Mark 10:12

and, if the woman divorces her husband and marries another man, she is guilty of adultery.”


a false equivalency
does not make an argument
any more wise
only more foolish

what’s worse for the gander
is not made better
by being made equally worse
for a gray goose

to be broken
does not presume blame
for missing a mark is not sin
nor is it eternal


Wright132 stops a bit short in his comment:

…this means that, for Jesus’ comment to make sense, he must be offering a cure for hardheartedness. If he is not articulating a rigorous return to the standard of Genesis, to God’s original intention, he is either being hopelessly idealistic or he believes that the coming of the kingdom will bring about a way for hearts to be softened.

After recognizing that the longevity of debates about divorce indicates there has been no easy cure for divorce, even if rigorously opposed, he mistakenly goes on to note millions of Christians have prayed and received a grace to remain faithful to their marriage vows, even being able to “celebrate” that an implicit promise of “one flesh” is realizable in their circumstance.

An idealism conflated into some potential state-of-being does not have an adequate grounding for the frailty of time-bound relationships. No amount of waiting will resolve the pain done by and to those ties to mutual creation or a helper status that can be seen as both larger and smaller than that of another being helped.

To turn a “solution” to brokenness into a next rule denying the reality of differences, is all too easy. Imagine Jesus now giving the disciples an essay question: “I have just tightened the rules on divorce. Reflect on the efficacy of rules to change people’s ways of interacting with one another. Be sure to include comments on our previous discussions of healings, prayer, seeds, and, bread.”

When we presume that these two verses say all that needs to be said about a deeply human experience of suffering in and death of a relationship, we have narrowed the scope of what “repentance” and “good news” might mean as a way of healing or repairing a gap in the mystery of attraction, deepening, and formation of a loving nature.

An on-going question of interpretation is how seriously to take what is reported at face-value. What if a literal reading is a test?

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