Homily: Together

Year B / Ordinary Time / Week 27 / Sunday

Readings: Genesis 2.18-24 / Psalm 217.1-2, 3, 4-5, 6 (R/v c.f 5) / Hebrews 2.9-11 / Mark 10.2-16

Regine is a student I mentor for her Extended Essay in my school’s IB Programme. Recently she reminded me of an important lesson about reading. It is to go deep. 

She did that when we discussed Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man. “It’s a story of an unnamed black man who experiences social invisibility in various ways in his life,” she explained. Then, she added, “It’s really about power and racial inequality.”  For Regine this is the novel’s underlying and more distinct theme. She could see if because she went from text to subtext.

Often we focus on what we see, read and encounter. We focus on the obvious, the predictable, the familiar. Sometimes, we focus on what we want to understand.  This is the text. Yet every novel, poem or play, like every person and event, has something more to say and disclose, something more for us to learn and reflect on. We can only discover it when we go deep, go into the subtext. 

Today’s gospel reading challenges us to go deep.

We are familiar with this gospel passage. Almost always, we interpret it to be about divorce and Jesus’ teaching against it. It is also a passage that might affect us in an intensely personal way. It has to if we have gone through a divorce, or our parents are divorced, or someone close to us is going through divorce now. We might feel ashamed, angry, hurt, or embarrassed. This is totally understandable, especially if we feel like this gospel is directed at me. 

What if it is directed at all of us instead because Jesus has something important to teach us about living in community?

The Pharisees approach Jesus. They do not intend to converse  with him about love, marriage and divorce. Instead, they are testing him about the law to divorce. Divorce was legal; Moses had permitted it. But in Jesus’ time there were differing opinions about the right circumstance for a divorce. The Pharisees were testing Jesus on this point to trap him.

Jesus responds by moving their focus away from matters of the law to matters about relationship. He refocuses their attention on God’s hope that human relationships have much more to do with life and community than with legal matters. What Jesus does is to help them – and us – to go deep. 

He does this by inviting all to go beyond the text about law and divorce to the subtext of relationships – relationships of mutual dependence and health, in particular, relationships called marriage, that we share with one another, and as God intended in Creation.

Relationship is at the heart of our first reading from Genesis about Adam and Eve. We know this story well. But let's imagine how Adam and Eve might have met for the first if they wandered through the Garden of Eden.

Adam is walking through the Garden of Eden. He recognizes all the animals he has named. Though they surround him, he is lonely. He longs for a companion.  Eve is also walking through the garden. She is attracted to everything around her, but she doesn’t feel complete and happy with them. They long for another. They spot each other. They recognize that each is somehow like themselves, but not quite the same. Finding each other, they then stroll together through the garden to pet the animals.

“Longing and belonging”. This is the subtext of the story about Adam and Eve. Its significant theme is the value of relationship. Relationship is where mutual belonging fulfils individual longing, where mutual dependence satisfies individual want, and where mutual happiness uplifts individual anxiety. Relationship is indeed good, and in God’s eyes, very good.

By referencing Adam and Eve’s relationship, Jesus challenges the Pharisees to go beyond the letter of the law. He pushes them to go deep to see and know the spirit of the law: that this law about divorce – and indeed all laws – has to do with relationship and the protection of the vulnerable in relationship. Indeed, all relationships, especially, marriage, are sacred to God and the vulnerable special to God.

For Jesus, divorce cannot be a convenience to break relationships. In Jesus’ society, a woman loses pretty much everything when a man divorces her – status, reputation, economic security, everything. The law is to protect the vulnerable and hurting. Every time it is use for another purpose, it distorts God’s plan and, indeed, violates it in spirit, if not in letter. 

Jesus’ statement is moreover about the value of relationship to community. Real relationships, founded on love and mutual dependence, fostered by respect and dignity, are the foundation whenever two or more gather. Relationship is at the heart of being a couple or a family, a school or a company, a parish or a ministry, and certainly friends. We all want to have authentic, life-giving relationships that promote everyone’s health and happiness and protect the vulnerable and poor.

We would be blind to this important subtext Jesus teaches in today’s gospel passage if we focus only on the part about divorce. If we do, we are no better than the Pharisees are. We would be too fixated on divorce, on its sin and those who have sinned and must be proscribed that we forget in all of this that God is always loving and merciful. This blinds us to God’s goodness that closes today’s gospel passage – with Jesus welcoming children to bless them.

His disciples however rebuke those who bring them. His disciples who had earlier argued about who is the greatest. His disciples who learned from Jesus that to be great is to serve and that God’s kingdom welcomes the vulnerable, the needy, the at risk, including children. His disciples who thought of community in terms of the chosen and select, the powerful and wealthy. May be we do too. 

For Jesus, the community that matters is made up of the broken, the vulnerable, those at risk. These know their need and seek to be in relationship with each other because they have learned that by being in honest and open relationship with each other they are in relationship with God, who created them and who will be with them always.

The disciples didn’t get it when the children came. The Pharisees didn’t get it when they obsessed with the law and divorce. Maybe we don’t get it too about the goodness of relationships we already have. But we can if we really pay attention to what Jesus is teaching us today.

If we accept his teaching that relationship is indeed God’s plan for us and community is how we are to share in relationship, then we will understand why God draws us together. 

You and I are in relationship because we are also the community of the needy, the vulnerable, the at risk. Whenever we gather as family or friends, wherever we gather on Sundays or at other times, we gather as individuals longing to belong together. 

This is why God in love sent Jesus to draw us into relationship, so that together we can partake of God’s life. Together in relationship and with community, you and I can live and flourish as the broken who are still loved, the hurting who are also healing, the lost who have been found, the suffering who are consoled, and the forgiven who can belong. 

When we can do this, we live as brothers and sisters as Jesus taught us. Then, a song we sang as children will ring true: “Yes, they'll know we are Christians by our love”.

So, let us go deeper as we read and reflect on today’s gospel passage. Let us not see this as solely instructions about divorce. Rather, let us celebrate it as Jesus’ invitation for us to let God enter into relationship with us. Enter to heal and restore our brokenness, not by taking away our problems, but by placing us in relationships with others who understand, care and help us to work with God to make all things new in what we called to be the communion of saints.

Preached at Church of the Transfiguration

photo: ‘hand hold’ by georgexler @ view.stern.de