When Jesus ‘hit the roof’
27B | 6 OCTOBER 2024 | MARK 10:2-16
We get to know a lot about ourselves and others by what makes us and them angry. Aquinas say, for instance, that it’s the mark of a good person that they are angered by injustice or harm done to others. So, it’s significant that when Mark describes Jesus’ reaction to the disciples’ rebuking parents for bringing their children to him for a blessing, he uses one of Greek’s strongest words for being angry, aganaktein. It might be rendered more colloquially as, “he hit the roof”.
Significantly, when the other evangelists relate the same episode, they delicately omit any reference to Jesus’ being angry. As in another recent gospel, the all-important background to this episode is the fact that children had no status or standing in society whatever: their value was as a vital investment for either future security or dynastic advantage. So, the parents in this gospel who sought a blessing from Jesus weren’t being emotional but hard-headedly pragmatic: their aim was to secure a return on their investment, namely, the safe arrival of their children at adulthood, so that they could contribute through labour and marriage to the family’s survival or prosperity.
But, here, as usual, Jesus turns conventional attitudes on their head: instead of treating children as nonentities, he makes them the very model of what it takes and even what it means to enter the kingdom of heaven. By implication, he’s suggesting that we can learn more about what is ultimately important from the powerlessness and innocence of children rather than from the casuistical teaching of the Scribes and Pharisees. He certainly knew how to make himself unpopular. But the passage at the beginning of this gospel that deals with the thorny problem, then as now, of divorce and remarriage, also has for its background a situation of disadvantage and disregard, this time concerning women. Their position in ancient society was only marginally better than that of children, and they were just as vulnerable.
On the question of divorce, too, Jesus drives a coach and horses through conventional attitudes. His teaching about marriage not only seeks to restore the binding nature of the institution itself but also to re-establish the standing of women within it. To appreciate the radical nature of his teaching you need only remember that in this rigidly, patriarchal society, marriages were arranged exclusively between men, specifically between fathers; indeed, a marriage was a legal agreement not between a bride and groom but between their respective fathers. And, then as now, divorce was far from uncommon and, though by this time it was unfashionable except among the élite, such as Herod and his clan, polygamy was still allowed. The debate that held people’s attention at the time, however, and which forms the immediate backcloth to this devious discussion initiated by the Pharisees, wasn’t whether divorce was permitted or not, but when and in what circumstances. Everybody accepted the ruling of Deuteronomy that a man could divorce his wife if he found something seriously objectionable about her, but there was wide disagreement about what exactly constituted “something objectionable”.
One rabbinic school, the school of Hillel, held that it could be for something as trivial as “spoiling a dish for a husband”. It doesn’t specify detail: presumably it could be for something as trifling as burning his toast, or the first century Palestinian equivalent. Another school, the school of Aqiba, thought that it was sufficient grounds for divorce if you found another woman more beautiful than your wife. With this kind of rampant chauvinism in the ascendancy, no woman was safe or secure in marriage. Jesus’ teaching was a return to a long-lost ideal that respected the standing of both the man and the woman, which recognised marriage to be a creation of God, rooted in our created nature, rather than man-made legal agreements, an assertion still relevant to contemporary debates on the meaning of marriage. Divorce and remarriage remain a complex issue on all levels, but Jesus’ teaching was as radical in the first century as it would be in the 21st . But the underlying point, here and elsewhere in the gospels, extends beyond marriage. He is asserting the intrinsic God-given, not man-made dignity of every individual person, in every condition and without exception.
Whether we’re married or unmarried, young or old, fit or unwell, our lives are judged not solely according to usefulness, economic or otherwise. Human persons are always ends in themselves, never means to an end. From the moment of conception to the moment of death, our lives have infinite, not merely instrumental value. That, too, is certainly relevant to contemporary (and in the UK specifically forthcoming) ethical debates. So, once again, here in the dismissal of and disregard for women and children, we see Jesus peeling back the layers of self-protective rationalisation that we so cunningly contrive to conceal our less than noble motives and goals, but which serve only to conceal the goodness of God’s creation.
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