Law & Gospel in Relationships

A sermon on Mark 10:2-16

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.]

This past week, the congregations in our synod cluster started a new adult education series on skills for studying the Bible, and we were lucky enough for the first session to be led by Dr. Tim Wengert, who is one of the premiere Lutheran scholars of our time.

Which you might think would mean a really complicated and academic lecture.

But, in actuality, Dr. Wengert took us back to the basics. He reminded us of the fundamental Lutheran understanding of what we get in scripture: Law and Gospel.

There is plenty to dig into with that one teaching… but for the context of this sermon, I want to focus in on just one elaboration that Dr. Wengert offered to explain how the concepts of law and gospel help us to read and interpret scripture:

Scripture functions as law in our lives when it tells us the truth about our human condition.

And scripture functions as gospel in our lives when it tells us the truth about God’s mercy.

These two functions, law and gospel, truth about us and truth about God, are interwoven and complementary.

We need God’s word to tell us both kinds of truth, and they both work together to effect the transformation that comes from encountering God through scripture.

They work together by, first, dismantling the self-deception that convinces us we (as individuals or as groups) are doing just fine on our own (which we aren’t), and then, second, by assuring us that we don’t have to do it all on our own.

The plan was never for us to be alone.

The plan was always for God’s love and strength to support us, and guide us, and pick us up when we fall down.

This is always a helpful guide for us when we are trying to understand the relevance of scripture in our lives, but it is especially helpful on a day like today…

Because, after that gospel reading, we need a reminder that scriptural law is not actually about judgment and inflexible standards of morality that cannot accommodate the complexities of real life …

And also because our local, national, and international news these days is telling us pretty sobering things about the human condition, and we need the reassurance that our sacred text can helpfully speak to this and tells us something that can change us.

We need to know that God’s Word is not just another source of bad news, piling on to the devastation of escalating war in and around Palestine, and hurricane devastation in the southeast, and a house fire in Hackettstown…

we need to know that God’s Word actually offers us something that transforms our broken world and broken souls and gives us hope.

So, I want to apply the framework of truth about our condition/truth about God’s grace to a few of the more challenging things in today’s readings and see what transformation and hope it offers.

Challenge 1: Divorce

We hear one central truth about the human condition in this apparently uncompromising teaching from Jesus.

We hear that our hearts are hard, and it is only to accommodate this deficiency that the Mosaic law provides provision for divorce.

It’s an unexpected take on a question about what is “lawful,” because we expect God’s law to be a bright line: this is what God wants… anything else is unlawful.

But Jesus reverses the argument.

When asked about the lawfulness of divorce, he responds: you know what the law says. And when his questioners confirm that the law provides a loophole for a man to divorce his wife, Jesus says, yes. The law does provide that loophole, even though it’s not what God wants. God wants inseparable unity… but you all aren’t capable of that, so God has allowed something other than the ideal, under the law.

The truth about the human condition is that we are inevitably going to fall short of God’s perfect design for human relationships.

It’s sobering, but it’s a truth that contains within it the seeds of grace.

Because it teaches that the law isn’t about catching us in our weakness… it’s about calling us into the good God wants for us.

That’s part of the truth about God’s grace that we see in this text: God’s willingness to meet us where we are.

The other part is more subtle, but it is important to understanding what Jesus is doing in this teaching, especially when he offers the follow-up teaching to his disciples about adultery (challenge 2).

The law under debate in this scene is about whether a man can divorce his wife, because that was the only scenario in the highly patriarchal context of the time.

Men had all of the power: legally, relationally, and economically.

Meaning that the accommodation for divorce left women extremely vulnerable. In that context, even a bad marriage was likely better than the poverty and lack of protection that was the lot of a woman who was abandoned through divorce.

But Jesus’s teaching undermines the inequities assumed by the debate.

First, he ties his teaching to an argument about God’s perfect plan that subverts the male-centric assumptions.

The man is the one who is to leave his familial security to join with his wife.

A subtle reminder than in the Genesis story it is the man who is needy, whose loneliness needs a remedy… and that God’s ideal solution is one of paired equals.

And then, in the teaching to the disciples, Jesus again presents an image of equality, this time in moral responsibility. The same standard for a man divorcing his wife applies to a woman divorcing her husband (even though that was a historical impossibility).

Jesus is emphasizing that God’s ideal is one of equality.

And here is where we see the transforming truth about God’s grace:  the truth that God doesn’t just want to address the problems that we already recognize.

God will make provision for our weakness, but God will also challenge our blindness to the harms that we are perpetrating.  

Part of God’s grace is to expose the damage done by the systems and assumptions that seem just fine to us, and to say: that’s not my design. I want you to do better.

And this ties into the final challenge in today’s gospel: the instruction that we can only come to God as “little children.”

Just to be clear: this is not a call to perfect innocence. That would be hopeless.

At this point in the story, we already know the truth about our condition: the truth that we need God to make allowances for our hard hearts.  

And this second scene in the reading tells us another truth about ourselves: the truth that have a tendency to try to act as gatekeepers, just as the disciples do in trying to stop the children being brought to Jesus.

Far from questioning our own assumptions about already knowing how things are supposed to work, we try to impose those assumptions on others.

And often those assumptions are about deserving God’s attention… getting to God through our own work.

That’s why Jesus tells his followers that they have to receive God’s kingdom like a little child: because children have no false illusions about their ability to achieve through their own strength. They know their vulnerability.

And the truth about God’s grace… the truth that transforms everything… is that we only get to God through grace.

This truth requires us to sacrifice our egos, and our self-assurance, and our efforts to get to God by fulfilling the law.

But it also assures us that this dependance is actually gospel… it is actually good news of God’s grace.

Because God’s grace does NOT depend on us.

It doesn’t depend on us perfectly understanding God’s ideal

And it certainly doesn’t depend on us living up to God’s ideal.

And when we make mistakes, and when we hurt ourselves or each other, and when our ideas about how things work are 100% wrong…

It’s just a chance for us to be reminded that we are, in fact, like little children: utterly dependent on a grace that we can utterly depend on.

Thanks be to God.