Does it ever frustrate you when the church seems to get caught up in political issues, and wind up getting involved in things that should be someone else’s business?
As often as not, it’s because people come – as they do in today’s gospel story – and demand an opinion on the issues of the day:
Tell us, Jesus, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?“Is the king’s marriage legal?” they are asking. “Is it holy?”
Herod Antipas, after all, was a divorced man married to a divorced woman (a woman who had been previously married to Herod’s brother).
Jesus’ cousin John has already gotten himself beheaded for his fierce criticism of this post-divorce marriage (among other things).
And now, we’re demanding that Jesus publicly wade into this mess.
There’s no good answer to this question. So Jesus, as he usually does, takes the intended trap as a starting place, and leads off into a wilderness no one was planning to have him get us into.
He starts with “well, what does the scripture say?”
He knows – and his questioners know perfectly well – that the Torah, the law of Moses, accepts divorce as a fact.
For as long as God’s people have had written law, written guidance on relationships acceptable to God, divorce has been a part of the fabric of society.
That’s the “don’t bother to try to trap me” part of Jesus’ response. And then he launches his real point.
It’s lawful; it always has been, because of your hardness of heart.
Marriage, in its right and holy state, is a lifetime unity. That’s the whole and perfect relationship God created to nurture and strengthen humanity. That’s what we dream of, what we intend, every time we come to God, to the church, to enter marriage these days, too.
But humanity is broken and imperfect. And God knows it.
Knows it, and creates a set of systems and holy law around our broken imperfection.
Jesus has not sought out an opportunity to shame people who have experienced divorce; or to scold those whose marriages are broken – or those who are broken by a marriage that’s not whole, not perfect.
Jesus responds to those who want to use divorce as a political trap, and chooses to remind us that none of us live up to the wholeness and perfection that God creates.
Because of our hardness of heart.
Our cardiosclerosis (almost literally, in the Greek).
The drying and hardening of the muscle of life and of love.
All the kinds of love that connect us in human relationship, not just in marriage.
For all that Jesus is laying down the law about divorce in the story we read today – and laying down new law, more egalitarian and more stringent about the possible injuries to others – I don’t think that divorce itself, or the institution of marriage, or the preservation of any particular marriage, is the point he’s focused on.
Instead, I think his focus – the focus he wants us to have – is on generosity of heart. Lively flexibility of heart. Like the heart of God.
The heart that flexes, grows, and strengthens in the face of humanity’s constant imperfections and failures and breakages, as well as in joy and in unity and completeness. The responsive and generous heart of God, that does not clog and dry up as our human hearts so often tend to do.
Our hearts – mine at least, and I suspect I’m not alone – our hearts do get broken.
In marriage and out of marriage, in all our human relationships.
And many of the injuries to our hearts – the little ones, the daily ones, often – scab up; harden. Clog up, just a little bit, our empathy, our generosity toward others.
It’s our self-protective instinct to not get hurt again.
Or we clog with just a garden variety solidifying of a resistance to irritations and annoyances. Because all these humans we live with and try to love are…full of annoying or irritating habits and needs.
Or there are times when the muscle of love for our siblings, our neighbors, feels overworked; when our compassion feels weakened because there are so many demands on our empathy and generosity.
So many devastating losses to the winds and waters in our news feeds and our family and friend stories.
So many illnesses and injuries and losses that come to friends and family members in waves and floods – that we want to support, to respond to with generous hearts, and are just too much at once, and our hearts feel stiffer and slower when the next one comes, or the first one drags on. And we ourselves get tired, and sore, and brittle and clogged.
And sometimes, honestly, our hearts get stiff and slow because we don’t take them out for exercise often enough. Just like my physical joints and heart and lungs, my emotional heart, or yours, can get slower because it’s more comfortable to sit still than to seek out the emotional exercise – the new relationships, the hard conversations, the actions of giving and caring, the sharing of joys – that keeps our muscles pumping and compassion flowing.
Jesus pushes us – today, all the time – to expect more from our hearts than we are used to. To expect and intend our hearts to be more and more like the heart of God.
That’s often not an easy thing to do. It requires attention and intention.
But we do not have to do it alone.
For many of us – not all, but many – marriage itself can be the relationship in which we renew, and heal, and strengthen our hearts, growing more generous and flexible in a working, living love that mirrors the generous heart of God.
For many of us – intentionally, for all of us – the community of disciples, the household of God should be a place of heart renewal. A place and a practice of softening and strengthening our muscles of compassion and trust and generosity, of love. Love for one another, and for God.
And of flexing that muscle of life inside us that receives love from God and one another.
I look for that, and I find that at Trinity.
At our practices of exercising our compassion and generosity together, seeking out ways to care for strangers, and for one another.
At our common prayer, meant to heal and stretch our scar-tissue and give us flexible hearts, more ready to love, and give, and receive.
I hear the strengthening beat of our shared heart, as we meet challenges together, adapt to changes together, welcome new friends, nurture our children together.
I hear the sound of God’s whole and generous heart in our shared song and praise in worship, and in the joys we share with one another.
I recognize myself, broken and imperfect, in the hardness of heart that Jesus calls out, today.
I recognize us, together, in the whole and generous heart of God that Jesus reminds us we are created to share.
The divine heart that doesn’t harden, but makes space for our broken imperfections. And still demands that we grow, no matter how often we break. Grow stronger, and truer, and more whole and perfect and holy, together.
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