Coffee With God

Reflection: Mark 10: 1-12

While writing the Gospel, Evangelist Mark selected and put together various incidents from Jesus’ life to address the issues that he considered particularly significant for life within the Christian community. In today’s gospel, the Pharisees, raises the issue of divorce. Mark’s community in Rome may have been experiencing this problem. Jesus tells the Jews about marriage between a man and a woman: “What God has joined together, no human being must separate.” But this translation fails to explain the nuance intended by Jesus. The original word for “joined” would literally mean “yoked together.” The yoke is a device that allowed two animals bring their separate energies together and apply them to a task at hand, without one taking advantage of the other. In marriage union, two persons of different gender, gifts and abilities, are yoked together to complement each other, each partner equally partaking in the loving and creative work of God. The word “separate” often referred to divorce, since divorce was the initial question raised to Jesus. And Jesus used the opportunity to speak about equal dignity of man and woman. But the word “separate”, originally meant “to discriminate”. Jesus was effectively saying that two partners yoked together in marriage must not be regarded by the couples themselves, their families nor by the society as having unequal rights, and the woman must not be discriminated. The questions of divorce were asked from the presumption that men were superior to woman and women were considered second class citizens. Jesus warns against even the possibility of divorce which could undermine, ignore and suppress the rights of women. Mark’s narrative is dealing principally with attitudes and relationships within the community of disciples. Mark wants to reiterate an important principle that in the scheme of Jesus, there were no second-class citizens. All are of equal dignity and are to be treated with equal respect. In the Jewish culture, when a man marries a woman, she leaves her own family and becomes a member of her husband’s family. But the man never leaves his. Jesus questions this culture and says that God had made humans equal, both male and female. They derived their origin and their dignity from God, without differentiation. Both man and woman in marriage, needed to leave their fathers and mothers and accept the priority of each other. Jesus not only rejected the notion of separation and discrimination in marriage but warned them of the sin of adultery. If a divorced man marries again, he commits adultery against her, his former wife. Adultery is an offence against the partner.