Made for Each Other

Genesis 2:18-24 & Mark 10:2-16

I am indebted this week to a great number of resources, including Debie Thomas’s article , Barbara Kingsolver’s writing, and the commentaries in Robert Alter’s translation and commentary on the Hebrew Bible. I commend all of these to your personal study.

There are people in my life who do not go to church anymore, who feel deeply skeptical of the entire Christian community, because of passages like the ones we hear today. Or rather, they do not engage with the church because of how the Christian community has used these passages throughout history. The early chapters of the book of Genesis have been used to separate men and women, to elevate the one and subjugate the other. The teaching of Jesus on marriage and divorce has been used to imprison God’s children in households of violence, fear, and grief. Our savior’s words have been used to shame and excommunicate those who for any number of reasons find themselves divorced. Read in isolation, as we often hear these passages in church or in conversation, it is impossible not to feel the sting of both history and the present day attitudes that have been born through and reinforced by them. It is only in the context of the entire story of God and God’s people that we can find the loving truth at the heart of these passages.

We begin at the beginning, in the second story of creation found in Genesis. God has formed out of chaos the heavens and the earth, and from the dust and mud God has created adam, the first human. This first human carries the image of God, and works in partnership with God to fulfill creation. God forms animals and birds and fishes and all manner of flora and brings them to the human to be named. Adam names each, but does not recognize in any of them an equal partner. God has seen that this is what is missing. God has looked across the beauty of creation and seen incompleteness. “It is not good that adam should be alone.” God, who is the community of the Trinity, who is by definition relationship itself, looks at the human he has created and sees loneliness. God sees that creation cannot be truly finished, cannot be truly good, until the creature that bears his own image can know partnership. It is not good for adam to be alone; God will make adam a partner and helper. God will make humanity a community.

The words translated “a helper as his partner” are tricky and have been interpreted many different ways. Ezer has been translated as helper, partner, help meet, sustainer, counterpart, and intervener. Kenegdo means alongside him, opposite him, a counterpart to him. The common translation of helper has been enough to place women and wives in subservient roles to their male relatives and spouses for generations. The idea of a second gender being in opposition to the first has been the basis of treating half the population as secondary for just as long. But we need only to linger over adam’s own words a moment to see that these constructs have allowed us to lose sight of God’s intent.

Speaking for the first time in the text, the first human meets the partner God has made for him in an exclamation of recognition. This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. At last, after meeting and naming every creature under heaven, the first mortal bearer of God’s image sees that image reflected in the eyes of another, and joy overtakes him. Adam’s speech is a poem, a claiming of the other as beloved. This, at last, is bone of my bones. This at last is a part of me, made whole. An earthly reflection of the eternal dance of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is embodied in these two human beings, the prototype for all human relationship ever after. While the details of gender and biological sex and ancient understandings of creation have played their part in the interpretation of this moment, the deep truth of this story is God’s dream for us. That we would see one another as bone of our bones, as flesh of our flesh, as one creation united in the stewardship and creativity granted to us in our beginning. That dream has been often neglected, tarnished, twisted and forgotten by our hard hearts. But this story remains to remind us that it is not good for us to be alone, and God has no intention of leaving us that way.

Those who came to question Jesus fell into the same trap that we so often do- that is, assuming that this story is one about marriage. It is the foundation of all human relationship, including marriage of course. But to hold tight to the belief that God’s greatest intention has always been for us to pair off and stay that way is to limit our imagination and confine God’s dream to one of contracts and constructs. When the questioners ask Jesus about divorce, they are asking him a question they know the answer to. Under Roman law it was indeed legal for a man to divorce his wife, and also for a wife to divorce her husband under certain circumstances. According to the scriptures of Moses, it was also allowed for that men could dismiss their wives. They knew these answers, and yet they asked Jesus, because just as today, the audience of the time would have found the topic uncomfortable. Whatever answer Jesus might have given, it was guaranteed to cause discomfort and even anger to someone listening.

As it does today, divorce had social, economic, emotional, spiritual, and even political consequences for the couple and their community. It was rarer then, and even rarer among the Jewish community than the Romans, but still it was not a topic for polite conversation. There were almost no protections for women who had been dismissed, neither were there recognized advocates for the children impacted. The social consequences were many, and as we know to be true in our own lives, the grief and pain of division left no one unscathed in these small closely knit communities. The question asked of Jesus was a bit of trickery, but the subject was one that reflected the greatest fears and wounds of his audience. It makes sense then that Jesus would first remind his listeners of the scriptures they held in common, the wellspring from whence their shared story poured. Moses made allowances for divorce. Our hearts are hard and there are circumstances in which division is necessary. Moses knew this, as Jesus points out. There are times when our hearts and our choices prevent us from being true partners, and there are those who simply cannot look at one another and recognize bone of their bones, flesh of their flesh. There are times when to leave is the bravest and most faithful act imaginable. God who lovingly engraved his own image upon our hearts weeps with us in these valleys of darkness, and carries us through with the reminder that even then we are not apart from our shepherd. God made humanity to be together, not apart. God made humanity in our many forms to be joined, to be united, to become one flesh. Division, separation, divorce, estrangement, death- these are all contrary to God’s deepest desire for us. It is not good that we should be alone.

Where the Christian community throughout history has implanted shame and blame in our hearts as we hear these passages, I pray you may hear them anew today. God did not simply make the first human and then duplicate the process. God made humanity in such a way that we would look upon one another in joyful recognition of our shared belovedness. God made us for one another, that we might cling to one another. God gave his own life so that we might be once again united in one body, one flesh and one faith. This is greater than an issue of a single type of relationship, though the relationship between spouses may be a sanctifying one. Every relationship, whether it be with the children we rear or the friendships we tend or the strangers we serve or the churches we love, is a microcosm of the kind of love that burst fourth at the start of the world. Imagine how we might live, if we could look upon one another with this truth in mind. If we looked at the young woman who bags our groceries or the man who picks our produce or the person in bright orange clearing rubbish from the side of the highway and thought with our whole heart- “this at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” If we could look at our siblings and our neighbors and the people we live and work with and know that they are a part of us and we are a part of them. If we could remember that God made us this way on purpose, that our relationships are an imperfect reflection of our perfect savior, instead of personal failures and accomplishments. How would we live, if we accepted that we are not alone? For we are no longer many but one flesh, one body, at last. What God has joined together, let no one separate.