Loopholes and Compassion

I once preached what I thought was a really good sermon about marriage.  My basic point was that that commitment had ceased to be a value in our culture. 

 

So the very next Sunday I was again standing at the church door greeting my congregation.  I woman I thought a lot of came up to me, shook my hand as she always did, and said, “Father, I want you to know that I’ve been thinking a lot about your sermon last week.  And I’ve decided to divorce my husband.”  Now her husband may very well have needed divorcing.  I don’t really know.  Still, it was not exactly the result I was going for.

Divorce, to be sure, is sometimes a necessary evil.  It is sometimes something simply unavoidable.  It is sometimes something that is actually in the best interests of the people involved, particularly when there is abuse of some kind.  Over my years as a priest, I have found myself on occasion encouraging someone to take the necessary steps to protect herself and her children.  I have, on occasion, asked people to stop and both think and pray carefully about what they were doing, although I’ve never tried to tell someone what they should do when it comes to marriage and divorce. 

This week’s gospel reading is Jesus’ teaching about marriage and divorce.  It is often misunderstood, particularly in two ways.  For one thing, even Jesus does not say divorce is never permissible.  He characterizes it as regrettable and a concession to human hardness of heart.  What Jesus said is that remarriage after divorce is impermissible.  Nor did Jesus say that remarriage after divorce was permissible if one acknowledged fault in the failure of the first marriage.  He just said it was impermissible.  Period. 

Southerners have an expression for this.  This is the point at which Jesus has done gone from preachin’ and gone to meddlin’.   

Given how clearly Jesus spoke, it is amazing, is it not, that I have never heard a sermon preached evil of remarriage.  I’ve heard sermons preached about the evils of a lot of things and about a lot of sexual practices but not once about remarriage.  Remarriage is something we not only allow; we celebrate it. 

Generally speaking, we look at second marriages as a second chance at life and a second chance at love.  Second chances are generally something we think people ought to have.  People do stupid things sometimes.  They ought to have another chance.  People make mistakes.  They ought to have another chance.  People even sometimes end up divorced through no fault of their own.  They ought to have a second chance.  People get hurt by our human tendency to hardness of heart.  They ought to have a second chance.

And doesn’t this have something to do with why I’ve never heard a sermon against remarriage?  The explicit words of Jesus notwithstanding, followers of Jesus, precisely because they are trying to be followers of Jesus, have an immense capacity to seek compassion.  They have an immense capacity to seek mercy.  They have an immense capacity to seek forgiveness.   They have an immense capacity to seek love.  They take seriously that Jesus said, not to give just a second chance, but to give seventy times seven chances.  That is one of the things that makes me want to be a Christian.

The only thing that worries me is when our capacity to seek compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and love tends to be greater with respect to our own situations in life than with respect to someone else’s.  We have made an enormous exception to the words of Scripture that have a tendency to benefit ourselves.  I have a hard time seeing Jesus as having a problem with that.  The problem comes when we make an enormous exception to the words of Scripture to benefit ourselves, to give ourselves a loophole in the law, but refuse to do that for others.  And that, my friends, is something I do think Jesus has a problem with—a big problem.

Peace,