Joseph Wiesenfarth
7 October 2018
Genesis 2:18-24, Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16
John Mortimer, well known a decade or so ago as the creator of “Rumpole of the Bailey,” has written a splendid play called A Voyage Round My Father, which enjoyed a successful run in London’s West End back then. Through an accident, his father, a prominent barrister who specialized in divorce cases, lost his sight. So he prepared his day’s arguments by having his wife read him their pertinent details on the train up to London. Mortimer writes, “The entire first class compartment would fall silent listening to the ever more embarrassed voice of my mother in the faint hope of catching the name of some close friend or relative who at last had been caught out.” He continues, “So I was housed, clothed, warmed and educated entirely on the proceeds of cruelty, adultery and wilful neglect to provide reasonable maintenance” (playbill notes).
Now I don’t mean to treat the matter of divorce frivolously because it is clearly a serious matter. But I do mean to show, precisely what Mortimer emphasizes, that divorce is here to stay. So much so that some people—take his father, for example–make their livelihood out of it. What, then, are we to say about it? Especially after reading what Jesus has said about it?
Northrop Frye—a Christian minister as well as a literary theorist–comes to our help in his book Words of Power where, drawing on Matthew 19: 3-6, he places Jesus’s remarks in terms of Adam and Eve—“for each of whom there was, naturally, no one else”—saying that Jesus sets us “this lifetime permanent commitment [of Adam and Eve] as the mythical model for human marriage.” What this model does, Frye continues, is distinguish “casual sexual liaisons founded on pure mechanical reflex [from] sexual unions which individualize both lovers.” Finally, he remarks that “in actual life the ideal that every marriage must be a sacred marriage strains the laws of chance intolerably” (223).
In other words, Scripture must be interpreted in the light of a mythical tradition. Consequently, Jesus’s words in today’s gospel prohibiting divorce must be interpreted in light of an understanding of the Creation myth that includes the unique situation of Adam and Eve. Moreover, life itself vividly demonstrates that not every man and woman who marry have been joined together by God.
Though Frye, not educated in their tradition, does not want for Catholic theologians who agree with him. Dietmar Mieth, for instance, writes in The Church in Anguish (ed. By Hans Kung & Leonard Swidler) that “the instructions found in the Bible in regard to ethical matters are not simple statements that impose duties valid for all times.”
This also presupposes that “morality” is not to be regarded as a given, preformulated system, but as a vital coming-to-be of the practical option of faith in dialogue with contemporary moral reason and perception of reality. (134).
This makes us as individual human beings not merely receptive, but creative as well. This is precisely what Jesus is doing as he “struggles against the hardheartedness of the doctrine of divorce in his own time” (141). Thus the strong words we hear him speak constitute a response to an intolerable situation of inequality in which men wantonly used women in his day. What Jesus in essence is telling the Pharisees is that women are equal to men, not their playthings. He is not condemning divorce altogether and forever. He is condemning what the Pharisees do.
Jesus’s rectification of inequality between men and women leads me to say–now that I’ve already said it!–that I really did not want to say anything about divorce today. It is obviously a vexed, difficult, and highly personal question. But I don’t at all mind talking about the issue of equality that the discussion of divorce raises. And that is relatively easy to do because today’s readings call our attention to an inescapable pattern that shapes such a discussion..
When Adam has no suitable companion, God creates Eve. And they are equals: they become one flesh. Then, in our need, God sends us Jesus and he “is not ashamed to call [us] brothers and sisters.” This annoys the Pharisees, who then question Jesus “to test him.” They would play master and have him play pupil; instead, he teaches them a lesson. Furthermore, when the disciples try to keep the children from Jesus, he becomes “indignant” with them, and remarks, “Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the realm of God like a child shall not enter it.”
What is self-evident in these passages is that they affirm the equality of men and women before God. Adam is not superior to Eve. The Pharisees are not superior to Jesus. The disciples are not superior to the children. More startlingly, Jesus is not superior to us: like us, he tasted death. And the letter to the Hebrews brings these things together when we read there, “For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified have all one origin,”
This, I think, is where the poignant lesson of today’s gospel lies. Adam and Eve, the Pharisees, the disciples, the children, and Jesus are, like us, of one origin: God. Should this not give us pause to reflect on our exercise of power when those over whom we would exert it are, as Genesis says, one flesh with us; or as Hebrews says, “taste death” as we do; or as Mark says, belong to the realm of God? How different would our institutions of church and state be if we reflected thoughtfully on this and actually acted on it? How would it affect our thinking, for instance, about the death penalty or gay marriage? Is it not already evident, in this second decade of the 21st century, that the major problem is not who sleeps with whom but who chooses to dominate whom? What has been done in the name of the superiority of nation, race, ideology, religion, and gender already suggests that our present day may be even bloodier than days past. Ours—mine certainly—is not a generation that has shared our lives with those who have loved too much but rather with those who have killed too many. What we all need to remember in the struggle to make our mark in the world is what Jesus taught us in making his: he “was made lower than the angels” and was not “ashamed to call [us] brothers and sisters.”