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What is marriage for?

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What is marriage for?

In our church we have a Spanish-speaking congregation, who join in on Sundays (where we have songs and readings in different languages and simultaneous translation) but who also have their own Spanish-language service on a Tuesday evening. We have been given funding for a Spanish speaking pastor, but also seek to integrate ministry across the congregations. So I preached at the service last night—and did so in Spanish! This is my sermon, in English and Spanish, and I conclude with some reflections on the challenge.

Today, I am going to be courageous! I am going to try to speak to you in Spanish, and I am going to talk to you about marriage! So please be kind to me!

The subject of marriage is very important—in the West, we have a crisis of marriage. Young people are not getting married, and fewer than ever are having children. As a culture, many have lost confidence in married and parenting. 

When Jesus was confronted with a practical problem about marriage—the question of divorce and remarriage—his response was fascinating. 

Instead of answering the question head on, he went back to the real question behind the question that was being asked. What is marriage? Why do we have it? And what was it for? To answer these questions, he went back to God’s intention in creation. So we are doing the same today. 

When we read the story in Genesis 2 about the creation of the first woman, we must notice four things.

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Jesus is our good shepherd in John 10

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Jesus is our good shepherd in John 10

The lectionary gospel readers for the Fourth Sunday of Easter take the three parts of John 10 in turn; being in Year A, we are reading the first ten verses. You can watch the video discussion of the passage here, and it is linked below. The epistle is 1 Peter 2.19–25, a challenge passage both for what it appears to say about slavery, and the teaching on enduring suffering. The video discussion is here and also linked below.

John 10 this is a good example of where our modern chapter divisions (first created by Stephen Langton, the 13th-century Archbishop of Canterbury who helped to write the Magna Carta) hinder rather than help our reading, for two reasons.

First, John 10 actually straddles a fairly major division in the narrative. The events of chapter 6 are clearly situated near Bethsaida and around Lake Galilee—the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus walking on the water, and the dispute about Jesus as the bread of life. But in John 7.10, Jesus heads off ‘secretly’ to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles in the early autumn, one of the three Pilgrim Festivals (with Passover and Pentecost), and the action of chapters 7, 8 and 9 until 10.21 is set around this time. (Note the mention, for example, of the ‘people of Jerusalem’ in John 7.25 and the ‘temple guards’ in John 7.45; this is a reason why we might interpret the language of ‘the Jews’ (Judaioi) here as either ‘Jewish leaders’ or ‘Judeans’.) But in John 10.22, we have now moved to The Feast of Dedication (Hannukah), around two months later, without any note of the time passing. The intense focus on Jerusalem is one of the things that makes sense if we believe that the author of the gospel is a Jerusalem disciple, rather than one of the Galilean Twelve.

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Enduring suffering like Jesus in 1 Peter 2 video discussion

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Enduring suffering like Jesus in 1 Peter 2 video discussion

The lectionary epistle for Easter 4 is 1 Peter 2.19–end. Peter sees out a challenge call for us to endure suffering following the example of Jesus.

But to make proper sense of this, we need to read it in its context, and notice the different language that Peter uses of us as slaves of God, living in obedience to him, and servants of others, submitting ourselves to their authority.

The gospel reading for this week is John 10, Jesus as the good shepherd. The video discussion is here,

and written commentary is here.

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