28 May 2024 Mark 10:28-31
“There is no one…who will not receive… houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions….” Mark 10:30
Why do we never hear about Peter’s wife? We know he had one – Jesus healed his mother-in-law (cf. Luke 4:38-40). We never hear anything about the wives of the other disciples, either – according to Paul at least some of them were married (I Corinthians 9:5). We know that Paul was single, at least at the time he was writing his letters. But it seems unlikely that he was always single, or always wanted to be.
Jesus promised that the community of the church would provide all the family fellowship the disciples would ever need: “There is no one…who will not receive…houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions” (Mark 10:30). Curiously, however, Jesus leaves out wives. Now, maybe that was because they were already married and didn’t need wives, but that wasn’t true for everyone (e.g. Paul, at least). Why is it that this closest of human relationships, the only one Jesus describes as the two becoming “one flesh” and a microcosm of the kind of relationship God has with the Church, is withheld from the list?
The Bible is strangely ambivalent about marriage. On the one hand, we celebrate it as a sacrament, and it is guarded by the sixth commandment. Divorce is a grave sin, and one of the clearest deviations from God’s intention for human relationships. On the other hand, Jesus says that in heaven “they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matthew 22:30). Marriage is sacred, it seems, but for this life only. We know about the apostles as preachers and teachers, but not as husbands and fathers. Joseph, the husband of Mary and foster father of Jesus, is completely silent in the New Testament. We don’t know a single word he ever said.
Of course, the Bible doesn’t say much about government either, or how to make laws, or how to change laws. The Bible doesn’t say much about war, and wars are going on all the time, as they have been for millennia. The Bible doesn’t say much about rights, how we know what they are, or how we apply them. We are not really sure what angels look like, or sound like, or where they are most of the time. In fact, when you think about it, there is a lot of stuff that we would love to know more about, about which the Bible speaks very little.
But maybe this isn’t a problem with the Bible as much as it is a problem with us. The Bible isn’t an answer book. It doesn’t provide recipes. It provides a place to go think, and ask questions like, “If this is true, what else has to be true?” That, after all, is the example of the saints. They have gone to the Bible to think, to reflect on texts that explain other texts, to reflect on one explanation in the light of other explanations, to see which texts are being highlighted by the Holy Spirit today, and find places to share what the Holy Spirit is saying.
Is the Bible a place where we go to think? So, there are no quotations from Joseph, the husband of Mary and foster father of Jesus. But there are dreams, so we know that is one way that the Spirit spoke with him. What did the angels say to Joseph in his dreams, and what does that tell us about being a husband and father? Are there perhaps ways in which the Spirit is still speaking that we disregard? Do we presume that we know all the ways in which the Spirit must speak, and so not hear the ways in which the Spirit does speak? Have we cultivated enough the disciplines of listening, and then remembering?
The Bible is a place where we go to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (II Corinthians 10:5). Reflection on the Bible is how the Word of God is continually on our hearts, and how we can be continually in prayer, turning as much of ourselves as we have toward as much of God as we understand, polishing the rough places in our minds so that they reflect more of, and finally only, Jesus himself.
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