Requirement of Rules or Response of Love

Mark 10:1-16

We're still in the midst of Jesus' teaching about who he is and what he's here for. To understand this it has to be realised that it is suffering and death that point to the reality of God, to real life-creating, life-giving power. That's the context, with children again positioned to challenge misunderstanding.

Mark's Jesus fights constantly the tendency amongst his fellow humans to create systems in order to feel we have a handle on things, to sort everything in terms of rules.

For example, relationships.

The Bible sees everything that is as given – gift of God. It's all God's dream, this proliferation of creatures and things and it's declared good. Good because the Creator delights in it. Creator and creation in relationship. A few chapters later when things are not good – deemed a total mistake and almost wiped out (by the flood) – it all stems from a breakdown of this relationship.

God's dream is the ideal, the vision, a.k.a. the Kingdom. For Jesus carries this same vision. He lives the ideal, he's rooted in Kingdom ways.

Kingdom ways lead to well-being, justice, peace – that is, right relationships (righteousness in traditional translation). When words like marriage (which I define as faithful, intimate relationship) are used by Jesus, this is the perspective he is taking. The ideal of what can be, the horizon to head towards.

When he's asked a question about it, he knows that his questioners are thinking not ideal, but rules and legal proceedings. An issue of justice – notably for women – is being hijacked and Jesus is not amused.

Jesus is being very bold here, more than we might think. Mention of moving into the territory of Herod at the start is significant. This is Herod the divorcer, Herod the murderer (remember John the Baptist?). Jesus is clearly calling Herod out for a life that is a million miles from God's kingdom.

Regarding marriage, God's dream is for nothing to break this holy relationship, when it is such, nothing to get in the way of it. Definitely not politics (as with Herod). Would that this most intimate and vulnerable of all relationships be faithful and true – right relationship; give it every chance to be God-like in that respect; don't let other things cause it grief or pull it apart for reasons that disregard the well-being of the people involved.

Jesus is making it clear that the Kingdom of God doesn't pull back from the ultimate of unconditional loving relationship. The ideal.

In practice – because of hard-heartedness, that is humanity at its hard core – there are ways of regulating or moderating how breaks happen, because they do happen and for well-being that can be the best. The measures for regulating and moderating are for the purpose of making as much good as possible in a bad situation. Saving what can be saved; keeping the eyes on well-being and justice. Jesus has a primary concern for justice for women. Note that he speaks of a woman dismissing (divorcing) her husband. That's not Jewish law but it is Roman law. A not so subtle dig here that the Romans' law got one thing better – if you have divorce, it must be able to work both ways.

But he then makes clear that the end-point, the pinnacle of justice and well-being, relates to children. Children must be in the centre. Relationships must not be about adult power play. Children are a reminder of that.

What to do when relationships crack and break. We know that question from experience. And we know that keeping children in the centre makes for a better future. They are the touchstone.

This is a vignette about marriage but there's a broad relationship message here that it is pointing to for everyone. For good marriage is only one kind of “deep community”, as one person puts it. Deep community that can go a long way to completing us as human beings. This is the community of love, so to speak, that can grow between ourselves and another or others.

The broad message here is a warning on how the love basis to this kind of right relationship gets subverted by our tendency to think about law and limits. In day to day living, in politics, in debates over right and wrong, we keep being pulled back from the ideal to see things codified in rules. Rules for friending and unfriending are not how relationships work. What's expected of friends, what counts as forgivable, or not, keeping a balance in gifts, in invitations, and so on. True, rules are useful, as boundaries and guides we adopt to keep on track with the ideal. Law is useful in describing what good action looks like. But if we want to live the way of the ideal, it is has be driven by love, not law-keeping.

To be a good Christian, to be Christ-shaped, is a response in a particular situation, to a particular context – a love-based response.

And a practical way to remind ourselves what it feels like to make a love-based response is to put children in our midst.

They remind us that it is an act of grace – by grace that we are moved and motivated, and let ourselves be Christ-shaped.