My Sunday Sermon - Hardness of Heart

Hardness of Heart

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Scripture for Sermon - Mark 10:2-12

Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.”

But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
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I ran across a a story about a man who was new in his community.
On his first Sunday in his new home,
the man became lost and arrived at church 45 minutes late.
Frantically he rushed inside,
found an usher and asked,
“is the sermon over yet?”
“Yes,” the usher replied with a lackluster voice.
“Its been over for about 10 minutes now.
But the preacher hasn’t figured that out yet.”

Every pastor has preached at least one of those endless sermons.
And that problem almost came back to me this week,
when I looked at the texts for today.
There were so many possibilities -
from the story of Job to the poetry of the Psalm,
from the angels of Hebrews to the Children in the gospel.
For awhile I thought about weaving these texts all together,
but lucky for you I decided against it,
and instead decided to look instead at the conflict over marriage and divorce in the gospel.
That way I could also tell you one of the best jokes about marriage I read this week on my email lectionary study group.

Three weeks after her wedding day, a young bride called her minister.
“Pastor,” she wailed. “John and I had our FIRST fight together.
What am I going to do?”

“Calm down, my dear,” said the minister. “It’s not half as bad as you think. EVERY marriage has to have its first fight.
Arguments and conflict are a natural part of any marriage.

“I know, I know that, pastor,” answered the bride.
“But what am I going to do with the BODY?”
(from Homiletics, vol 18, no. 5, p. 46)

In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus is caught up in a less serious conflict about marriage and divorce with some people who quote Scripture at him.
By now his predicament should sound familiar to us.
The religious leaders of Jesus’ day were always trying to trip him up,
to catch him on the horns of some dilemma,
and to make him look bad in front of his disciples and the crowds that flocked to see and hear him.
One of the ways they did this was to quote scripture.
Of course, this kind of behavior still takes place today.
There are a lot of scripture quoters in the world today,
many of whom use the Bible as a tool for proving their points and for putting people in their place.
The trouble is that often we can find scriptures to prove just about any point,
especially if we are willing to take them out of their context.
And because of this,
it is all to easy to fight about the meaning of scripture.

And as we look at today’s gospel,
it’s worth noting that people in the first century were already fighting about the meaning of the Bible back then.
Even then it was hard to figure it out.
For instance, on the matter of divorce,
the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament that the Jews considered their books of Law, the Torah actually had very little to say.
It actually mentions divorce only one time,
and even that is a passing comment,
given while dealing with a different, although related issue:
Deuteronomy 24:1 says
“When a man takes a wife and marries her,
then it comes to pass, if she find no favor in his eyes,
because he hath found some unseemly thing in her,
that he writes her a bill of divorce,
and gives it in her hand,
and sends her out of his house . . .

Based on this one brief passage,
at least three different opinions about divorce were formed by the time of Jesus by the various rabbinical schools.
For instance, the more restrictive school of Rabbi Shammai taught that the only basis for divorce was marital infidelity-adultery.
This view was almost certainly the minority opinion in Jesus’ day.
The school of Rabbi Hillel, on the other hand, interpreted the law with far
greater leniency.
Husbands could use virtually any complaint as grounds for divorce;
Three examples that he gave as reasons for divorce were
1) if a man found another woman fairer than his current wife,
2) a wife’s incompetence as a housekeeper, and
3) a wife’s burning of the toast,
These were all acceptable reasons for a man to divorce his wife.

Finally, a third group headed by Rabbi Akiba
falls somewhere in between the other two camps,
arguing that divorce was to be allowed whenever a marriage fails to provide a basis for happiness - for the husband.
You might have noticed that not one of the Rabbis ever gave any reason why a woman might divorce her husband.
This just wasn’t done.

And in our reading from Mark,
Jesus was being asked to take sides in that argument.
That way, one side or the other - or the other - or all three - could find fault with his answer.

But instead of just wading into the argument in the way they expected,
Jesus does something shocking.
He says ‘Moses only allowed divorce in the first place because of your hardness of heart.
Yikes! What is he saying here?!
He’s saying that just because it’s in scripture,
you can’t assume that what you read is the will of God!
Jesus is saying that some Bible verses express nothing more than the stupidity,
the sullenness, the bigotry, and the hardness of heart of the people who received them in the first place-and, who knows?
maybe of the people who read them now.

After all, Jesus talks to them about ‘your hardness of heart.’
Now he’s not talking to the scum of the earth.
He’s talking here to the good, religious people.
They pay close attention to the law,
they fulfill its demands,
they’re the respectable pillars of their communities.
And they’re all male.
Perhaps that’s the main issue in this case.
They’re all male.
The Torah is addressed to males.
In that world, men were the public persons;
they were the people of power,
and in that world the women were private persons,
who were supposed to keep out of the public eye,
and who had no power at all.

Marriage wasn’t the sort of thing we take for granted today -
you know what I mean-
two young people falling in love and deciding to create a new family together.
No, it was the men who made the decisions about marriage.
Marriage was a contract between the parents’ families:
the woman’s father gave his daughter away (you recognize the language) to bear a new generation of children for the husband’s family.
She never even became a member of her husband’s family.
If she bore a male heir and if she and the boy both lived long enough,
she would finally have a secure place in it when it became her son’s family.
But if she was divorced and sent away,
the son remained with his father and she just had to hope that her birth family could and would take her back.

Otherwise, without a male attachment,
she would be perceived as a “loose woman” on more than one dimension.
Most women in such a situation had few options for making a living,
and as “damaged goods,” little prospect of remarriage.
If their fathers would not take them back,
many would have no option to survive aside from prostitution.

This may be hard for us to imagine, since it’s so foreign to our own customs.
But it was the norm of the time.
Marriage was something men did to women;
and so was divorce.
And divorce was almost always a disaster for the woman.
Oh, there were a few exceptions.
We know from historical records that a few women from influential and powerful families sometimes had the right to divorce their husbands;
but even then that right had to be written into the marriage contract.
Basically, divorce was for men.

So Jesus takes this accepted cultural practice and the Scripture that was seen as backing it up,
and he says: That’s not what God meant at all.
These verses, these scriptures about divorce just reflect the mean-spiritedness and the hardness of heart that you think is normal in our society.
And so Jesus turns the question back onto the questioners.
His answer puts them on the spot:
Moses said this because of your hardness of heart.

But please notice that Jesus isn’t throwing out the Scripture,
even though he is rejecting one particular text.
Sometimes, when we’re looking for an easy way to understand the Bible and what it says,
we divide people into religious conservatives who take Scripture really, really seriously and religious liberals who don’t take it seriously at all.
So what is Jesus here?
A conservative or a liberal?
This system of classification doesn’t work in this case, does it?
Yes, Jesus does negate one passage of scripture,
but he’s also lifts up another passage and then interprets it in a way that nobody had ever understood it before.

The text Jesus refers to is from the very first book of the Bible, from Genesis,
and its found in the creation story when Adam and Eve becoming husband and wife.
Jesus quotes:
That is why a man leaves his father and mother and be joined to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.
And then Jesus adds his own two cents worth:
“Therefore,” he says, “what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
In effect Jesus is saying that God has created something good in marriage,
and you men can’t just use it for your own convenience and then discard it when a better match or a better family alliance comes along.

The Torah preserved the power that men had in a man’s world to abuse women.
Jesus abolished divorce in order to protect women.
And the basis for Jesus’ changing of Scripture is Scripture itself:
God never intended to okay human hardness of heart;
God intended to teach us how to love one another and do one another good.

Of course, some later Christians turned Jesus’ own statement into yet another license for hardness of heart.
In Eastern Christianity, in the Orthodox church,
it was held that Jesus was establishing an ideal of lifelong marriage:
it was a goal.
But Western Christians long held that Jesus was establishing a rigid new law:
no one can be divorced;
and if they are, they cannot remarry.
Does that condemn you to spending the remaining decades of your life with an abusive spouse?
Well, we’re terribly sorry, but that’s the rule.
Once divorced, are you now forbidden to seek the love and intimacy of another?
Again, that’s too bad, but that’s just the way it is.
Hardness of heart sneaks in the back door again.

Whose hardness of heart caused a blemish in the sacred text of Scripture?
Whose hardness of heart often does the same thing even today?

You see, what Jesus is really doing in this story is turning the whole use of Scripture on its head.
The Scriptures, he says, are not a law book designed to protect the powerful.
They are a book of astonishing insights into God’s extraordinary grace.
The purpose of God all through Scripture is the well-being of God’s beloved children.
If you find things in the Scriptures that seem to say something different,
then take at least a moment to consider who benefits from that.
Whose hardness of heart caused that blemish in the sacred text?
Whose hardness of heart is maintaining that interpretation even now?

After all, at least one thing hasn’t changed since the time of Jesus.
When religious people (that’s us) read Scripture,
we’re still quite capable of using it to support and affirm our own hard-heartedness.
White Christians in the early nineteenth century justified slavery by the Bible.
After the Civil War, they justified discrimination against blacks by the Bible.
Christians have justified wars by the Bible.
Christians have justified Inquisitions by the Bible.
Christians have justified the subordination of women by the Bible.
And it goes on and on.
Hardness of heart is something that just keeps on cropping up.
It wasn’t unique to the Pharisees in Jesus’ time.
It’s not specifically Jewish.
It’s an equal-opportunity sin.
It’s the property of the whole human race.
You can’t escape it just by being religious;
but you can’t escape it by ceasing to be religious, either.
And if you quit reading the Scriptures,
you not only lose the passages that cater to your own hard-heartedness;
you also lose the ones that might wake you up and suddenly let you see how really big and generous God’s love is.

As Biblical Scholar William Countryman has said,
“The people in our own world who like to wield the Bible as a weapon-
they like to claim that they’re just reading it all literally.
They’re not.
They pick and choose what they will take seriously,
just as Jesus did in this morning’s Gospel story.
They just prefer not to notice what they’re doing.
The big difference is that Jesus knew what he was doing and said it straight out.”

Jesus wasn’t a biblical conservative.
But he wasn’t a biblical liberal, either.
He expected something important from the Scriptures;
he expected to be challenged and surprised by God.
And he also expected that when you are challenged and surprised by God,
some of the things we find in the Holy Bible will be seen for what they are –
as concessions to hardness of heart-
and they will have to go.

But how do you decide which ones to discard?
That’s still a scary question for us, isn’t it?
Countryman in writing on this passage tells us that it does one more thing for us.
It actually gives us a principle for making those decisions.
I’m going to conclude with a quote from Countryman because I hope you will take his words away with you.
He tells us:
When Scripture seems to confirm your own hardness of heart, it’s wrong.
Ditch it, just the way Jesus did.
And on the other hand,
when Scripture breaks your world and your heart open and makes it bigger and more loving, it is achieving its true goal.

Hang onto that principle.
It may not be the whole story,
but it’s a great place to begin and it will take you a long way.
Hardness of heart is a dead giveaway that we’ve got it wrong.
Only generous love can open the door to God’s truth.

This sermon owes much of its content and flavor to an excellent 2003 sermon by William L Countryman entitled Jesus Interprets the Scripture, which can be found here.

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