Weekly Seeds: Hardness of Heart
Sunday, October 6, 2024
Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost | Year B
Focus Theme:
Hardness of Heart
Focus Prayer:
Loving God, soften our hearts toward one another, creation, and ourselves. Amen.
Focus Scripture
Mark 10:2-16
2 Some, testing him, asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” 5 But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
10 Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
13 People were bringing children to him in order that he might touch them, and the disciples spoke sternly to them. 14 But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. 15 Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” 16 And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.
All readings for this Sunday:
Job 1:1, 2:1-10 and Psalm 26 OR Genesis 2:18-24 and Psalm 8 • Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12 • Mark 10:2-16
Focus Questions:
What are the symptoms of a hardened heart?
What causes a hardening of the heart?
How has your heart been softened? Describe that experience.
In what ways does the church need to soften our collective heart?
In what ways does the word need to soften our collective heart?
Reflection
By Cheryl A. Lindsay
If there was a law you would question, what would it be? Would it be one of the Ten Commandments or one of the hundreds of Levitical laws? Would it be a federal statute or a local ordinance? No law is perfect. At their essence, laws attempt to define rules, guidelines, restrictions, and boundaries for behavior for living in community. Traffic laws prescribe behavior to keep motorists, pedestrians, and property safe from physical injury and harm.
Also, at their essence, laws reflect what a society will allow. Slavery was legal. The Trail of Tears/Death was legal. Jim Crow was legal. The Chinese Exclusion Act made it legal to restrict one people group from immigrating to the United States. Japanese internment during World War II forcibly imprisoned over one hundred thousand people of Japanese descent, mostly US citizens, in concentration camps while the nation joined the war against Germany and its ally, Japan. Notably, there was no corresponding detention and relocation of people of German descent as the US government employed the tool of the German government to segregate and remove a sub-group of the population from interacting freely with the rest of society. These examples provide ample evidence that legality does not equate with morality, and just because a society, culture, or nation tolerates it does not make it good or right.
Questioning the law, therefore, is an appropriate response. As the gospel passage opens, Jesus is being tested by a group of people described as “some.” One might assume the religious leaders are at it again or that a subgroup of disciples are featured in this question and answer session. Actually, the “some” emerges from a nameless and faceless group that Jesus has been teaching. It is not unusual for students to ask probing questions of their teacher, and it is to Jesus’ credit that the assembled crowd, who presumably has only had a limited encounter with him, feels comfortable asking him to expound on a topic that mattered to them.
Because Mark provides so little background information, we do not know if the question is an extension on teaching regarding the law or a departure. Is this passage a Markan variation on the Sermon on the Mount found in Matthew or the Sermon on the Plain recorded in Luke? In those passages, Jesus deconstructs and reconstructs understanding of the Law and the kindom of God. In the same way, his teaching in Mark reframes legalistic guidelines, practices, and allowances.
Defined primarily in terms of servanthood, discipleship runs counter to a social structure that advances persons with access to wealth, power, authority, and even purity to the highest levels of the social order. Those without access to this social currency remained at the lowest levels. Thus the way of Jesus reverses the honor-shame codes that structure the cultural world in which Mark’s audience lives (St. Clair, 109–64).
Racquel S. Lettsome
Divorce, during the time period, was not only the dissolution of a relationship between two people, it was a power move limited to one party in the relationship. Even the question reflects that as there is no provision for the woman to exercise the right to divorce her husband. He held the power and authority. He dictated the terms. She was at his mercy, and if divorced by her husband, she would have to rely upon the compassion and care of another male relative or enter the world of prostitution. Yet, despite having little to no agency in the matter, she would have received all the blame.
The law around divorce, Jesus notes, was given in response to the hardness of heart of the people from the time of Moses to those in his audience on that day. Then Jesus expounds on the law from what is permissible to what is the meaning of the action. Divorce is the same as adultery, Jesus declares in what was and remains a shocking revelation when adultery was and remains a socially acceptable reason for divorce. But for Jesus, the law is not merely about what God will allow, it is about living right with each other as well as God. If marriage is a mutual relationship between two people, adultery and divorce have devastating consequences on the relationship. Perhaps, the most shocking aspect of Jesus’ teaching on the matter is that he assumes equal and mutual agency on both parties in the marriage to exercise the divorce option:
The casual assumption of both women’s and men’s option to divorce probably indicates the gentile social context of the Markan community. The idea that a man could commit adultery against his wife, whether by divorcing and marrying another woman or by simply having sex with another partner, is foreign to Jewish law (Deut. 22:22–24; Lev. 20:10), and as Collins (2007, 469) points out, it is also alien to Greco-Roman cultures: “Unconditional fidelity was required of the woman alone. In Greek law, [a man’s] adultery was defined as ‘secret sexual intercourse with a free woman without the consent of her [“husband”].” The astonishing evenhandedness with respect to the sexual rights of both wives and husbands presupposed here is evidence of a level of gender egalitarianism within Mark’s community that is dismissed as wishful thinking by some contemporary biblical scholars. Paul, citing Jesus, instructs women not to separate from their husbands and men not to divorce their wives (1 Cor. 7:10–11, 39), but in his own name (as opposed to Jesus’s) advises believers to divorce their non-Christian husbands or wives if the unbelieving spouse wishes to separate; otherwise, spouses should stay together (1 Cor. 7:12–16). This contrasts with Matthew’s version, which allows divorce in the case of adultery and does not mention the possibility of a woman’s initiating divorce (Matt. 19:1–9).
Mary Ann Beavis
Like he often did with religious leaders who challenged him, Jesus turns the test from himself to those attempting to test him. How we relate to one another matters, including to those closest to us. The hardness of heart Jesus identifies pointed to the need to establish boundaries and expectations around a practice that was weaponized. Jesus does not say divorce is not permissible or even, at times, necessary; rather, divorce has consequences. Like most of Jesus’ teaching, he’s not just talking about divorce. He uses a known institution, practices, or reality to illustrate a broader point. Hardness of heart provides a barrier to reconciliation, redemption, and restoration. The law can only do so much in prohibiting behavior, but the heart needs to change.
The passage shifts in a seemingly abrupt way to Jesus encountering children. Yet, Mark deftly moves from one vulnerable group of people to an even more defenseles one. Jesus and the disciples engage in a mutual rebuking session as the disciples attempt to keep the children away, an action that offends and angers Jesus.
Mark 10:13–16 returns to the theme of the status of children in the community (cf. 9:36–37, 42), underlining the theme of children as paradigmatic for the reign of God. After the previous teaching, the disciples’ attempt to prevent children being brought to Jesus to be touched/blessed is at once shocking and typical of the lack of spiritual insight evidenced in earlier passages. As in Mark 9:36–37, the importance of children, both as members of the community and as symbolic of the divine rule, is expressed in both word and deed…. The casting of Jesus’s words as an amen saying gives the utterance the solemnity of an oath. In view of 9:36–37, the image of receiving/entering the realm of God “like a child” refers to seeking God without expectation of status or reward. Wolfgang Roth finds an inverted Elisha-Jesus typology here: “Jesus’s reaction is . . . reminiscent of the brief story of Elisha’s cursing of children who had mocked him when he left the city of Jericho (2 Kings 2:23–24). Thus the gospel contrasts Jesus and Elisha…. This kind of inversion of problematic stories from the Jewish scriptures is found elsewhere in the Gospel.
Mary Ann Beavis
Much of Jesus’ teaching is a reversal of messages and doctrine that have become corrupted over time. The law, in this case on divorce, that was once given in order to decrease the weaponization of a societal action, had become a weapon in itself. This pattern has continued throughout the evolution of the Christian faith as those who claim Jesus cherry pick scripture passages and theological claims that support their worldview and ignore others that challenge them. The good news brought to and embodied in the world by Jesus to liberate, save, and deliver the marginalized and oppressed from the systems and powers of this world gets twisted and turned by those empowered by those same systems at work today. The test today asks: will we be on the side of the most vulnerable? Where is our love needed most today?
Reflection from Voices of People of African Descent
The 33rd General Synod adopted a Resolution to Recognize the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024). As part of its implementation, Sermon and Weekly Seeds offers Reflection from Voices of People of African Descent related to the season or overall theme for additional consideration in sermon preparation and for individual and congregational study.
Bigger Thomas represents all of that. He is a poor Black person on the Southside of Chicago. Although we do not know much about his mother, we can infer from their interactions that while she is warm in certain circumstances (if you could call someone making you breakfast warm), she is also harsh on and critical of Bigger. Vera has no sympathy or empathy for Bigger and oftentimes disparages him and his capabilities. The only person in Bigger’s family who treats Bigger with something akin to empathy (if idolatization can be called empathy) is Buddy. In Bigger’s friendships with Gus, Jack, and G.H., there is no empathy for Bigger. Instead there is fear and the mutual connection of robbing people. Finally, in Bigger’s interactions with white people, there is sometimes sympathy but not empathy.
In transformative justice, there is the question of how do we go about healing in a way that is survivor centered, even when the survivor of harm has caused harm themselves. In most of the books I’ve read for my Prisons and Policing class and Transformative Justice class (both taught by Pam Butler), it’s been seen that there are survivors who have committed harm who still get the help that they need (as in they aren’t turned away). For example, a woman was seeking help through a transformative justice process because she had been sexually abused by a family member. Only for her to realize and admit that when she was a teenager, she sexually assaulted her own sister. Those running the process did not pack up their bags because she was still a person with a great need who wanted to get better and better her life. This is something that we need to understand when we talk about Bigger.
What Richard Wright is asking us to do is essentially flex our empathy muscles. So many people say that they ‘empathize’ with those who live in poverty and with Black people. Yet, that ‘empathy’ always seems to run out at some point. Sometimes over simple things. Often, once a poor Black person commits a crime (or is accused of committing a crime) people take off their ‘empathy’ hats and say “Oh, they’re a criminal, they deserve all the racism and harm that comes towards them”. This strips Black people of their personhood and their deserving of empathy even when the person has not actually committed the crime they are accused of. Knowing this, people who are deemed criminal deserve empathy. To be more specific, impoverished Black people deserve empathy, even when they are deemed criminal. That’s a hard thing to say, especially when it seems like certain people are the embodiment of evil itself. However, if we strip impoverished Black people deemed criminal of their empathy, we are punching downwards. We are not challenging the system that dehumanizes and punishes impoverished Black people. In fact, we are feeding into it.
— James Baldwin, “An Argument for Empathy“
For Further Reflection
“We are not born with hard hearts. We are born with soft and tender hearts that, more often than not, are mishandled and consequently broken. The pain is always harsher than expected when each fragment turns to stone. So we pile them high to form a wall of protection around ourselves, determined never to experience such terrible pain again. That is how hearts come to be hardened. Ironically, our refusal to dismantle the wall is how and why we continue to suffer.” ― Richelle E. Goodrich
“How hardening to the heart it must be to do this thing: to change an innocent soaring being into a bundle of struggling rags and pain.” ― Iris Murdoch
“The funny thing about the heart is a soft heart is a strong heart, and a hard heart is a weak heart.” ― Criss Jami
A preaching commentary on this text (with works cited) is at //ucc.org/SermonSeeds.
The Rev. Dr. Cheryl A. Lindsay, Minister for Worship and Theology (lindsayc@ucc.org), also serves a local church pastor, public theologian, and worship scholar-practitioner with a particular interest in the proclamation of the word in gathered communities. You’re invited to share your reflections on this text in the comments below this post on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SermonSeeds.
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