The Jesus Ethic

"Is it lawful..." began the question. "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?"
It was a trick question. They already knew the answer. Which is why Jesus answered their question with a question, "What did Moses say about it?"
Yes. It is lawful.
But wait, there's more.
According to the law (see Deut 24:1), a man could divorce his wife if he found something objectionable about her. There is no elaboration on what sort of objectionable feature-- presumably if she burns the bread or talks back, or rolls her eyes at him in an objectionable way, a man could write up a bill of divorce and throw her out. There would be no division of assets, no custody disputes (the children remain the property of the father). There is no provision at all, in the law of Moses, for a wife to divorce her husband, and in fact, if the man makes false charges against a woman, he may not divorce her ever. Apparently, it did not occur to Moses that the woman might not wish to remain the wife of a man who would be so cruel. In the whole of the law, women and children are about equal with cattle.
The Jesus ethic is not about what is lawful. Jesus criticises the law as something created by Moses to accommodate men's hardness of heart.
Jesus would not ask "is it lawful?" Jesus would have us ask "Is it compassionate?"
Is is compassionate for a man to throw his wife out of the house with nothing but a certificate of divorce?
In the past, this gospel reading was excised from the context of the gospel and used as a mallet to beat on people who divorce and remarry. I suppose in some churches it is still used that way. But I don't think Jesus was about replacing the law of Moses with an even stricter legalism.
Consider the object lesson that follows this discussion.
They (and would they, perhaps, be women?) were bringing children (children being a little lower on the scale of humanity than women) to Jesus that he might bless them. The disciples "spoke sternly" to them, shooed them away. But when Jesus saw this he was indignant, and said "Let the children come!"
And he enfolded them in his arms and blessed them.
The last and the least of these, he blessed them.
"What would Jesus do?" is sometimes an inadequate question. How can we know what Jesus would do with our complex, urban, industrial, information-age quandries?
"What is lawful?" is also an inadequate question, as Jesus demonstrated. The law is of human origin, and therefore, always skewed to someone's benefit.
"What is compassionate?" Now there is a good question. "What is the most compassionate, loving way to respond to the benefit of the last and the least of God's children?" That, I believe, is the Jesus ethic.

for Sunday, October 4, 2009