When I was a freshman in college, at George Washington U in Washington DC, I worked in the reference library re-shelving books three afternoons a week. One afternoon in late spring I heard a sort of a distant bell-ringing sound, but didn’t really pay any attention to it, until I noticed that half of the people in the library were rapidly disappearing out the door. I asked a co-worker what was going on, and he said that the Good Humor man was outside. “The Good Humor man!” I exclaimed, and rushed to the window to look out and see for myself. You see, I had never seen a Good Humor man. I had read about them but I had never seen one, and if I’d thought about it at all I would have said it was probably a myth, somewhat like Santa Claus. It was the most amazing thing to find out that they really did exist.
Once upon a time I thought that life-long marriage was something like the Good Humor man - something that may have existed once, but certainly didn’t any more, and in any case had been magnified out of all proportion to reality. Everybody I knew was divorced. My parents were divorced - my father twice. My sister was divorced. My brother was divorced. The only people I knew who hadn’t been divorced were the ones who didn’t get married but just lived together.
But to my surprise, when I became a Christian and started attending church regularly, just about everyone was married. Some of them had been married for 40 or 50 years. I’d never seen such a thing, I thought it was absolutely wonderful. The church had had very little success in getting a singles ministry going, and the leadership used to ask me if it didn’t bother me being around couples and families all the time, didn’t I feel left out or second class or something. I kept saying “No.” Just being around all those solid families was a healing thing for me. I watched people loving each other, caring for each other, deferring to each other, living in partnership together, and I marveled. It was like finding out that fairy tales and happy-ever-after endings were really true after all.
But things aren’t really all that good in Christian circles, either. Divorce statistics among Christians - including those who call themselves evangelicals, or born-again, are just as high as among the population in general. That doesn’t speak very well for the life-transforming qualities of following Jesus, does it? Many people think that the problem would go away if only divorce laws were strengthened, no-fault divorce eliminated, Biblical standards strictly enforced. And I do agree that divorce is a bad thing, and it shouldn’t be so easy. The new Louisiana law allowing for “covenant marriages” is probably a good idea.
But if you look at the statistics more closely you realize that divorce in Christian circles wouldn’t be much affected by passing stricter laws, because among Christians the reasons most often cited for their divorces are actually valid grounds: infidelity, desertion, and abuse. (The appropriate references can be found in Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and Malachi). And in that same church where I had discovered that good marriage was possible, my pastor encouraged me to start a support group for battered women. Because it was needed.
"And Pharisees... asked, 'Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?' [Jesus] answered them, 'What did Moses command you?' They said, 'Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away.' But Jesus said to them, 'For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment.'” [v. 2-5]
It sure looks as though hardness of heart is still a big problem, doesn’t it?
Maybe Jesus was being unreasonable, saying divorce is unacceptable. The disciples certainly thought so. In the parallel passage in Matthew, they respond to Jesus with, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry.” [Mt 19:10]
So a reluctance to be trapped in an uncongenial relationship with no way to get out of it is not a modern invention. Even people 2000 years ago knew that marriage didn’t come with guarantees. Why is Jesus making such a big deal out of it?
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. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” [v. 6-9]
The reason that divorce is so bad is that marriage is so important. The Catholics and the Episcopalians both consider marriage to be a sacrament. I tend to agree with them on this point. Let me explain why.
In order to be a sacrament, three characteristics must be present:
(1) A spiritual reality is embodied in a physical form,
(2) God’s objective action becomes real in the people partaking of the sacrament only insofar as they submit to him.
(3) The spiritual reality represented has social implications.
Well. We could spend the next month talking through what all this means. But today I want us to look at what is the divine reality that is represented in marriage.
Jesus begins by quoting Genesis, “God made them male and female.” The first part of the quote is, “In the image of God.” The image of God is both male and female, and it is as men and women come together in marriage that they most nearly reflect that reality. Marriage is our creator’s way of giving us the joy of the kind of communion that is shared within the godhead, between the three persons of the Trinity. It is characterized by a unity of spirit, a unity of purpose, that holds fast even though the three persons each have their own particular sphere of activity. That’s a perfect relationship, the ideal, the gift that God wishes to build in his children as they obey him within the sacrament. It’s the kind of relationship that’s called a covenant relationship, which is an unbreakable promise sustained by unconditional love. It is, of course, rarely fully achieved on earth.
The analogies to marriage that we find in Scripture also include the relationship between God and his unfaithful people Israel, and between Christ and His church. And these relationships were - and are - stormy at best. So it’s clear that God knows it’s not going to be easy. He expects patience, forgiveness, growth, unconditional love. He showed us how, in his own long-suffering relationship with Israel, and the example of Christ, who died for the sake of the relationship, and he also gives us the Holy Spirit to help us.
But there are two cases in Scripture where God himself initiates divorce proceedings. The first time God divorces Israel, after her persistent, blatant infidelity, amounting to desertion - that is their long worship of foreign gods. And the second case is when the prophet Ezra commands the priests and Levites in Jerusalem to divorce their pagan wives, because they were seducing them away from the worship of God. In both cases, the covenant relationship was already broken. The person who breaks the covenant is not necessarily the one who files the papers.
The only thing that God puts above the covenant of marriage is the covenant relationship God has with us. And the reason for that is that without him, the covenant of marriage is no more than a contract. But with the help of God, with the example of Jesus and the presence of the Holy Spirit, marriage can be what God designed it to be at creation. If husband and wife love one another as Christ loves us, then the covenant remains unbroken, and the divine reality which God wishes for us to enjoy in marriage begins to take shape. It isn’t instant, or easy. But it can happen. It does happen. I’ve seen it.
It isn’t law that prevents divorce, it is love. Not romantic, unrealistic, fairy-tale ending love; that is a myth, no more capable of supporting a life-long relationship than the Good Humor man. But God’s love is different. God’s love creates, God’s love gives, forgives, and endures, and the reward is joy. It’s worth sticking around for.
