Spiritual Hiccups - Seeing Others' Humanity

As a pastor I do my fair share of weddings.  Sometimes, when I am talking with a couple about the upcoming service, we go into the sanctuary and discuss wedding traditions.  I occasionally point out that many of these traditions are rooted in rather archaic understandings of men and women.  For example, in many weddings, the service pauses on the sanctuary floor, at the steps to the chancel area, where a father brings a women and gives her to her future husband, before the couple moves up the steps for the actual marrying.  This tradition harks back to women as chattel, property that could be owned by a man.  The pause at the chancel steps was to complete the property transfer.

Certainly most of us don't view a wedding this way, but clearly the notion of women as property persisted for much of the history of the Church.  And that only underscores the radical nature of Jesus' words on marriage and divorce in today's reading from Mark.  While this passage has often been used simply to condemn those who divorce, this misses the stunning way Jesus speaks about women.

"Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her

 husband and marries another, she commits adultery."  It is easy to miss the radical nature of Jesus' words if you don't regard women as commodities, but in ancient times, adultery was largely a property crime.  It robs a man of his property.  In the Old Testament law, a man cannot commit adultery against his wife.  The only person who is wronged by adultery is a husband or father.  But Jesus  speaks of a man committing adultery against his wife.

Here and in many other places, Jesus refuses to see women as less than fully human.  In Luke 10:38-42 Jesus praises Mary for taking the "male" pose of a disciple.  And his famous commandment against looking at a woman with lust says that women are not to be viewed as objects to be acquired, a lesson we have still not fully learned.

It seems that for Jesus, nothing about a person can keep him from seeing her full humanity.  People that others disparagingly label "them" are not so to Jesus.  And so he shocks the religious folk by hanging out with outcasts, lepers, prostitutes, Gentiles, tax collectors and sinners. 

I think most of us still struggle to see things as Jesus sees.  Most all of us use labels for other groups that diminish their humanity, that allow us to hate or dismiss or discriminate against them.  Maybe that is why Jesus insists that we love our enemy.  He wants us to remember that he sees every single person in the world as fully human, as deserving of God's grace as the next person, as someone he deeply loves.

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