I miss blogging! I have some thoughts sometimes! So let's see if I can do Friday updates again.
My Christian meditation and prayer app has been going through Mark 10, and I feel like I'm seeing things from entirely new angles. Like I've been out of the Christian discourse for long enough that what I was initially taught about what things meant are finally mostly cleared out of me and I'm more open to seeing what's actually on the page and viewing new possibilities. Am I completely changing my theology because of that? Probably not, none of these have been that life-changing, heh. But it has been very cool to see what new things I noticed and think about. I'm going to quickly share two of them.
Mark 10:1-11 is Jesus' teachings on divorce. In particular I had a completely different thought process on this section:
They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.”“It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied.
I always grew up hearing that "you were permitted divorce because your hearts were hard" in the same vein as God allowing Israel a king in 1 Samuel, like they were fighting so hard for divorce that Moses finally said, "Fine, you're going to do it anyway, so I won't stop you, but it's absolutely the wrong thing to do."
But this time, what occurred to me was a completely different train of thought. I don't think anyone would argue that the ideal for God's plan for marriage is two people stubbornly living together in misery. The ideal is two working together as a cohesive unit, loving each other, yielding to each other, supporting each other, forgiving each other, giving each other grace...
Maybe this passage isn't saying, "Fine, go ahead and do your wicked divorce since I can't stop you." Maybe it's saying, "If you aren't going to even try to build the kind of relationship this is meant to be, there's no point in continuing on hard-heartedly." Maybe it's saying, "If you refuse to treat your wives with love, she would be better off alone than with you." Maybe it's saying, "Oh my gosh, you're such a jerk to her, you are the worst, just let her go already."
That's a completely different way of looking at it.
It still acknowledges God's ideal for marriage but makes the idea of remaining in an unkind, hard-hearted relationship a worse twisting of it than cutting the strings, which a lot of folks I know would disagree with.
Now obviously there are more nuances and ins and outs of this, but that one phrase -- "because your hearts were hard" -- had been taught to me so many times from that one viewpoint that I had never even considered it might mean something else.
And immediately after, we have the passage where Jesus tells the disciples to let the children come to him and bless him. And this was a tiny, tiny moment, but in the way it's been taught to me, in the way it's been illustrated in children's Bibles, haha, it's all about these unsupervised kids climbing all over Jesus and following him around and hanging out with him on their own volition.
But that's... not what happens.
People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them.
This wasn't unsupervised kids making the disciples be like, "Back off, littles, this is out of control." It was their parents swarming Jesus. And when Jesus rebukes them, he doesn't actually address the parents, he addresses the kids. We don't even know that the kids wanted to be there, it could totally just be Mom saying, "Well, let's go get you a blessing today" and shoving a 2-year-old in Jesus' face.
Unlike the last one, I don't actually have a possible or interpretation for this thought. It's just interesting to see parents bringing their children for a blessing, and Jesus doesn't acknowledge the parents at all but interacts with the kids on their own behalf. What does this mean for people I pray for or bring in my heart to God for blessings? No idea. But it's always interesting to have the children's illustrated Bible image turned upside down.
