Today’s readings centre on the sacrament of marriage.
How many sacraments are there?
The Church of England has seven sacraments of which two baptism and eucharist are given special status with the other five – marriage, ordination, confession, confirmation and anointing – named as lesser sacraments.
A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. The outward sign of water is a sign of baptism’s grace of cleansing and renewal. The outward sign of bread and wine is the sign of Christ’s body and blood. The oil of anointing is the outward sign of God’s healing. The bishop’s or priest’s hands and voice are the outward sign in confession, confirmation and ordination.
What about marriage? What is the outward sign?
The ring? No. The sign of marriage is the vows by which husband and wife give themselves to one another before God.
What is the inward grace of marriage?
Life-long union. Someone reads Mark 10.7-10 But from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’
Our Lord draws his teaching from our first reading, Genesis 1.21-24: So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.’ Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.
The rib story is just that, a story, one that teaches truth, though - the truth that men and women share a common humanity and are designed to complement one another. Vive la difference!
That passage has been abused to argue for the subordination of women so that in Our Lord’s day the all male Rabbi’s would build arguments for divorce to please their fellow men which included ‘she can’t cook as I want’. In Mark Chapter 10 Our Lord challenges this maltreatment of women and the culture of easy divorce weighted towards men. He goes out of his way to uphold marriage as first conceived in Genesis over against the easy divorce of his day as we read in the Gospel v11-12 He said to them, ‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.’
Marriage according to Christ is indissoluble – it can’t be dissolved.
It’s a high bar we struggle to reach up to. Like the high bar set in last week’s Gospel when he says if your eye offends you pluck it out.
If the food’s no good the answer isn’t divorce. ‘Pluck your eye out rather than do so’ is the sense of Our Lord’s teaching against breaking a marriage. That teaching has been a source of encouragement to married couples for 20 centuries.
Or should I say discouragement? At times when people are lured by the flesh to look elsewhere they’ve been discouraged from following those lusts by obedience to the wisdom of Jesus.
We need the wisdom of Jesus as much today as ever. Figures published by the Office for National Statistics show divorce rates in England and Wales increased by 5% between 2009 and 2010, from 114,000 to 120,000.
High Court Judge Sir Paul Coleridge made headlines in May for describing marriage breakdown as one of the "most destructive scourges" in Britain. Sir Paul felt compelled to speak out because of the "unprecedented scale of the problem". He’s launched the Marriage Foundation charity to improve public understanding of the "nature, benefits and importance of marriage and how healthy married relationships provide the most stable environment in which to raise children". Interesting that today’s Gospel ends with just that concern, about the welfare of children, having made clear the importance of the faithfulness in marriage that’s so helpful to this.
How does the Church, how do we, today, make sense of Christ’s teaching against divorce?
Each denomination has a pastoral policy on second marriage that allows for what Jesus called hardness of heart in v5. Some marriage failures come, as some of you know, even where there is much soft hearted generosity. Our Lord taught and showed us soft hearted, irrevocable love. On Calvary he gave himself as God does, without thought of taking back his gift.
That’s God! Softhearted! Never takes himself back from anyone - only from sin.
We humans love but our love can be hard hearted. When we say ‘I love you’ it can mean ‘I love me and want you’! For all of that it’s the noblest act of a human being to say, as many of us in Church have said to someone, ‘I take you...to love and to cherish. Till death us do part...all that I am I give to you, and all that I have I share with you, within the love of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’
The nature of the marriage vow, the outward sign of a sacrament, makes repeating it to someone else, within the life time of your spouse, difficult. For most Churches it is impossible to do so. That’s the position at St Giles. In Christianity, in Christ, a vow of love is a vow of love. It goes against the grain of Christianity, of Christ, to take love back again.
So what of those who've got no option but to do so?
Roman Catholics have to seek the annulment of their first marriage. If you’re Free Church you fall back on a less sacramental and more human view of marriage and start folk over again. As Anglicans we offer a compromise. Our Service of Prayer and Dedication after Civil Marriage has quite a take up, for the honest service it is, in publicly admitting past failure and seeking God’s blessing on a new start.
If remarriage after divorce seems the unforgiveable sin, which it isn’t, it’s because the Church, being held to Jesus’ teaching, has to protect the integrity of word and deed as best she can. In doing so we try not to make the best the enemy of the good. Our Lord set high standards but was forgiving to those who fell short of them.
Many of us will know second marriages where God is evidently at work and first marriages where he needs to get in more, so to speak. This is the human reality but it would become so much more inhuman without the wise standard Jesus sets us .
If the outward and visible sign of marriage is the making of life-long vows to each other the inward and spiritual grace is life-long union. When you marry in Church you receive a special anointing from God to help you keep your vows that’ll always be there for you if you seek it.
It is an excellent practice for married couples to seek that grace together from time to time which is why on Sunday 7th July we’re inviting couples to renew their marriage vows together at this service.
The sayings of Jesus are unlike the sayings of say the Buddha. Jesus not only gave his teaching, he gave us his life to seal it. By his life, death and resurrection Jesus Christ is able to empower us not just to hear what he says but to do what he says and to do it cheerfully.
What God has joined together, let no one separate – this is the word of Jesus. There is no word of God without power.
Let’s believe it – however much is might cost!
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