THE BLESSING OF CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
Sermon Text, St. Mark 1:29-31, 10:1-12.
Now as soon as they had come out of the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. But Simon’s wife’s mother lay sick with a fever, and they told Him about her at once. So He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and immediately the fever left her. And she served them.
Then He arose from there and came to the region of Judea by the other side of the Jordan. And multitudes gathered to Him again, and as He was accustomed, He taught them again. The Pharisees came and asked Him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” testing Him. And He answered and said to them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to dismiss her.” And Jesus answered and said to them, “Because of the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept. But from the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’; so then they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.” In the house His disciples also asked Him again about the same matter. So He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
Lord, this is Your Word and these are Your words. Sanctify us by the truth. Your Word is truth. We thank You for instituting marriage and preserving it against the assaults of the evil one. Fashion the hearts of husband and wife so that they love one another and bear with one another; and cause parents and children to walk in the faith of Your Son and be saved. Amen. (Adapted from Book of Devotion: The Psalms, p. 374)
Dear people loved by God in Christ, who makes our marriage and home beautiful by His gracious presence: Grace be unto you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Here we have a beautiful picture of marriage and the home from Mark 1, and a scene from Mark 10 where Jesus teaches about marriage. This goes with today’s gospel, where Jesus performs His first miracle at a wedding. He was honoring His institution of marriage, showing that it’s a blessing.
God instituted, or officially began marriage in the Garden of Eden; as we hear in Genesis 2. The words that we hear Jesus say in Mark are from that chapter, right after God created Eve out of Adam’s rib, then brought her to Adam as the first marriage. Adam responds with joyful words, and they’re the first words we hear Adam say: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, for she was taken out of Man.”
At that point in Genesis 2 it says: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”
This is the main Bible text for marriage. Jesus quotes it here in Mark 10. Then He preaches about it; He says: “So then they are no longer two, but one flesh.” The husband and wife no longer are separate individuals but they’re a unit, a one-flesh union.
Then He says: “Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.” He says two things here: first that you don’t just find each other and fall in love, but God is behind it. God has brought and joined you together. He also says it’s until death, and divorce is against God’s will.
Here Jesus so beautifully explains marriage as God made it to be. Our world that we live in seems so far gone from that. Think of how easily our society and even Christians accept or turn a blind eye to homosexuality, premarital sex, couples living together before marriage, even pornography.
But look at these Pharisees. They’re far gone too. They ask Jesus if it’s OK for a man to divorce his wife for just about anything. He’s speaking to men who have no interest in His beautiful words about marriage.
But we aren’t so different from them. While we do want Jesus’ words about marriage – at least we would say we do – we often show that we don’t. What Jesus says to the Pharisees about “the hardness of your heart” is something He needs to reveal in us.
The hard heart shows itself when you make your wife or husband unhappy and you don’t care, when it’s hard to say “I’m sorry,” when you don’t say “I forgive you” but want to punish your spouse for a while, when you only think of what you want or when you count up everything he/she has done to you. Nobody goes into marriage thinking, Now how can I mess this up? Or: I want to act as selfishly as I possibly can. These are the sins we don’t want to do. Why do we do them? We have rock-hard hearts of stone, the sinful nature in us that doesn’t care what God wants, only what I want.
But just as Jesus doesn’t just give up on the Pharisees as a lost cause, but He speaks these words to them, neither does He give up on you. He isn’t wasting His beautiful words about marriage. He lavishes them on you.
Because when He says, “From the beginning of creation God made them male and female,”He speaks as the One who was there in the beginning. He made marriage Himself “and it was good.” It’s glorious!
It may not feel glorious. It was in marriage that sin first came in. It still does. God didn’t give up on marriage but let it continue, though sin is in the picture, sin always coming into marriage which makes it hard. Although sin is in the picture, what else is? Grace, forgiveness of sins.
God, who made marriage and then saw Adam and Eve ruin it, made the very thing that would take the sin away and make the marriage glorious again. He sent forth Jesus, our dear Redeemer. Jesus makes it so the forgiving of sins – by God — comes into the marriage too.
If you’re troubled by the end of that reading — where Jesus says that whoever “divorces his wife [or] her husband and marries another commits adultery” – then this is what you need to hear: the Gospel.
God hates divorce, just as He hates all the sins that go against His design for marriage (including lustful thoughts, premarital sex, pornography use, homosexual sin and the things that lead to divorce). He wants you to be troubled by the sins in this way: for your repentance to be real. He wants you to have a soft heart, a tender conscience that’s easily pricked, not a hardened one. But He doesn’t make any of this an unforgivable sin. These sins do damage you more, not making you more guilty before God but making it harder for you in your conscience. He wants you to bring your troubled soul to Him with these sins and hear that He died for them.
But that’s not all. He doesn’t want you to be forgiven and just forget about it. In James it says we are to be “doers of the word, not hearers only.” That we are not to be like a person who sees in the mirror, “goes away and forgets what kind of man he was.” But instead, as God’s forgiveness frees us from sin, we are to “continue in the perfect law of liberty” and “not [be] a forgetful hearer” of God’s word of forgiveness, but a “doer of the work” (Ja 1:22-25). What are we to do? To let God’s forgiving of this in us make us stronger, more self-disciplined, more determined to “abhor what is evil,” (Rom 12:9), avoiding things that lead into sexual sin and unfaithfulness; and to honor our spouse and “give preference to one another” (Rom 12:10).
What would it be like if you thought of your spouse as the person to treat the way Christ treats you? With patience, understanding, love, compassion, and a sacrificing, serving heart. In our marriage and home we do become more aware of our sins, but we know what happens to those sins: Christ takes them away. We know this makes us glorious. He makes our marriages this glorious. So every little thing we do for each other is glorious in Christ.
This is one reason Jesus’ healing of Peter’s mother-in-law is in the Bible. This miracle that Jesus did to cure her burning fever was one of His first ones – which He did not long after the wedding at Cana. We see that Peter was married. His wife’s mother lived in their home. Peter honored his wife this way, to provide a home for her widowed mother. Bringing joy into their home, bringing happiness and relief to Peter’s wife, peace of mind, was important to Jesus. Their home life testified to Jesus’ glory too.
We know that after Jesus had ascended to heaven and the apostles were spreading the gospel, Peter’s wife traveled with him. An ancient historian says she went to her death as a martyr shortly before Peter; as they took her away Peter said her name one last time, and then: “Remember the Lord!”
Is there anything more glorious than a Christian marriage? – Where our togetherness in the home, by faith in Christ, after all our struggles and efforts to make a happy home, will end in our heavenly home where we need no forgiveness, where there’s no separation, where we’ll have one will and one love that never decreases, only grows, and never ends. Amen!