Who is doing the judging, and what it is based on

For the past few months our morning meditations have centered around the books of Hebrews, James, and now, John. There is much in these books on old law versus new, and what it meant for Jesus to come in regard to judgement.

Today we looked at John 5. I was particularly drawn by the passages about Jesus as judge. For some reason, I never picked up on this before. I've always envisioned the Father as the judge, with Jesus as intermediary. But John 5 shed new light:

²⁷ And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.

What a comforting thought. The one who tells us that the greatest commandment is to love God and to love each other is the one who is going to evaluate our behavior.

Jesus goes on to remonstrate the pharisees who judged his healing of an invalid on the sabbath:

⁴⁵ “But do not think I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set.

So Jesus will not accuse those who focus their attention on the dots and tittles of the law. The law itself will accuse them. As for Him, He will judge our love. 

There is much condemnation of same sex relationships based on scripture, especially Old Testament scripture. But if scripture alone is used as the basis of the argument, there is also much to show that the law is no longer what it once was. It is no longer what we must live by in some vain attempt to be righteous. The law will not be our accuser unless we set our hope in it. 
 
As Christians, we have the choice to set our hope in the law, or in Him who's mercy triumphs over judgement.

I set my hope in Him, and pray that He will judge me according to my love. And I pray that those Christians who structure so much of their faith around law, judging others based on the particular set of laws that they have chosen not to disregard, will have their hearts attuned to the words of Christ.

God Himself Violated the Law

While reading through some of the laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy recently I came across the passage below:

Deut 22:23 If within the city a man comes upon a maiden who is betrothed, and has relations with her, 24 you shall bring them both out to the gate of the city and there stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry out for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor's wife. Thus shall you purge the evil from your midst.

I wasn't hunting for marriage related laws, this one just happened to jump out at me. Why did it grab my attention? Because according to this passage, God Himself violated the law.

Luke chapter 1 describes the occurrence.

Mary the mother of Jesus was in a city; the town of Nazareth. She was betrothed to Joseph. The Holy Spirit came upon her, overshadowed her, and planted a child in her womb. She did not cry out for help because she didn't want or need it. Joseph initially believed himself to have been wronged and planned to divorce her.

All of these facts line up to show a clear violation of the law laid out in Deuteronomy 22.

At the very moment the New Covenant was initiated, God Himself broke an Old Covenant law related to marriage. Perhaps it was a sign of it's passing, a shattering of a clay tablet inscribed by a Pharisee.

The Spirit must have whispered to Mary "Don't think about what you've been taught. Simply love Me with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength." Mary responded by opening to His request, despite knowing that she could be stoned.

I'm still pondering what this could mean. I don't have an answer. But since God Himself begins the very life of Christ through a violation of marital law, it certainly points out that the Biblical "view" of marriage is far from straight forward.

What God has joined together...

The gospel reading for yesterday was Mark 10:2-16. The priest focused part of her sermon on verses 2 through 12, which read:

And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" 3 He answered them, "What did Moses command you?" 4 They said, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away." 5 But Jesus said to them, "For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female.' 7 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder." 10 And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 And he said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery." 

Two things struck me about the passage, in relation to Marriage Revolution.

The first comes in verse 9, and in particular, the phrase about what God has joined together. 

In the past, I'd thought this referred to anyone who was married; if you ended up marrying, surely it was God's will, because marriage is a God-thing and a church thing.

But I realized that this thinking isn't quite right. Sure, He permits us to marry whoever we want. We have free will, and free choice. When you marry, it definitely falls within his permissive will. But then again, so does sin. He permits many things. Not all marriages fall under his ordained will however. Not all matches are made (literally) in heaven. Many, many marriages come as a result of us not listening to the voice of reason, whether it be spoken directly by the Spirit, or indirectly through friends, families, and our own logic.

So that's the first part of my realization; that just because you are married doesn't mean God directed it to happen.

The second part is a bit more nuanced. I'm a lover of the sacramental, and hold the sacraments in high esteem, so the idea of undoing a sacrament is difficult for me. I thought that all Christian traditions considered marriage a sacrament. Turns out that in Protestant denominations (including Anglicanism) it is not. 

Strike two against my fundamental thinking.

Even within the Catholic and Eastern traditions, which hold marriage as sacrament, there is an issue which shakes my thinking. Unlike the other sacraments, which have an ordained clergy member officiating, the spouses themselves are the ministers of the sacrament of marriage. They officiate. And this seems to pull it even further out of the realm of what I'd viewed it to be.

Is it any surprise that half of our marriages end in divorce? We are not uniting as couples that God chose from His heavenly throne, we are most often not married sacramentally, and even in a sacramental union we are being our own ministers rather than joining with a priest in persona Christi to knit a chord of three.

My notions about the sacramental quality of marriage have fallen by the wayside. 

That doesn't mean that I don't believe what He says in verse 9: "Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." 

Woe be it to any who would do so. 

What has shifted is in my understanding of what God's joining together means. I think there are very, very few couples for which this description fits.

And that's the crux of the problem.

One minute of pain, a lifetime of companionship...

Only When the Innermost Heart of Man is Opened...

Hans Urs von Balthasar writes about Christian sexual ethics in the book Elucidations, but his description of the self-giving nature of true love is accurate for people of all faiths, or none:

Christian sexual ethics is best advised to keep to the quite simple outline of the New Testament. For this is as unchangeable as the nature of divine love which is become flesh in Christ. This is unalterable because a “greater love” than the one shown to men in Christ is not conceivable, not in any phase of our evolving world. So long as the Christian’s heart and mind are spellbound by this humble and totally selfless love, he has in his possession the best possible compass for finding his way in the fog of sexual matters. With the image of this love before him he will not be able to maintain that the ideal of self-giving—of true self-giving, not of throwing oneself in front of people—is unrealistic in our world and impracticable. It demands a very great deal: namely, to subordinate everything to the love which does not seek its own; but it gives a great deal more: namely, the only true happiness. One can use sex, like drugs and alcohol, to maneuver oneself into a state of excited, illusory happiness, but one is merely transporting oneself into momentary states which do not alter one’s nature or one’s heart. The states fade and disappear, and the heart finds itself emptier and more loveless than before. It is only when the innermost heart of man is opened that the sun of love can penetrate into it. “Fili, praebe mihi cor tuum, Son, give me your heart” (Prov 23:26).

The Ancient Problem of Divorce

The challenges of matrimony are obviously nothing new.

Babylonian Talmudic texts (fourth century?) talk about divorce, saying:

"There are four minds in the bed of a divorced man who marries a divorced woman."

Oscar Wilde on Divorce

"One divorce may be regarded as a misfortune, but two begins to smack of carelessness."

--Oscar Wilde

(Note: This is not intended as a judgement of divorcees, I'm simply collecting marriage and divorce quotes and found this one interesting. I ran across it in Elizabeth Gilbert's book "Committed", where she explains her reluctance to remarry after divorcing. Considering the assessments of others at a second wedding ceremony was one of the discouragements.)

Book Recommendation: Committed

I'm in the middle of reading a great book, picked up with no idea how well it fit into Marriage Revolution ponderings. It is Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, by Elizabeth Gilbert.

The book is a follow on to Eat, Pray, Love, and was prompted by the threat that her Brazilian lover (who was introduced in that book) might not be able to enter the United States unless he becomes her husband. Both of them were marriage averse, having survived ugly divorces. Gilbert therefore jumps into a study of marriage both through history and current research.

I have to get my own copy (this one is from the library) so that I can reread it, mark it up, and pull extracts for this blog.

The current same-sex marriage legal debate gains interesting context from the book, which I'll be unfolding in future posts.

Meanwhile, check out the book yourself. It's an entertaining read as well as being useful.

More on Adam and Steve

A few more thoughts on Adam and Eve as a central argument against same sex marriage, begun in this post.

Adam and Eve are regularly brought up in the debate despite the fact that they didn't actually have what is currently being legally debated. Like the first humans, same sex couples can have a non-governmentally sanctioned union. They can live together and love each other despite an outward appearance of "wrongness" (in this case the problematic duplicate DNA issue). What they can't have in many places is the wedding at Cana, the legal protections of Hebrew marriages etc.

None of which Adam and Eve had.

My point? It's complicated. When it comes to legalization and rights related to same sex marriage, the Biblical arguments which are most frequently paraded need refining. God's model for procreation is clear, and his esteem for fidelity is obvious.

But the Biblical model for marriage itself? Not so simple.

The "Adam and Steve" argument

One of the primary Christian arguments against same sex marriage is the Genesis creation account. You may have heard phrases along the lines of "It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!"

But while I'm a Christian, and a fairly conservative one at that, I find a number of problems with this bit of scripture as a defense of traditional marriage.

Adam and Eve were not "married" as far as Biblical accounts are concerned. Their bond was something that is not really comparable, or comprehensible, to what we have now. For one thing, it reads like the first instance of successful human cloning, which appears to go completely against a properly ordered procreative union. Plus they were the only humans available, which meant there wasn't any aspect of choice. So it seems to me that we can't really use them as the model for marriage.

As a procreation model yes, but not as a marriage model.

In contrast, the Bible as a whole is the model. It concentrates on fidelity. Trust. Love. Covenant. Forgiveness. Generosity.

But back to marriage. Given that Adam and Eve can't really be the model we have to look at later scriptures. And unfortunately, marriages are rarely healthy and whole in the Bible. Most of the accounts show a lot of brokenness. The exceptions are few; the Song of Songs being one of them, and a beaut at that. Mary and Joseph being another one, but that relationship was chaste and therefore also not really comparable.

I think that God uses the broken accounts to contrast His own marriage with us, as described in the Song and in Revelation. The fullness of relationship. The true wedding supper fulfilled. True fidelity, in all ways.

Adam and Eve? Not so much. The first couple is immediately dysfunctional. They don't communicate, they blame each other for joint mistakes, they are homeless, and just look at what happens to their kids.

Not exactly a great model for marriage.

As Christian's we'll have too look harder.

Slow waaaayyyy down.

 

A friend posted this on Facebook today. I think it is accurate, but doesn't convey the impact of what this reality means. 

Slow down girls. Slow waaaaayyyyy down.

Men are from... where???

Yesterday DiDi mentioned to the real estate agent who is helping us find a B&B property that we've been talking about the institution of marriage. I said that we've been seeing marriages disintegrate all around us. The agent responded very seriously. She said "I know exactly why it's happening. It's because men are assholes." She's considering writing a book on the subject.

We laughed because it was such an unexpected answer. And having both been through ugly marital situations ourselves, DiDi and I sympathized with the emotion of the statement.

But of course it isn't true, any more than "all women are bitches" is true.

(Or perhaps they are both true.)

The agent is on her third marriage, and this one isn't going terribly well. Because of her history, she's given up on the idea of men. And she's not alone. Many women who come out of difficult relationships draw the same conclusion, which is very sad.

Masculinity itself is not the problem. Nor is femininity. The two are meant to be complementary and compatible. The particular matches themselves are the problem.

People marry the wrong people. In some cases they do it over and over again.

It's time to refocus. Talk to the young people in your life as soon as you can about this. Tell them that there are few decisions more important than the selection of a mate. Tell them that they are worth much. Teach the young ladies that they are treasures, and the young men that they are noble princes.

Help turn the whole situation around, one person at a time.

We can do this. You and I.

Same Sex Marriage Debate Chart

Click here for source.

Biblical View of Marriage

 

Click here for source.

You say we need a revolution...

Re-posted from A Theology of Desire:

Marriages are imploding all around me. In some cases I could see it coming for years ahead of time. In a few cases, it has been a surprise.

Simultaneously, the airways are filled with chatter and clamor about gay marriage. As a result, I've come to a conclusion.

I want to start a marriage revolution.

The revolution would focus on three essential tenets:

1. Choosing the right person.
2. For the right reason.
3. At the right time.

How much better off would our nation be as a whole, and each of our families individually, if we truly focused on these three things?

What if we started training our children from toddlerhood right up until they are launched?

What if our high schools offered classes in relationship preparedness instead of "sex education"?

What if our churches helped people understand God's plan for spousal union from the pulpit and through formation classes, rather than in a few counseling sessions before the marriage service takes place?

It seems so simple.

Tell me; am I missing something?