Indulgent pragmatism or transformative love

Today’s gospel (Mark 10:1-12) offers us two profound truths of the spiritual life that can nourish us on a daily basis.

Why did Moses allow the Jews to divorce? Jesus says explicitly that it was because they were unteachable. Another translation expresses this as the hardness of their hearts. Yet, the challenge for us, especially in COLW, is to look hard at ourselves and wonder: where are we guilty of the same hardness? Where do we show ourselves unteachable?

Unteachability may show itself in major matters, as in the question over marriage and divorce. Or it may show itself in small matters. In those who commit to a more devout life, perhaps unteachability goes along with a way of living through which our eyes are more focused on ourselves than on the divine horizon ahead of us. In that sense, being unteachable means not looking towards our Divine Teacher. Instead, we look to ourselves and our own supposed self-sufficiency, or else we judge our actions merely by our own lights, be they indulgent or severe. Who can learn in those circumstances? O that today you would harden not your hearts. Such is the appeal we hear in the Psalms. O that today we would be teachable, and be all ears for the lessons of the Master.

One objection that might be raised as we read this gospel is to wonder whether Jesus is less merciful than Moses. After all, Moses allows divorce and Jesus doesn’t. Therefore, Moses shows mercy and … Jesus doesn’t?  How can that be?

Yet this brings us to another profound truth of the spiritual life in today’s gospel: Jesus comes not just to govern us but to transform us.

God’s creation is not the work of a manufacturer who designs his invention, sets it running, and then wanders away. Creation is suffused not only with God’s presence but with His wisdom and inner working; with the attention of its Divine Lover who cares for all things in their right order. The Divine Law is not imposed on the world as some exoskeleton but is intrinsic to it by God’s design; all things are possible with God except those that are contrary to His nature. He could not design a world in which He worships us, for example. In this sense, Moses is but a technician of the Law; his ruling on divorce is like the work of a mechanic who finds the inventor’s machine malfunctioning and does a botch job until he can work out a better solution. Moses was not responsible for the Law. He was merely its guardian, even when he made this exception about divorce.

But Jesus is no technician of the law; He is its author. The indissolubility of marriage is wedded to how God designed the sexes. In this sense, it is not that He is less merciful than Moses. Rather, He is giving us something more than Moses could ever offer: the call to be transformed by His grace in a new life of divine intimacy and friendship.

Moses’s mercy is the mercy of the pragmatist managing the appearances.

Jesus’ mercy belongs to another dimension. He takes us through the darkest valleys where we must die to ourselves only to lead us to the sunlit uplands of the Resurrection.

Are we tempted by the pragmatism of Moses rather than the transformative call that Jesus offers us? O that the Almighty had not fixed His canon against self-slaughter, says Shakespeare’s despairing Hamlet. In our darker moments, we might be able to taste such bitterness.

But, could we ever say O that the Almighty had not offered us His deepest, transforming love and His abiding friendship? After Jesus' death and all His labours, such a plea would be shaped by the indulgent malice of hell.