The phone call came late in the evening. Was it because the children would be in bed and out of earshot? I was indeed in bed when the phone rang, but this curious child was also still awake and listening. One of my parents was on the phone with someone from the Roman Catholic diocese. A family friend was going through a divorce and was seeking an annulment by the Church. An official was calling to interview my parents about their experience of their friends’ marriage because a reason was needed to justify the divorce. A litany of questions had been prepared, which I couldn’t hear but I can imagine in hindsight. Did the couple behave lovingly toward one another? In your experience, were there ever any moments when the spouse was cruel or mean to the other? Do you think there was ever really love there to begin with?
I was too young to question this whole process or really understand what was happening, but even in my childish innocence, I was unsettled by it all. It seemed as if the annulment process was proceeding from a standpoint of deficiency. Something must have been wrong with one of the partners in the marriage for it to have fallen apart. Surely, he or she must have done something so bad that the marriage could be written off as never having really been valid. The annulment would, of course, free the two partners to marry again.
Now, as an adult, if I want to analyze why that late night phone conversation made me uncomfortable, I could talk about casuistry and legalism. But I’d rather focus on how it started at the wrong end of things. The interrogation seemed to assume that there was a deficiency that needed to be discovered. The process was intended to look for an exception to the rule that divorce should never happen.
If you ask me, this isn’t very different from starting with what’s wrong with humanity rather than the many things that are good about it. Imagine, for instance, the first story in the Bible being the Fall, when Adam and Eve messed up in the garden of Eden. But that’s not what the canon of Scripture gives us, and I think there’s a good reason for that. Scripture begins with the first creation account, when God created everything and called it good. And then when God made humans in his image, he said it was all very good.
The story of humanity’s relationship with God starts with goodness, not deficiency. It doesn’t take long for things to go off the rails, but it still begins with goodness, completion, and paradise, rather than with evil, deficiency, and hell. This beautiful story begins not with an exception to the rule but with the rule itself. Or we might say with an expectation that transcends a rule. The expectation is that humanity is capable of goodness. To speak in anthropomorphic terms, God, in some sense, expects and desires it.
And so, it should be no surprise that when Jesus gets drawn into a discussion about divorce, he starts with God’s expectation, not with the exception to the rule. The Pharisees who question him, attempting to trick him, are simply looking for the exception. Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? Forget the woman, in this case. She had no rights, which is also part of the problem. The Pharisees assume that divorce will happen. They don’t ask if it’s a tragedy. They just ask if it’s allowed.
But Jesus isn’t so much interested in what’s allowed as in what God dreams for humanity. And this is why Jesus references the second creation story. God desires a one-flesh union of two people. Jesus doesn’t want to start with humanity’s exception clause, which simply allows people to separate what God has joined together. Jesus takes the whole conversation back to the story of creation because it’s the only true starting place. It starts with goodness. And because it starts with goodness, we are dealing with God’s expectation rather than humanity’s exception.
Jesus seems to know that people will always try to take the easy way out. They’ll operate according to the lowest common denominator if they can get away with it. Does my term paper have to be ten pages double-spaced with 12-point font or 14-point font? Am I still an active baptized member if I only receive Communion twice a year instead of three times? Do I have to forgive her every time she offends me or just the first two times? Do I need to need to tithe on my whole net income or only on my net income after I pay the bills?
Looking for the easy way out assumes that there’s a deficiency within us. It assumes that our spiritual lives are beholden to the governing forces of industry in which we’re always striving for economy of motion or doing the least amount of work possible to earn the most amount of money. It assumes that we’re always searching for an exception to the rule.
But Jesus isn’t interested in exceptions to rules. He’s not even very interested in rules. Jesus is interested in God’s high expectations of his creation and in God’s vision for humanity. Jesus highlights what God intends and desires rather than what’s merely allowed. He sets the bar high because he knows there’s a still more excellent way than our tendency to settle for less.
It's not simply that Jesus always demands more and more in the sense that modern progress is no longer satisfied with working forty hours a week and must push for fifty. As Jesus draws his followers into deeper and deeper relationship, he also draws them more and more out of their own selfishness and isolation. He invites them into community. He does so by setting their sights on the immeasurable love between God and his people, a love that never settles for less and that can never be put asunder.
And this is why the world needs the sacrament of marriage. We need this sacrament to set our sights high instead of settling for less. The sacrament of marriage calls us to live into God’s expectations rather than humanity’s exceptions to the rules. In a good marriage, we see a glimpse of the love between Christ and his Church, a love that is indissoluble, even when we reject it.
In pointing to a more excellent way, Jesus navigates a different path from our two modern ways of dealing with difficulties in marriages. Marriage is either treated without reverence, tolerating divorce when a marriage simply becomes inconvenient. Or marriage is treated as something that can never be dissolved and requires a legal process to prove that it was never valid from the start. The problem with these two approaches it that they let Christian community off the hook.
When Jesus points to one-flesh marriages as embodiments of God’s high expectations of humanity, the implication is that more than the married partners are involved in a marriage. The whole Christian community is affected when a marriage is in distress. The community can’t easily write off a marriage because it has some troubles. They can’t write off a marriage as invalid because one of the partners didn’t behave well. The community is called to do everything in their power to support the couple when times are tough. The community is supposed to live into God’s expectations rather than settle for the exceptions to the rule.
Christ points us to a still more excellent way in which eschatological hope exceeds human deficiency, where with God, anything is possible. It’s possible that in a troubled marriage, God’s grace can help a couple emerge stronger on the other side. It’s possible that with the help of the Christian community, a couple can learn to delight in one another again after years of dissension. But it’s also possible that God can create a new future for those who’ve had to face the tragedy of divorce. God can heal and mend wounds. And it’s possible that God can still enable forgiveness to happen for those who’ve been wrongly hurt and judged by the Church after a painful divorce.
As Christian disciples, we’re called to live into God’s expectation, not into humanity’s exception. This doesn’t mean that the exceptions won’t occur or even be the best possible solutions in intractable situations. But there’s no good reason to make the exception the rule. Nor is God’s expectation itself a rule. It’s a vision of hope, a call into walking the way of the cross. And when we walk this way in community and fellowship with one another, we settle not for exceptions for rules or even for rules themselves. We learn to glory in God’s hope for all humankind. We refuse to settle for what’s allowed. More than anything else, we dare to hope for what is possible only with God, because with God, anything is possible.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
October 6, 2024