My high school chemistry teacher was a brilliant man and an excellent teacher, but his style of teaching was somewhat unusual—or at least, it was different from all my other teachers. Suppose we were having a class discussion and came across the word “ubiquitous,” and someone asked what the word meant. Well, he would not tell you. He would make everyone in the class walk across the room, grab a dictionary, and look the word up. And of course, few people ever again forgot what “ubiquitous” meant.
For assignments, this teacher would give us difficult chemistry problems to tackle, with very little preliminary information, which meant that we all struggled mightily through our homework as we prepared for a class lab. Upon returning to class, we weren’t graded on right or wrong answers, but instead, we learned from our mistakes as our teacher guided us through the correct line of thinking. The process of wrestling with difficult chemistry problems forced us to begin to think for ourselves. We didn’t absorb information spewed forth by the teacher. We learned how to be stronger independent thinkers.
We might label such a teaching style as a kind of interactive dialogue, like a game of ping pong. A student asks the teacher a question, but the teacher does not give a direct answer. In some cases, the teacher asks another question as a type of response, but the answer still requires reflection and mental stamina from the student. The teacher does not handfeed the student. The teacher coaxes and challenges. The teacher lobs responsibility back onto the student.
In the Gospels, Jesus is usually this kind of teacher. Today’s Gospel reading is a classic example. When the Pharisees approach Jesus to test his beliefs about divorce, the test is intended to trip him up. It does not really seem like a question designed to elicit the truth. The test is used by the Pharisees as a distraction from examining their own inner beliefs. And Jesus knows this in his heart.
So he ping pongs the Pharisees’ question back to them with his own question. You want to know if it’s lawful for a man to divorce his wife, well, then tell me what Moses said. Don’t rely on me for easy answers. Take some responsibility for yourself in this conversation. Once the Pharisees have been drawn deeper into this dialogue, Jesus reveals what he really thinks about divorce. And I suspect that the Pharisees did not want to hear what Jesus had to say because it was too difficult.
Does this sound familiar? Perhaps we are all hung up on the word “divorce.” Make no mistake about it: this is a challenging passage, no less because Jesus’s standard for marriage flies in the face of modern reality. But there is something deeper going on that can be missed in splitting hairs over moral quandaries. The more we argue over various views of marriage and divorce and judge others who disagree with us, the more we excuse ourselves from something else that Jesus happens to be doing.
Jesus, it seems, is offering us a test of Christian discipleship. Jesus, the blunt and challenging teacher that he is, ping pongs responsibility back to us. His challenge is not directed only to the historical Pharisees or to those who have been divorced or to those who are struggling in unhappy marriages. Jesus’s test is directed to every single one of us. And Jesus’s litmus test of true Christian discipleship doesn’t even occur in relation to the question of divorce. It emerges in Jesus’ teaching on children.
Once Jesus has volleyed the Pharisees’ initial question back to them with his own question, he has drawn them into an intricate dialogue in which they are now invested. Their accountability is demanded by Jesus’ answer. They can no longer merely test Jesus. Now, he is testing them.
Jesus’ teaching on children is not unrelated to the dialogue with the Pharisees. It is the response to it. How we treat children is the litmus test of discipleship. It’s not about children being cute and innocent. The point is that the children represent exactly the kind of people Jesus wants us to welcome: those forgotten by society, those relegated to the margins because they have no money to offer the jaws of big business, those who are considered quirky or weird and who make for easy scapegoats in overzealous quests for orthodoxy. But, says Jesus, the children are the ones we should pay attention to. And how we treat the children is our own test of Christian discipleship.
When we test God, like the Pharisees tested Jesus, God doesn’t challenge us by offering a pop quiz on how to be a Christian. God simply puts the children, the poor, the unloved, and the marginalized before us with the implied question, how do you treat them? God places in our path those who have suffered devastating divorces and broken relationships, those who have been ostracized because of difficult choices they have made, those who have been ill-treated through lack of understanding, and God ping pongs back to us the question, how will you treat them? Will you welcome them? And how we treat them tells us something about how we’re doing in our relationship with God.
Jesus knows that we often come before God with our own complicated reasoning in order to justify what we are already doing in order to test God and to justify our behavior. If I do this in such a difficult situation, is it really a sin? God, give me a clear answer on this ethical dilemma so that I understand exactly what your will is. God, I’ll believe in you if you will only heal my cancer. God, this failed relationship wasn’t really my fault, because there was never any love in it from the beginning, right?
This Gospel passage that speaks directly about divorce and that challenges casual approaches to marriage is actually about so much more than this one pressing issue. And the more we try to box God into a neat system, the more we fail to live up to the discipleship test that Jesus has offered us.
Because it’s much easier to cast stones than to apply Jesus’ litmus test to our own lives. Judging others becomes the distraction from self-examination. When we demand Jesus’ answer to difficult moral questions, he sends back to us the responsibility that each of us is to bear if we wish to become one of his disciples.
Have we done our part to uphold and support the struggling marriages in our community, or would we rather judge the result of a failed marriage? Is it easy for us to become comfortable with divorce and therefore excuse ourselves from supporting the sacrament of marriage? Do we point fingers of blame at difficult choices that others have made without recognizing the nuances of moral complexity? And can we accept the deep moral responsibility that God has tossed back onto our own lives?
How do we treat the vulnerable and the hurting among us? How do we treat the person who has offended us deeply? Do we flippantly dismiss the person with whom we disagree, or do we seek to engage them in conversation? Our self-checks hold us accountable to our baptismal promises. They help ensure that Christianity does not become a religion of convenience but a way that leads to fullness of life.
It is often our hair-splitting over the fine details of God’s will that prevents our own self-reflection. The testing questions that we throw at God for our own reassurance are usually answered by an unexpected question in return. And rather than testing us directly, God’s question pulls our attention back to our own hearts and souls, where work needs to be done. Are we trying to force our way into the kingdom of God, or can we receive it as a gift? Have we defined the Way of Jesus too narrowly in order to let only ourselves and those like us into heaven?
The truth frequently obscured by our testing of God and judging of others is that the way to eternal life is a big, wide boulevard, but the effort required to walk it is immense. We are the ones who make it narrow rather than God. And yet, at the end of this road is our gentle Savior, who came to save the world not to condemn it. He stands there with arms outstretched, no matter how many stand in the way to obstruct the path to him. And when we find ourselves before him, he scoops us up, lays his hands on us, and blesses us. No matter how much we fall short in honoring our commitment to God, it doesn’t change God’s steadfast and reliable commitment to us, and this commitment is always to bless us and welcome us home.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 3, 2021