What God Has Joined

                The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. (Genesis 2:23-24)

 

                Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”

 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

“Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”

Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.” (Matthew 19:3-9) 

When I first thought of the verse from Genesis 2 yesterday, the idea came to mind that this was something Adam said and therefore might well have been his opinion, not God’s. This morning as I copied and pasted it into my journal, the passage from Matthew came to mind. But let me back up a little. On meeting Eve, Adam, who had no mother, no father, and no children, announced that for this woman (and by extension “a woman”) he/men would leave their fathers and mothers and become one with her. Com means “with,” and unity  means “one.”

As a writer, I have to wonder if Adam’s statement foreshadowed what was to come. God was Adam’s father. For Eve, who was deceived and gave the fruit of  the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to Adam, Adam left God. The other thought that came to mind is that this brings us back to the notion that Adam and Eve weren’t blank slates. They were mature humans with intelligence and insight. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that Adam was in the same category of wisdom and intelligence as Solomon. This proves that wisdom doesn’t completely protect us from sin or error.

Another trivial tidbit I noticed. While it says that a man will leave his father and mother, it doesn’t say that a woman will leave her parents. Curiously, however, the tradition eventually seems to have become that the man would go to the woman's house, collect her (and possibly a dowry), and return to his father and mother's home. To which I must say, “Hmm,” and drop the subject.

Back to community. One aspect of community suggested in this passage is that some communities have priority over others. Adam recognized that the animals, as significant as they were to be to him, were not his main community. He recognized that parents were not as significant a part of his community as his wife. When Jesus spoke of the community of husband and wife and the issue of divorce, He didn’t say that God gave permission for men to divorce. In fact, those with whom He was discussing the issue didn’t claim that God gave them permission to divorce. It was Moses who was given credit for that. What God joined, man was not supposed to separate, regardless of what Moses said.

While marriage is clearly one of the most significant communities, with family and the Church following close behind, we would do well to be cautious in our choices of community, making sure that the lesser do not interfere with the greater, but keeping in mind that those communities that are established with a covenant or legal conditions make demands we aren’t free to ignore.