NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 27 in Ordinary Time, Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Today's Gospel follows on directly from last Sunday's Gospel. But I'd like to bring out something that wasn't clear from last week's Gospel, but which becomes clearer with this week's Gospel because of the structure of the two passages together. Imagine, not a triptych but a pentaptych — if that exists — a five-panel figure, with the three outside panels, the outside, the centre, and the outside being about children, and the two middle ones being about adult things. If you remember, at the beginning of last time's Gospel we had Jesus taking a small child and putting him into the midst and hugging him, as a way of trying to get the disciples off their kick of who was the greatest. So the criterion for the discussion is: look at a child, look at the one whom nobody takes seriously. That is the one who's going to be the greatest. You have to become like them in order to become the greatest. And then, after the disciples — John had attempted to prevent other people from spreading the Gospel because they weren't part of the good guys' band — Jesus says if you cause one of these little ones, still referring to the child, to stumble, it'll be worse for you, and gives a series of examples of terrible things. Then we get the teaching on marriage in today's Gospel, again a thoroughly adult thing. And then finally, at the end of today's Gospel, we get yet again children coming to visit. The disciples try to keep them apart. They really haven't learned the lesson, and Jesus once again makes children the central — if you like, the central interpretative principle — of his reflection. It's only in as far as you're like one of these that you'll be able to receive the kingdom of heaven. So here we have Jesus continuing his journey with his disciples from Caesarea Philippi, where the great recognition had happened, to try and show them what it is going to be like, what sort of Messiah, what sort of anointed one he's going to be. And they are royally screwing it up on every occasion, which is why we get to read this Gospel year after year, so that we can redo their learning route, to learn what it means that Jesus is Messiah. So here in today's Gospel: he left that place and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan. So he's left Galilee — before he'd been in Capernaum, remember, in a house. He's now left Galilee, he's heading towards Jerusalem, he's gone into the area that John the Baptist had preached in — and crowds gathered around him, as was his custom. So there's very public teaching. Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked: "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" Now please notice — one of the things I think insufficient attention is given to — this: remember, we are adults; marriage And its related matters are very important to us, so we tend to treat it as an adult theme. Remember that Jesus's interpretive principle throughout all this is: the real voice that must be listened to is that of children. And notice he doesn't get on his high horse and start independently going on about marriage. The only reason he teaches about marriage in Mark's Gospel is because some Pharisees question him about it. This is not a subject that he starts himself. And then after the Pharisees questioned about it, the disciples. So just remember, this is answers to someone else's question. This is not, as it were, this is not a topic he's chosen to talk about. I think that's quite important because his attitude has a certain indifference to the whole subject. He takes it very seriously but with a certain distance. "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" So he answers them. Obviously, the experts in law — that was what they did. "What did Moses command you?" And they said Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her. They're quoting Deuteronomy 24, and it says slightly more than that. That's a very accurate summation of it. It says slightly more than that, and I think it's important to pick this out. This is what Deuteronomy 24 says: "Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her, and so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hands and sends her out of the house. She then leaves his house and goes off to become another man's wife." Okay, this is obviously a permission that's given, but Jesus talks about it and then he says, "Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you." Now that's interesting. The hardness of heart typically comes up in the Bible — the place where it most occurs is in relation to Pharaoh and Egypt. And Pharaoh was going to let people go from the house of Egypt, or not let people go from the house of Egypt, depending on the degree of his hardness of heart. The suggestion here is that Moses did that because he knew that his followers were going to be pretty Egyptian in their handling of these matters. So there's always the suggestion that something Egyptian is about this. But also remember that the form for divorce as it is written in Deuteronomy is completely androcentric. It presupposes that a man may find a woman unpleasant and get rid of her. There is no possibility the other way around. The woman doesn't have rights in the system. Apparently, close to the time of Jesus, some rabbis were beginning to suggest that women maybe have similar rights, but that wasn't in general true of Jewish culture at the time. It had started being the case in some of the pagan cultures, and when I'm — in Ptolemaic, I think, in Greece — and Rome some women did have some rights, but the ones who had all the rights in Jewish culture at the time was the man, who got to decide. In other words, the woman was pretty defenseless in the face of all this. So because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you, and then he answers not from Moses but from Abraham. He goes to the book of Genesis, subtly hinting at the root of Abraham. He said, "But from the beginning of creation God made them male and female." It's quoting Genesis 1. God made earthling, God made them male and female. There was a single thing, earthling, which only gets separated later. It gets separated into male and female later in the second Genesis story, and this is quite important for Jesus's argument. Then it says, "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife." It's interesting he's saying from the beginning of creation God put something together which then got separated, and now it can be put together again. But in order for it to be put together again, people have to leave something. There has to be a leaving. And the leaving is from your father's house. "He shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife." We don't pay as much attention as perhaps we should to that leaving, because of course that was what God called Abraham to do. He told him to leave his father's house, which meant leaving the world of those idols behind and head off on his journey to become the father of many nations. But the key thing here is the leaving. Jesus is saying, actually, part of being able to be joined to your wife is always going to be leaving behind the gods of your father's house. Your father and mother's house — if you're formed by that, if you're bringing someone into that, it won't work. You have to leave that. There's a real act of leaving, of separating, of a certain sort of being cut off, which works, but it's not from your wife. That's how you enter into the fullness of creation. It's from your father's house, which is potentially the land of idols. "This is so they are no longer two but one flesh." Again he's quoting Genesis here. "Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." And of course this is what is absolutely central. What he's laying down is the basic anthropological criteria for marriage, which is that the only people who can tell whether they are married or not are the couple themselves. They're the only ones who can tell if God has put them together. This is not something that any outsider can decide. That's hugely important, because that means that the principle is going to cause huge pain to all systems of arranged marriages, marriages on the basis of property, of kinship, and so forth. All of that, over time, is going to be caused to tremble and crumble. by this extraordinary principle that the only people who can determine whether they're married or not are the people themselves. A forced marriage can be null, an arranged marriage can be null. When two people have married together, they know they're married, and the only people who can say whether it's a true marriage or not are they. This is an extraordinary breakthrough, if you like, an extraordinary anthropological breakthrough couched as a legal answer. So then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter, and he says to them: "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her." That's perfectly simple. That's actually following, in the sense of at least the basic sense of the Deuteronomy passage as well – it's indicating that this does have effect, you cause someone to stumble by doing this. Against whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, you are causing stumbling. And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. Again, the remarkable thing about this is that the even-handedness is aspirational. Jesus is not referring to marriage practices that were common at the time, but probably this is something that the disciples began to realize how they were going to have to interpret this after the resurrection, and when they began to start dealing with pagan peoples where the woman could in fact divorce, initiate divorce in some circumstances. But the key thing here is the absolute equality of both in terms of the capacity of each to cause the other to stumble. And the cause to stumble in this case means not being cut off. You remember that in the previous passage, the diptych passage, we had feet, hands, and eventually eyes that could be plucked out or cut off if there was a cause of scandal. But here the cause of scandal is precisely the being cut off rather than the refusal to cut off. So this is, if you like, the reverse side of the cutting off element to scandal. This is: do not cast scandal, do not cut off that which is genuinely bound together. At this point we have the fifth element of the Pentateuch, people bringing little children to him and the disciples speaking sternly to them. And we can imagine the disciples being bosses, being male bosses, not treating children with regard, having failed to learn from the previous time when Jesus put a little child in their midst – and Jesus having to explain the whole thing to them again. When Jesus saw this he was indignant; he's actually seriously angry at this point, because after all this is the third time he's referenced them. He's attempting to get them to understand that the place from which we perceive these things… …is not from the complications of adult emotions. It's from the place of the non-scandalized child, the one whom we must not scandalize, the one who is therefore able to receive the kingdom wholeheartedly. "Let the little children come to me; do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God in the way that a little child does will never enter it." And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them. So once again he's drawing the fascination, the jealousy if you like, of the disciples. Any one of them would no doubt have longed to be picked up in his arms and hugged by Jesus. He is taking them and saying, "These are the ones you've got to learn how to desire like. These are the ones whom you must imitate in order to enter into the kingdom." So the continuation of cutting off — not cutting off, scandalizing, not causing scandal — is how we are to learn to follow the pattern of desire of the Messiah. We continue walking with Jesus to Jerusalem. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.