Mark 10:1-12

Complementarity Identifies the Christian Community

Mark continued his selection and grouping of incidents from Jesus’ life to tease out further the issues that he considered particularly pertinent to life within the Christian community. In the following incident a representative of the cultural in-group, a Pharisee, loomed out of nowhere and asked a question on what looked like a quite irrelevant issue: divorce. Experiences of divorce may have arisen within the Markan community, but they could hardly have been sufficiently frequent to warrant a long intervention by Jesus on what today is interpreted as a moral issue.

Mark 10:1-12 – Assumptions Behind Divorce

Mark used the question to introduce a long reflection by Jesus on the proper relationship and relative dignity of man and woman in marriage. Mark would seem to have inferred that the points made by Jesus regarding marriage and divorce extended beyond the immediate issue itself to the question of the dignity of women in general, and perhaps particularly pertinently, within the community of disciples.

Mark continued the motif of the journey (the Christian “way”). Jesus and the disciples definitively left Galilee, for Jesus never to return. They got to Judaea, and then moved eastwards across the Jordan, into Gentile, neutral territory. In Mark’s narrative, Jesus had not exercised any previous ministry in Judaea. Yet his reputation by this stage had obviously gone before him and crowds gathered around him.

Jesus’ response to their need was to teach: to open them to the possibilities of the Kingdom.

Some Judean Pharisees were obviously well aware of Jesus’ reputation and immediately moved onto the offensive, asking a question to test him.

Of itself, the question was hardly a test. In the culture of the time there was no doubt that divorce was possible. Perhaps it was a leading question, with others to quickly follow it up. (It was the divorce issue that had led to the arrest of John the Baptist. The area beyond the Jordan was, like Galilee, under the control of Herod Antipas, and it was in this area beyond the Jordan that John had in fact been held under arrest and killed.)

Jesus prescinded from answering their question because he utterly rejected the assumptions behind it.

He began by inviting them to recall the teaching of the Torah, specifically the Book of Genesis, which had spoken about marriage. They possibly did not see what Jesus was driving at, and instead replied that divorce was certainly supposed without question in the Torah. They cited a passage from the Book of Deuteronomy that clearly accepted the reality of divorce and required that a man divorcing his wife give formal notification that she was no longer his wife:

Jesus accepted the objection, but insisted that Deuteronomy had been referring to an exception, in fact an aberration from the original vision, to accommodate the hardness of people’s hearts, their inability to love as they were intended to. 

In Jesus’ worldview, hardness of heart was of itself a challenge as much as an obstacle. It spoke precisely of the struggle to ever-greater intimacy and fidelity. Life was a process of growth from “hearts of stone” to “hearts of flesh”, a never-ending movement from instinctive self-interest and self-centredness to self-giving and self-sacrificing love, a growing beyond “being in love” to the freedom to “love without conditions”, to be stretched as the ideal met the real. The difficulties encountered could be occasions to become more mature and more beautiful, and in the process to discover depths of happiness otherwise not dreamt of.

Jesus therefore called people back to the original vision of Genesis that was the appropriate source of the true sense of marriage. Jesus consistently focused attention on the way things were meant to be, not how they in fact had become due to people’s failures.

He then added his own comment, emphasising the obvious.

What was Jesus saying? This section of Mark’s narrative was dealing principally with attitudes and relationships within the community of disciples. He had already made the point clearly that in the Kingdom there were no second-class citizens. All were of equal dignity and were to be treated with equal respect - the Kingdom was counter-cultural.

The assumption of the culture out of which questions of divorce were asked was that men were superior to woman. This was a fiercely patriarchal society. Women literally had no rights. In Jewish culture a man effectively owned his wife. Only he could divorce his wife; she could never divorce her husband. In rejecting his wife, for virtually any reason whatever, a man needed no appropriate justification. His only responsibility was to testify that she was no longer his wife.

Within the culture, the man married the woman and she became a member of his extended family. She left her family. He did not leave his. The relationship that mattered was the continuing relationship of father and son, since it was that that determined inheritance issues.

Jesus rejected radically the cultural suppositions. He maintained that God had made humans equal, both male and female. Though their gender was different, both derived their origin and their dignity from God, without differentiation.

In God’s creating vision the union of male and female was the primary union. They became one flesh. Both man and woman needed to leave their earlier dependent association with fathers and mothers and accept the priority of their new relationship. Specifically Jesus quoted the Genesis statement that counter-culturally emphasised the fact of the man’s leaving his mother and father.

It is interesting to explore further the vision of Jesus. In referring to what God has joined together the present translation may be missing some of the nuance intended by Jesus. The word often translated as "joined" is here more literally rendered as yoked together. The yoke was a wonderful invention that allowed two animals of unequal size and strength to each bring their separate energies and apply them to the task at hand without one taking advantage of the other. The image in reference to the marriage union was of two persons, of different gender and gifts and abilities, enabled to work together on a common task, in a complementary, not competing, manner. The contribution of both was harnessed, and was mutually appreciated. The marriage union was not a hierarchical order. It was a union that valued difference, without reference to superiority, each partner equally reflecting the loving, creating God in whose image both had been fashioned.

The word translated as separate also allows a different interpretation from that often given it in the context. Generally, the separating is taken to refer to the separation of divorce, since divorce was the initial question that sparked Jesus’ reflection on the equal dignity of man and woman. 

However, the original word could be understood differently. In the comment in question Jesus avoided the use of the word “to divorce”, which more literally carried the sense of “to set free from”. In the culture a third party was not needed for divorce to occur. It was sufficient that the husband make the decision. Yet Jesus was saying that third parties were not to separate the two partners. 

The word translated in the text as to separate can mean more generally “to put in another place” and by extension “to classify differently” or “to prioritise” or, perhaps best of all, “to discriminate”. Jesus was effectively saying that two partners yoked together in marriage must not be seen or treated by society as having unequal rights, as being related to each other in hierarchical, patriarchal ways. Neither party must be discriminated against, specifically in the culture, the woman. 

Jesus’ intervention prescinded from the possibility of divorce and went to the kernel of the relationship, undermining the general cultural attitude that completely ignored and suppressed the rights of the woman.

A careful reading of the text would seem to indicate that, while Jesus did recognise the possibility of divorce, he distinguished it from divorce with remarriage. He may have accepted the reality of the hardness of people’s hearts and admitted that in cases where continued cohabitation was physically dangerous or emotionally impossible, divorce was the only practical alternative.

In regard to the second case, however, where a divorced man married again, Jesus maintained that he commits adultery against her, his former wife. Jesus did not simply say that he committed adultery, but that his adultery was against the one to whom he had been joined in one flesh. Adultery is an offence against the partner.

To see things in this light ran totally against the cultural assumptions. In the “honour” system of the society, the man would have committed adultery against the woman’s father or brothers. It was not the “honour” of the woman that was violated, because women did not rate in the “honour” hierarchy. It was the “honour” of the family, specifically of the men in the family, which was flouted. Within the culture the woman was regarded as the possession of the males of her family. Adultery was not seen so much as a sin of sexuality as a sin against “honour”.

Jesus radically rejected both this honour system as well as the view of woman that saw her as the possession of males. A divorced man who remarried offended the wife he had divorced.

The passage consistently stated that the converse was also true. A woman who was divorced and then remarried offended the husband she had divorced. This situation may have been considered by Jesus to make clear his sense of reciprocity. However, since in Jewish society it seems probable that no woman could divorce her husband, Mark more likely added the comment for the benefit of Gentile disciples in the non-Jewish societies of the diaspora where women could divorce their husbands.

Women Disciples in the Christian Community

Later in his narrative (15:41), Mark would casually mention that the women who would witness Jesus’ crucifixion “used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem”.

Presumably these women were part of the group of disciples, though it would be natural to conclude from what Mark had said so far that Jesus’ disciple-companions were exclusively male. Apparently not so. Given the presumed presence of women in the group, and in light of the universally accepted patriarchal attitudes of the culture, one might wonder about the social interactions. With the sensitivity among the male disciples to issues of honour and relative importance, how did they take to Jesus’ evaluation of women? This may have been a further on-going source of tension and a possible contributory cause to the breaking down of group cohesion. However, Mark gave no direct evidence of Jesus’ addressing the problem – so there may not have been one.

Whatever about Jesus’ disciples, the dignity of women within the Markan community would have been a real issue. The narrative had provided a number of incidents where Jesus had interacted with women. His first healing miracle had been of Simon’s mother-in-law, and her response had been to embody the distinctive identity of disciple as “one who serves” (1:30-31). He had spoken of the faith of the chronically bleeding-woman as the kind of faith that could heal Israel, and had asked for a similar response from the ruler of the synagogue if the “virgin-daughter of Israel” was to be brought back to life (5:21-43). He had allowed the Syrophoenician woman to engage him in discussion and to broaden his sense of the limits of his mission (7:24-30). In all these interactions, Jesus had challenged the cultural stereotypes, yet the issue of the dignity of women and their place in society had not been addressed specifically. 

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