but, at the beginning of the Creation, ‘God made them male and female.’
our starting point
is always direct and specific
I am this and this
you are that and that
with hope of completion
this dancing with that
and fear of any new home
honing and molding us
reducing invadingonce started we choose
where variances need apply
virtues shed their shadow
or hold it tight
vices find their warm heart
or grip their cold
ideally both find more
than batch-ing it
under the same roof
We are now a step deeper into the commandment as we move from Moses to Genesis. In this ancient view, the positive benefit of a parent/child relationship becomes a communal liability (an inbreeding) that can only be rectified with new blood and so a child bonds with another child beyond the confines of a beginning family structure and cleaves to them in a way that requires a shift in relationship dynamics.
This is more than simply a maturational issue; it is a deeply genetic attempt at the improvement of the gene pool that goes much beyond this or that personal life. There is a multiplicative binary that seems deeper than any subsequent dualism that is used to hold everything to one standard. This is particularly visible when considering a gift of singleness.
When we can look beyond a commandment’s surface, we can begin to see a wider issue. With divorce as it had come down to Jesus there is a tendency to see it in the limited view of a single male-female relationship. The dynamics of life are never quite as simple and clean as whatever triggers a loss of honor in the eyes of one or another party. There are waves of additional energies that ebb and flow around and behind a single instance. Myers118 points to an on-going issue of social patriarchy that stands behind divorce.
[Jesus] addresses the system of male power and privilege in which a woman who had been “dismissed” by her husband became a social outcast with little means of supporting herself. The original vision of Genesis, Jesus argues, stipulated equality between men and women. The marriage covenant, far from delivering the woman into the power of the man, instructed the man to break with his patriarchal “house” in order to “become one flesh” with his wife (10:6–8). Jesus’ conclusion in 10:9 refers to the way in which patriarchy, not divorce, drives a wedge that tears this equality asunder.