Doing the Hard Work--August 25, 2022

Doing the Hard Work--August 25, 2022

"To the married I give this command--not I but the Lord--that the wife should not separate from her husband [but if she does separate, let her remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband], and that the husband should not divorce his wife." [1 Corinthians 7:10-11]

Anybody else feel like we're right back in the minefield we first wandered into back in Chapter Five? Whew, this is tough slogging here in these chapters, isn't it?

Look, I'm just not interested in weaponizing Bible verses against folks who have struggled, suffered, and survived through marriages that then came to an end.  Paul, drawing on the remembered teaching of Jesus himself [which is why Paul says, "not I but the Lord" here], does pretty clearly teach against divorce as a rule here, and we don't need to pretend that's not the case here.  However, it does seem important to note that Paul himself doesn't take that rule to beat up people who have already gotten divorced and lived through the pain of it, and he doesn't spend the rest of the chapter guilt-tripping people who have been through the death of a marriage.  Even when he is at his most hard-line, Paul doesn't punch down.

It also seems worth noting that Paul doesn't make threats here, even when he holds up the ideal of working through difficulties in marriage with the goal of reconciliation.  There's not a whiff of sulfur or brimstone, and there's not a mention of hellfire for those whose marriages end in divorce [to be honest, a number of the folks I have known and cared for over the years who were in bad marriages would have told me they were already living in hell and threats of damnation after death didn't have any persuasive power over them anyway].  But I do think there may be something helpful in Paul's way of framing things. By simply saying, "Neither spouse should divorce the other," [and, indeed, notice that he is saying the same to both partners in this marriage], it would have had at least some power to prevent divorce from being used as an empty threat.  And in a culture where at least some of the prevailing thinking was that a man could divorce his wife for burning dinner by simply saying, "I divorce you," three times, there were surely plenty of bad marriages where women were held hostage with the threat of being abandoned by their husbands.  "Put up with my cruelty, or else I'll divorce you... accept my coldness and do what I say, or else I'll throw you out..." that kind of thing.  By simply giving the directive, "In this community, we don't treat other people like they are disposable," Paul would have at least given some comfort to women who were being intimidated into just accepting their husbands' meanness because it came with a threat that they'd be abandoned if they spoke up.  Paul does not give an easy out to those who would use divorce as a threat to manipulate spouses.  And the fact that he doesn't go on to list divine punishments for actually going through with divorce suggests to me that he knows he is holding up an ideal--what "should" be the case--and not addressing every possible set of circumstances that could arise and which might end in divorce.

Maybe the question we need to ask when we come across texts like this is to consider how we intend to use these words from Scripture.  If my agenda is to beat up on someone else who has gone through a divorce, or to manipulate my spouse into staying rather than working on whatever issues we have between us, it doesn't seem very Christ-like to go hunting for verses to make people stay in marriages that are perhaps already dead.  But if I hear Paul's words as a calling toward the ongoing [and often difficult] work of refusing to throw other people away or treat them as disposable, then those words hit me and call on me to deal with my own relationships.  So maybe instead of loading up these verses so we can berate someone we know who has been through divorce, we can read this passage and ask, "Where might I be treating other people or relationships like they can be thrown away, and what would it take to work on those relationships rather than dismissing them?" If not in our marriages, what friendships have we strained or ignored?  What people at work have I treated like they were disposable?  How might I even be interacting with strangers at the store or in my daily routines like they don't matter, rather than seeing them as neighbors with whom I am in some level of relationship?  

Wrestling with those questions is not easy, but it does seem like the more Jesus-aligned way to deal with what Paul says here.  I think that makes it worth the effort.

Lord Jesus, keep us from attacking others and keep us honest with ourselves as we look at how we manage our own relationships in this life.