Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
NL Daily Devotion for Friday, February 16, 2024
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
Some people use this text as a justification for the oppression of the LGBTQ+ community. They say that since Jesus points out that God made humans male and female and that marriage is the two of them as one body, God therefore excludes anything other than cisgendered heterosexual marriage from acceptability.
But that argument is invalid because Jesus isn’t talking about that at all. The Pharisees come trying to entrap him into speaking against the law of Moses, which allowed divorce and Jesus responded, as was his MO, by turning the question on its head. His answer—that divorce was wrong—was about protecting women, whose entire health, safety, and livelihood in his culture depended upon having husbands to take care of them. Jesus says, “Yeah, sure, Moses said you could divorce, because you were a bunch of jerks. But the reality is that way before Moses, God made the union between people sacred and therefore unbreakable. So if God says the union shouldn’t be broken, who did Moses think he was to disagree?”
What Jesus doesn’t offer is commentary on whether the position of women in said society was acceptable. He was a first century Jewish man so who knows if he just took it as a given (though he spoke out against so many “givens” that were anything but, it leads me to wonder if he wouldn’t have had some pointed words about the injustices of women’s place in society that just didn’t get recorded by the men who wrote the gospels. Yes, I know that’s probably pointless conjecture, but there it is anyway.)
The bottom line, I think, is that the laws or traditions a society puts in place can’t be justified simply on the basis of “Well that’s the way we’ve always done it." There are truths that precede and supersede societal norms, and these are the truths of love for God, self, and neighbor.
Where do I see Jesus’ words being used to justify injustice? What is my role in addressing this?
