The Pharisees come to test Jesus with yet another question. They ask him if it's lawful for a man to divorce his wife. The Pharisees are well-versed in the law, and they know that the law allows a man to simply write out a bill of divorcement. That's it. No need to show cause. No further responsibility. No family law court. No alimony. No child support. No custody battles. The divorce is written, the children stay with the father's family since they are his property, and the former wife is sent out into the street. It's unlikely she will be accepted back into her family of birth. The best she can hope for is a life of prostitution.
But the Pharisees ask Jesus if divorce is lawful. He doesn't tell them that this law is a bad law. He doesn't tell them that this law is unfair or disrespectful to women. In that day and age, women are possessions, and it's unlikely that the Pharisees can hear anything that suggests women be treated as humans with rights. So, Jesus gives them a new rule-a new guide for behavior. A way to behave that will prevent the circumstance of women being thrown out of their homes. He tells the Pharisees not to divorce.
Is that the end of the discussion for us? If we think of Scripture as a collection of rules, picked from the text without thought for context or condition, maybe it is. Is divorce lawful? Scripture says it's not. For many years, that rule guided pastoral counseling. Clergy from pastors to popes have done everything in their power to convince couples to remain married at all costs. And, in many cases, those costs have been high.
So we read these words in this gospel portion, and we wonder. Is this prohibition God's will for us? Is that the end of it for us? Our church recognizes that divorce is sometimes the only life-giving option, and we know that divorce can be the sword that both divides and begins the process of healing. But the question remains: what are we called to do as Christians?
Perhaps the answer lies in another question: why did Jesus say that no one should divorce? We can't know the mind of Jesus, but the stories of his disregard for the laws and traditions of his day seem to have a common denominator: his compassion for the people who are adversely affected by those laws. In Jesus' time, the abolition of divorce would be a compassionate rule, the action which would give most protection to those who are most vulnerable.
What does it mean to be compassionate? I’ve always understood compassion to be the feeling of tenderness we experience when we see someone who is injured or in distress of some kind. Then, last Saturday, I had the pleasant duty of driving our consultant, the Rev. Dr. Rob Voyle, from the Bishop Search Committee meeting in Salinas to the airport in San Jose. As we drove north, he responded to my questions about how he got into the consultant business and what brought him from New Zealand to California, and our conversation wandered from there all over the map. Somehow, we got on to the topic of compassion, and he shared with me an understanding that has grown out of his study with a therapist named Stephen Gilligan. From this framework, Voyle sees Jesus as always grounded in compassion and as acting out of that compassion in three different ways.
The first way is the compassion that we all recognize. It’s the tenderness that we see in Jesus when he sees the leper and touches him. It’s the caring concern we see when he heals the blind and comforts the grieving. This is the tender compassion for which we pray when we are hurting, when we need the comfort of Jesus presence.
The second form of Jesus’ compassion is fierceness. On the face of it, fierceness seems completely in contradiction to compassion, but think for a moment about the last time you saw someone you love being hurt or in danger. Remember the rush of energy that came to you, the depth of the urge to protect the one you love—to remove the danger—to make things right again. When we see someone hurting someone else, we don’t stand and beam tender thoughts at everyone. No—we intervene, especially when we see an imbalance of power, when we see someone whose vulnerability calls to our hearts to right the injustice we see. Jesus acted with fierce compassion when he overturned the tables of the money lenders, when he rebuked Peter, saying get behind me, Satan.
The third form of compassion is mischievousness. The dictionary defines mischief as malevolent—don’t you just love that word?—and that’s certainly how the authorities of Jesus’ time saw his actions. They saw him as so malevolent—so detrimental to the status quo—that they killed him. But Jesus’ mischievous actions were not mean-spirited. His goal was not to harm the others but to help them see that there is another way to live in this world. His mischievousness was not malicious but designed to surprise and to puzzle and to bring us into a new awareness that lets us make new choices. He does that by turning the world upside down and looking at it from a different perspective. In today’s gospel portion, he acknowledges that it’s indeed legal for a man to divorce his wife. He names the context for Moses enactment of that law, then says that legality is not the point—that doing the right thing is the critical issue.
It’s important for us to notice that each form of Jesus’ compassion is rooted in love for the people he’s talking with.
Like all things in our lives, these forms of compassion can take us to our shadow side, to that part of us that we would usually rather not acknowledge. Tenderness that doesn’t rise from caring for the other person but from sentimentality, from image building or from a desire to manipulate a situation is self-serving, not the compassion Jesus shows us. Fierceness that doesn’t rise from caring for the other person but from a need to control or show power over the other is self-serving, not the compassion Jesus shows us. Mischievousness that doesn’t rise from caring for the other person but from a desire to put the other in a bad light, to show one’s own superiority, to win the debate, is simple trickery, not the compassion Jesus shows us.
In today’s gospel portion, the good news is that our own lives, our own motives, our own actions can be transformed through Jesus’ compassion for us. The good news is that even the attempt to walk in the path Jesus shows us leads us further into transformation.
Where does that leave us on the question of divorce today? It leaves us without clear-cut answers. It leaves us searching for the most compassionate course of action when a marriage is broken beyond healing. It leaves us looking for ways to ensure that all people have equal access to protection against injustice. It leaves us providing a supportive community for those who are discerning the way forward in their lives. It leaves us in awareness of how easily we can fool ourselves. And it leaves us on our knees, asking that all our choices and all our actions be rooted in Christ's compassion for the world.