Year B

Mark 10:2-16

The Rev. Denise Vaughn

Blessings of Love

It seems to me that one of the hallmarks of a great leader is the ability to be able to see the way things ought to be. That’s an easy thing to lose sight of because we can get so bogged down in the immediate detail that we miss the larger picture. Or we are so burdened by what is that we lose touch with what ought to be. A great leader should be able to lift his or her sights above the present reality and then cast a vision of the way things ought to be for the others around them. Not always an easy task but Jesus was able to do just that and the reading today from Mark, often listed among the “hard sayings of Jesus,” is an illustration of Jesus casting a vision of the proper attitude of those who are to receive and enter into the kingdom of God.

Needed is reliance on and gratitude for God’s grace, along with an appeal to God’s forgiving mercy because the reality is that whether in Moses’ day, Jesus’ day, or ours, marriage is hard and each time this passage is read and heard many of us cringe, either feeling assaulted by it directly or worrying that others might be. In one way or another, directly or indirectly divorce is everyone’s issue. But Jesus sees beyond the way things are and tend to be and amid this rather thorny reading, brings us good news for a world that’s broken and in pain.

Several years ago, the Rt. Rev. Catherine Waynick, Bishop of the Diocese of Indianapolis began the Stewardship reflection series for that year with these words about the reading today. She say’s “Jesus offers the reminder that God’s intentions toward humanity and creation, are full of blessing and mercy from the very beginning. Humanity is made in the image of God, and given lasting companionship which is intended to mirror God’s own communal nature.” Our relationships are to mirror God’s love in the Trinity and we are to represent, as good stewards, God’s compassion and love for all creation.  She reminded us that the bible is full of accounts of God’s pursuit, God’s longing for us to live in the blessings of love. And that there is nothing we can do that will make God stop loving us.

Good News indeed as Jesus addresses our hard heartedness today. He’s not just challenging the divorced among us. He is challenging every last one of us, even if we have been happily married for decades. In some, hard heartedness does manifest itself in a marital break-up, in others hardness of heart appears in a failure to forgive, or in any other form of sin in which we humans become trapped. But the good news for a world full of hard heartedness is that Jesus goes beyond social boundaries in his words to us today to proclaim God’s mercy and grace even if it meant challenging the status quo. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, when some Pharisees stop him and start a discussion for the purpose of trying to trap him in his words, and hurt his credibility. The issue they raise was a controversial one at that time as it has always been, but divorce in the first century was not at all the same social phenomenon that it is in the twenty-first.

In Jesus’ day men believed they had the right to put away, dismiss or divorce their wives if they displeased them in any number of ways. Women had no rights. The consequences for the woman was devastating as it can be today also, so Jesus’ words were likely intended not to set up a standard by which to judge and stigmatize but rather to protect women who were so much more vulnerable before the law then men. In his response to the question, Jesus turns the question on its head, shifting the conversation from legal to seeking protection for the most vulnerable. The questions asked by the Pharisees take us to the question we have been asking for weeks and for which Mark’s gospel has lead us to ask. How are we to receive and enter the kingdom of God?  Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them…..truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” Jesus welcomes the most vulnerable. The children are blessed by him, and offered as models for receiving God’s kingdom.

Evidently there were parents who were bringing their small children to Jesus. It is a lovely scene, which has been portrayed in many paintings and posters and one that should be cultivated and encouraged within the young parents of our congregation. In a few minutes a little child named Shanna Annabelle will be brought to Jesus and received into the kingdom of God. Christ will take her into his arms, lay his hands on her and bless her. It is a beautiful image to take away from today’s readings. Jesus is reminding the disciples that one enters the kingdom of God as a little child only by receiving it in complete dependence on God. One does not enter the kingdom through fulfillment of any legal principles, including those related to divorce and remarriage.

For Mark, those persons on the edges of humanity any outsider, marginalized by ritual, tradition, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, will find their place in the kingdom of God because we have all been outsiders or have been made vulnerable at one time or another. We all fail one another, we are all faithless, and we all are much less than we had desired and unworthy to bring ourselves to Jesus that his healing hands might touch and bless us. Yet, Jesus blesses and welcomes the powerless, the least, the vulnerable and those who experience brokenness. All of us live under the experience of our human flesh and we stand together under the experience of brokenness and need.  In this text, the good news that Jesus reminds us is that the proper response to God is the trusting innocence of a child, an innocence not dependent on moral success even though we are always striving for moral success.

Jesus in his humanity was able to look beyond the present reality and see the way things ought to be not by casting off his humanity. Rather, he joins us in suffering and death, so that we might be brought into God’s kingdom of love. The kingdom of right relationships, acted out in Jesus when he stretched out his arms on the cross. We know that when Jesus gets to Jerusalem, he will be dismissed, put away, and crucified. He will be made an outsider and vulnerable. All of this, he endures in order to witness more fully and profoundly to God’s abundant mercy, steadfast love, and amazing grace for all people, regardless of their condition.

This is the miracle of forgiveness of God’s reconciling grace for each one of us. We have been created for relationship with God and for one another. We have been created to receive the kingdom as powerless persons eager to be taken up into Jesus’ arms and blessed. Christ comes to establish all our relationships as holy places of God’s own presence and power at work to accomplish God’s purpose. This Christ comes through Word and water, bread and wine to bless and sustain our relationships. This Christ comes through bread broken to empower us to accomplish the work of forgiveness and reconciliation in the church, and in your house and mine. That’s the good news of God’s grace that blesses us all despite our hardness of heart and brings us into the kingdom of God.