Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.
Mark 10:9 (NET)
The Argument Behind the Wedding Line
Second and fourth Sunday they drive over to his daughter’s, and he can tell inside ten minutes how the week has gone in that house. He has been able to tell for two years. In the car on the way home his wife asks him what he makes of it, the way she does, and he says the same six words he has said every time since the first time, and they are not what he makes of it.
The question put to Jesus that day was divorce, and a law that Moses had written about it. He answered by going back past Moses. God made them male and female. A man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and the two become one flesh, so they are no longer two. Here is the line people hear at weddings: “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
He describes the thing before he says what to do about it. One flesh is a claim about what happened to two people, and he makes it before he makes any rule at all.
This sentence gets read over divorced people like a verdict. A person coming out of a divorce reaches for the language of injury, and that is an accurate description of what he says took place. One flesh came apart. A tear like that goes on hurting long past every reasonable timetable.
He does not soften it afterward, either. Back inside the house his own followers asked him about it, and what he told them in private was harder than what he had said outside. But the command has an audience, and the audience is everybody standing there. Let no one separate. It falls on the in-laws, on the friend with the advice, on the coworker making his case at lunch every day for a year, on a church that talks about a family in the lobby on Sunday. It does not stop at the two people.
He is protecting something, and everybody standing near it has been told to keep their hands off it.
And if the thing already came apart in your house, the sentence is still not a verdict on you. It was a description before it was a command, and the command was never aimed at the two people inside it.
Fourth Sunday of the month. Nothing has got better in two years. On the way home she asks, and he gives her the six words.
A Prayer to Remember
Some people stayed near me without asking for an explanation. They kept coming when there was nothing to tell them, and I am counting that as your work. Keep me from pulling at a marriage that is not mine, in a conversation or an opinion nobody asked for. That is the part I can do today.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
