Observance: Twentieth Century Martyrs
Ezekiel 16:1-15, 59-63
Song of Isaiah (APBA p. 391; Isaiah 12:2-6)
Matthew 19:3-12
Today’s readings seem to be pretty lewd – there is the condemnation of Israel’s great sins in depressingly saucy imagery, and then Jesus is asked by the Pharisees about divorce.
Ezekiel’s prophecy is, ultimately, God telling his people to do two things: first, look at the great gift God has given them. Secondly, look at how they have treated that gift. We are not talking about gifts like a new coffee machine or the latest popular novel, but rather the great gift of God’s grace in bringing a people out of death and misery up into his glorious and loving presence. This is why the illustration God gives is so heartbreaking: because it is heartbreaking when people scorn God and his gifts to them.
Meanwhile in our Gospel passage, our Lord is interrogated by the Pharisees looking to trap him with a “gotcha” question. Jesus is a bit of a Bible-basher, as it were, and so his enemies pull out a passage from Scripture and ask him about it. He is very keen that we follow God’s Law. But he is also very keen that we keep a moral lifestyle that goes above and beyond the written Law. For example: God’s Law (as recorded by Moses) is that a man can divorce his wife. But Jesus says that we shouldn’t be divorcing each other at all. Ah ha! Jesus has contradicted himself! Or so they think.
As always, Jesus gets to the heart of the matter. He moves past the letter of the law to get to the spirit of the law. Marriage was ordained by God because men and women have been designed to get together and love each other. This is because there is some sort of higher mystery that human marriage points to. The reference our Lord chooses is telling in this regard: of all the passages he could have brought out, he quotes Genesis 2:24, the creation of human beings. Two become one. Two individuals retain their individuality, yet they also become one. Divorce doesn’t come into the equation.
This is a mystery which, as St Paul the Apostle points out, refers to Christ and the Church. In Ephesians 5, he quotes the same line from Genesis as Jesus does when talking about marriage, and follows on by saying “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” (Eph 5:31-32)
The reason I have taken this minor detour around marriage is not because I want anyone to feel scolded (or “Bible-bashed”) for their own experience of divorce. Our human experience is filled with enough of the tragedy of divorce and other marital sadness for me to add to that. What I do want to do is focus on the bit about how it is meant to point us to the relationship between God and his people; or, as St Paul teaches, between Christ and the church.
As a Christian, you are brought into Christ. The New Testament letters describe Christians as people who are “in Christ” more than any other way. We retain our individuality, yet are nonetheless joined inseparably to the Lord. When this breaks down, Ezekiel gives the extremely confronting imagery of a loose woman. Jesus talks about divorce as a sad compromise by Moses to save women from the hardhearted husbands. “Yet in the beginning it was not so”, says our Lord. Humans are made to be together with one another and with God.
Let us therefore check our hearts for any straying away from our Lord of love. For he has showered us so abundantly with such great gifts, and has promised us an eternity of rapturous bliss, it is a heartbreaking tragedy to scorn that gift by seeking lesser loves. And let us share that love that is within us with the humans we share this world with, that all may know that we were not made for ourselves, but for one another. What God has joined together, let no-one separate: and God has joined us to him and one another in the bonds of love through the blood shed for us by the Lord Jesus.