Which is the Greater Principle, Love or Failure at Love?

19  Pentecost Cycle b proper 22 October 7, 2012

Job 1:1; 2:1-10    Psalm 26

Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12  Mark 10:2-16

Lectionary Link

  One of William Shakespeare’s most popular plays in his time was the tragic love story Romeo and Juliet?  Isn’t it significant that there is something very gripping about star-crossed lovers who are  not given permission by their society to fulfill what love requires, namely, to be  with one’s beloved.

  What is perhaps our favorite definition of God?  We say that God is love.  And so there must be something divine about love.  We might even view creation as the total sense of togetherness that we experience in life.  Love is general in that we unavoidably belong with everything else, but love is very particular in that it is intensely experienced as  personalized magnetic forces which are scattered within the world and it happens that people are drawn to particular other people.

  The story of Adam and Eve is not a historic event; it is the theological explanation about why people are attracted to each other.  Why did Eve exist?  God saw that Adam was lonely and so there had to be someone enough like Adam but not Adam to deal with his lonely heart.  There had to be another person for Adam.

  The story of Adam and Eve is a primordial love story of humanity in that each person confronts one’s own loneliness and deeply yearns for companionship and even desires a soul mate.  But what has happened in human society? The great quest for love and one’s soul mate gets reduced to what the society needs for division of labor and for the politics of relationship between families.  The notion of finding one’s soul mate gets reduced to mere human breeding for procreation for farm hands and for survival of the species.  And when love is taken out of human relationship and it is reduced to fulfilling the role requirements of humanity then the value and importance of love is lost.

  And what happens?  It’s time to bring in the lawyers.  Marriage and love is reduced to the fact that love is absent and marriage has failed.  And so the great love story of Adam and Eve is reduced to the priority of something like the legal document called a prenuptial.  A prenuptial is going into a relationship with one’s fingers crossed; it is a lack of faith.  It is a belief in disillusionment before it even happens.  It is the elevation of Murphy’s Law to the high principle of life.  If my relationship can fail, it probably will and so I have to take steps for that eventuality.

  This is what Jesus confronted in his encounter with the religious lawyers of his time.  Jesus confronted the fact that marriage relationship had been reduced to the loss of utility of a person in a marital role.  Some rabbis thought that a woman could be divorced for something as trivial as not being able to make good soup.  This emphasis was a great sin against the great love story of Adam and Eve and the loneliness of heart that gets resolved when two people in love find each other.

  What if you were on an airplane and every five minutes the flight attendants came onto the public address speakers giving you advice of what to do in the eventuality of a forced landing.  You would get nervous and angry.  You would rather that they shut up and let the thought of safe arrival to your destination be the dominant goal of the entire flight.

  Jesus came to a group of religious lawyers who talking more about the inevitability of divorce rather than the divine superiority of love.  And Jesus simply stated the principle of the great primordial love story of Adam and Eve.  Remember it was not good for Adam to be lonely.  Remember that finding the love of your life is to a large extent what human life is all about.  And then Jesus did what he often did; he brought in the kids to get adults to unlearn all of their skewed priorities.  See these kids; they understand God’s way, God’s rules, God’s kingdom, God’s order.  They understand need for others, dependence and they understand love.  They know it when they receive it and feel it.  So become like these children if you want to regain your native new-born in the Spirit Selves.

  Part of the problems for adults and the question of love is that we can get bogged down by all of the politics and the details of the social context.   Jesus found the religious leaders arguing about what to do about human failure in a way that elevated human failure to the same level as success in loving relationship.  As adult we can get so jaded by failure or we can get so angry that people don’t agree with our view, we can easily lose perspective.  There are many interpreters who would elevate meaning of this Gospel lesson to be solely about how heterosexual marriage should be practiced in society today.  I would argue that this would miss the entire point that Jesus was making since if we look at the diverse cultural details of how covenant relationships have been practiced in the last 6000 years of humanity, we could not elevate any details of any particular setting to be the final definition of marital practice.

  The Gospel of the words of Jesus for me is this:  God is Love.  Humans are lonely for God.  But God is too unlike humans to be adequate to human loneliness.  Humans need other humans to cure another aspect of their loneliness.  But acknowledging general loneliness and general need for love is not enough, there has to be Adam and Eve, namely, there has to be particular love experienced between two people in a special way that enables human loneliness to find the therapeutic cure for loneliness.  The Gospel is also this:  find your child-likeness again to be able to recognize the experience and priority of love.

  The warning of our Gospel is the same warning of Romeo and Juliet:  Human societies can actually make love a tragic event.  Why is it that human societies often build up barriers to people who have found their soul mate to being able to be honest to love and honest to God?

  Let us not forget today that the Gospel of Jesus is in fact the truth of the great love story.  God is love.  The primordial couple found committed love to each other as the cure to loneliness.  Today, let us pray that we can know God as love.  Let us know that we are called to Love.  But let us be thankful when we have found specific love with someone.  And let us be happy and hopeful for all to be able to find and express specific love with someone else.  Let us not be tricked into making divorce, failure at relationship the dominant topic of life;  let us hold onto the fact that God is love and God calls us to love and indeed we can have wonderful love with another person.  Amen.