Last week’s readings were challenging – with hands and feet being cut off! This week we may also struggle – how do we reconcile Jesus’ apparently uncompromising words (Mk 10:2-10) with the reality of marriage and married life as many people experience it?
As we seek to understand what Jesus may be saying to us, it may help to remind ourselves of some overriding lessons he gave us. Jesus does not create impossible burdens for his followers – “my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Mt 11:30). He also is not much of one for rules and regulations – his strongest condemnation is reserved for the Pharisees and those think the way to follow God is by defining ever stricter laws and condemning those who fail to observe them.
With those thoughts in mind what can we make of Jesus’ words about marital relationships. The first thing, which we might easily skip over, is that he starts by noting that the law of Moses was actually a compromise with what people would accept. This is very different from tablets of stone handed down from on high. God’s law actually takes account of His people’s capabilities.
And when Jesus comments on the Law he doesn’t set out to replace it with alternative rules. Jesus is always trying to get people to understand what is the point of the Law, how is it trying to help us build our right relationship with God. In this case he is telling us that a relationship between a man and a woman is sacred and not to mess with it. Anyone who disrupts such a relationship, from inside or outside, does a grave wrong.
But it is easy to hear Jesus saying more than he does – because it satisfies our need for clarity and certainty. Jesus isn’t commenting on a person trapped in an abusive relationship, he isn’t legislating for a relationship which has died, he certainly isn’t addressing relationships between people of the same gender. He’s telling us that we don’t have the right to end a relationship simply because we want to – regardless of what Moses may have said. That was a radical and extreme statement in his time. Other issues or questions which may challenge us now were so far beyond the scope of anything that could have been considered in that time that we cannot expect to find direct answers reported in the gospels.
In Mark’s gospel Jesus goes on to tell us how we need to approach the Kingdom with the simplicity of a child (Mk 10:10-16). For a child relationships are everything – literally. So it must be for us. And as the author of Hebrews points out (Heb 2:9-11) Jesus, who was God, has made himself our brother. When we accept that relationship and what it means for us, it helps us see our other relationships more clearly. Asking what our brother would want of us and want for us is our pathway to the Kingdom.