need of a helper and he said I have a perfect helper for you. She is all you could ever want. Adam says great how much will she cost me. God replies just an arm and a leg. Adam replies says sounds great but what do you got for a rib?"

Then for the other side, “You know why Eve was created second? Why? Well, because Adam was created first and God wanted to get it right.”

You have these little jokes and they are all in fun. But the text of Genesis chapter 1 and 2 is such a beautiful text because it says so clearly that God created Adam male. He intrinsically was created incomplete. Then God made Eve not from sugar and spice and everything nice. Not from a different plot of clay and dirt. God created Eve from His rib and called her female. The message was clear. Here in Adam and Eve do you have two entities that complete each other in literally every way.

Scripture when it comes to the important issues of life does not want us to be lawyers. A lawyer is a fine profession for this world and some of the best theologians where once lawyers. But before they could become great theologians they had to put down their law degree. Because the Lord does not want us to just be looking at the legal loopholes. He does not want us just reading the fine print. He wants us to see the main point. Marriage and family is a gift from God. Marriage and family is not found in some back water passage of Scripture, or some exhortation of Paul at the end of one of his letters, surely it is there too but it simply and profoundly is in these words that we all know that “therefore a man shall leave his mother and father and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

In our world today this understanding of maleness and femaleness and marital unity is truly very lacking. We often easily cast it off to the side. But the message of Christ to us today is that He does not.

This is why Christ mentions children at the end of our reading today. It seems so strange to being talking about marriage, divorce, then adultery, and then children. But it is not strange. When maleness is not significant and femaleness is not important and Marriage is simply verbiage, then children are not all that important either. In our society today one thing is very clear. Children, especially in some very direct actions that our society does, which I really don’t need to describe to you on a Sunday morning, are not all that significant. To be fair children weren’t important in the ancient world either. Again nothing is all that new.

But Christ ate with tax collectors and sinners. Christ does give us some Gospel today. And what is interesting is how he gives this Gospel. He doesn’t give this Gospel like many of the modern therapists who say it is okay. He doesn’t simply talk it away. He doesn’t give a loophole. The disciples even take him aside separately and try to sort of mitigate the message he gave to the Pharisees and Christ gives the same message even stronger. He says, “whoever divorces his wife or husband commits adultery.” It can't get any stronger than that.

This underlines a fundamental problem with how we look at sin and I do it too. When someone has done something against you and apologizes how many of you have ever said, “No problem.” I do this all the time. See Christ doesn’t simply say when talking about the sins of family that it is no problem. Because it is a problem. It is a problem when families are destroyed. It is a problem when children are abused, neglected or thrown away, it is a problem when marriage and its inherent unity is mutilated. All these things are problems and our Lord and Savior will not lie to us and tell us otherwise. In heart of hearts, regardless what we are going through, we all know it to be true too.

But just because the problems are real and Jesus is not willing to simply brush them away does not mean that He is unloving or hostile to our aching and often broken hearts. This is why we are given the example concerning the small children. When you take a small child aside who has done something wrong and say what did you do? With very little prodding the child will often confess their guilt. The Lord today bids us to remember that in all family disputes, in all family issues, in all family brokenness to put down the hard heartedness that is often there and allow him to lead us again like a small child. For He so desperately wants to lead us to face our sin, to admit our personal guilt, and to embrace us again like a small child.

See when we are hard hearted, entrenched and unmovable He is unable to look us in the eye, to lay His hands upon us, and to bless us by saying, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, I forgive you. For when we allow the Lord to make us like a son or daughter of God, like a small child, then healing enters in and forgiveness washes over us in even the most difficult of situations.

Now a sinful pastor has constructed everything that has come before and like a wise man once said if I get about 75 percent right I am feeling pretty good. So let us end with the sure Gospel words of the Lord to us today. “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly I say to you whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall never enter it. And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them.” Amen.