Offensive!

Mark 10:7 ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife,’

There are so many cultural hot-button issues these days. You know, the topics that when discussed can cause tempers to rise and even fists to land on cuffs. These flashpoints are at the divide of very different cultural visions, and are not likely to go away. It is more likely that they will become even more filled with friction.

I will give you an example: election integrity. I can feel your blood pressure rising and your pulse increasing. Strong opinions stand on both sides, along with piles of ‘evidence’ to support said opinions. And I doubt that any amount of prognostication will convince the other side to back down and concede.

Many of these friction points are not new. The role of government and the intent of our ancestors bubble to the surface in the United States around every election cycle and every high profile court case challenging the established norms. This is certainly not something that will be settled soon or without a fight.

Our text comes in a chapter that hits three of these hot-button issues. The first is about gender and marriage. The second about the value of children, applied to abortion. And the third around the role of wealth and the spiritual life. Although each of these issues is not the central message of the passage, the topics need definition in order to properly understand in both the historical context and then apply in our current one.

And just in case you think these topics are easy for Jesus to discuss, Mark ends this trio of topics with Jesus again predicting his death. There is a high cost even for Jesus to take the positions he took. While Jesus is not crucified for these positions, they are emblematic of his opposition to the religious teaching of his day, the very thing that did get him killed.

So let’s look at this first topic, our text. Jesus has been approached in order to try and trap him in what he says. The leaders are trying to find teachings around which they can hang charges to invalidate Jesus as a person, prophet and someone worthy of devotion. They are focused on ‘lawful’ while Jesus focused on commands.

Jesus quotes from the first pages of the Hebrew Bible when he starts his defense. God made two sexes, both for all the creatures and for humanity. Just two. There is no room for someone to identify as something other than these two, and in a particular configuration.

Yikes this is offense to a portion of our country. Such black and white thinking. How narrow minded. How bigoted. And the name calling could continue…but it moves the discussion nowhere.

Jesus’ point is that people were designed to be connected in a particular arrangement. The leaders wanted to redefine that arrangement to allow divorce, the rupturing of the bond designed by the Creator. Jesus would have none of it.

For Jesus, marriage between one man and one woman was fundamental to his understanding of humanity as a whole. To say that that bond could be undone and redone with another person, apart from the death of the spouse, was to drive a knife into the creation story itself. If this part of the origin story and the meaning that the community of God had understood from it for centuries could be undone, then what else could be undone!

Jesus did not compromise. He confronted these leaders who wanted to find something Jesus said to convict him. And instead, Jesus uses their intent to convict them. It was their hard hearts that was leading them into sin and the deconstruction of the historic understanding of the Jewish faith.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. The definition of terms and restricting of language prevent human thought and expression. Jesus faced it, and so do we.