Marriage Yesterday and Today.
Matthew 22: 23 -33; 1 Timothy 3: 1 – 13
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A bishop must be above reproach and the husband of one wife. [1 Tim 3:2] A curious saying isn’t it? When I first came across this text I read it from my experience of the time. To me it was an affirmation of marriage as I knew it: one man and one woman come together in a loving relationship and commit to live with each other for better or worse. I did not hear it with any critical faculties, but as an affirmation of marriage as we understood it 47 years ago. I never asked why was it necessary for Timothy to say this? But then I was young with so much to learn about the Bible and Christian history.
Today I want to address the issue of same sex-marriage. I want to approach it from the perspective of the concept of marriage then and now. I want to share something of my journey with regard to homosexuality and the concept of marriage.
There was a time that I thought the term ‘marriage’ described only the coming together of a man and a woman to form that unit of family. Such was my thinking that I could not think how it could apply to Gays. In fact for the first thirty-five years of my life I lived in regions that treated homosexuality as a criminal offence! How in the world could I contemplate same-sex marriage when I was still wrestling with the concept of decriminalising homosexuality?
Of course my experience of life and society’s changing attitude has caused serious reflection on the matter. If homosexuality appalled me, homosexuals did not. I knew some and I have a family member as one. They’re just people like me who have a different sexual orientation. And I know they no more chose to be homosexual than I chose to be heterosexual. Think about that too. Did you choose to be a heterosexual? In recent times I have thought about same-sex marriage. It hasn’t been an easy choice, because I was still working through this notion that the term ‘marriage’ only had one meaning. One of the things I did – this is the way I work out things – was to define marriage. I looked at dictionaries and came to see that the term is used in some industries to describe the joining of things in a state of permanency. I was a little surprised to see that the metal industry used the term to describe the joining of sections of metal. Of course that makes sense. The inherent sense of marriage is bringing together two elements into one. Why not use it to describe the joining of different metals joined into one?
A couple of years ago I attended a conference on the Freedom of Religion. In practice it was all about protecting Christian marriage from being undermined by same-sex marriage. The argumentation was not all that convincing. A lot of ignorance of both language and Bible arose. During the conversation I happened to mention to a young lawyer heading up the anti-same-sex marriage lobby that the word ‘marriage’ also was used to describe the joining of metals. She was visibly taken back. This very intelligent young person – possibly in her early 40s – took this as something entirely new. You see the conference had been arguing that marriage only meant one thing: the union of a man and a woman to form a family. I guess if you hold that marriage only defines the mating of a man and a woman then it logically cannot apply to anything else, even metal work! Some define marriage as being about the getting of children.
Now I am not trying to get you to support same-sex marriage. That is your decision. However I want to share my understanding that the concept of marriage has always been adjusted to the social historical context. We were brought up to understand and believe that marriage simply meant that a man and woman enter equally into a permanent relationship to form a family and most probably raise children. I am confident that we would agree with that. We in fact may be working with those same sole elements in our definition of marriage of male, female, equal persons, entering a sexual relation for the formation of a family.
Because we are Christians we should start with the Bible. So I am going to take look at the Biblical experience of marriage and in the Western world. Naturally this looking at the concept of marriage does not include homosexuals for the obvious reason they were persona non grata.
Let us begin with Abraham and Sarah. We take them to be ‘married’ – husband and wife. When they couldn’t have children they decided to use the method appropriate to their culture. Sarah’s handmaiden became a surrogate mother for Abraham and Sarah. Abraham impregnated Hagar, her servant, and she most likely gave birth to Ishmael across Sarah’s thighs. This action symbolised that the child was Abraham’s and Sarah’s. Sarah’s handmaiden was their servant. They owned her. Her child was theirs. If God chastised them it was because Abraham and Sarah had failed to trust God for an heir, not because Abraham, according to our values, had committed adultery.
Turn the pages of history over to Abraham’s grandson Jacob. God named Jacob, Israel, which means he has striven with God and prevailed [Gen 32: 28]. Israel had 12 sons who Israel fathered through his two wives, Leah and Rachel, and their handmaidens, Bilhah and Zilpah. [Gen 29-30] The 12 tribes of Israel descended from these 12 sons. In the ancient world it was not uncommon for a man to have more than one wife. By the way polygamy, as we call it, is never condemned in the Bible.
The rules about marriage were inevitably tied up with property in ancient Israel. Marriage was not simply about children. The land was divided amongst the tribes and tribal land amongst the members of the tribe. When a male died his widow was to marry the next of kin, most probably her husband’s brother. This happened so the land of the brother had an heir and was kept within the family’s name. Clearly there is no assumption that the brother taking his deceased brother’s wife was without a wife. A number of stories in the Bible, such as the story of Ruth, are dependent on this tradition to make the story work.
From an early stage in history marriage, property and political alliances were part and parcel of marriage. What we call polygamy was practised up to the time of Jesus and for many years after. Half the world today still legitimates polygamy. Jesus apparently accepts that marriage includes more than one wife for he uses that concept in some of his debates with the Sadducees and Scribes, without ever questioning the rightness or wrongness of having more than one wife. Take for example Jesus’ controversy with the Sadducees over the resurrection. The Sadducees use an absurd illustration of one woman being married to 7 successive brothers arguing that would make the resurrection nonsensical. Jesus tacitly accepts the possibility of this happening, but cleverly points out that there will be no sexual relationships in the resurrection life. [Luke 20:27-40] When Jesus speaks against divorce saying that a man and a woman become one and should not be divorced, it is not an argument for marriage being only between one man and one woman. [Luke 16:18, Mark 10: 2- 12] The Bible as a whole neither offers us a consistent view on divorce or a rejection of polygamy.
In fact returning to Timothy’s statement that a bishop and a church leader should only have one wife implies that the Early Church had members who had more than one wife. If this was not so why would you state that a church leader should have only one wife. You see if every man only had one wife then it would be totally superfluous to make this statement. The relevancy of the statement is precisely the reality that there were husbands with multiple wives in the Church.
The Bible leaves us with little doubt that polygamous relationships were acceptable, that property was tied to marriage, but that God required faithfulness in all relationships including marriage. The Bible also makes it clear that a woman was not equal to a man. However noting Jesus’ teaching, commands and exhortations it is clear that he had a view that a woman was equal or virtually equal to a man. He certainly believes women should be treated with justice and compassion.
What this says to us is that the concept of marriage has never been a static concept. It has developed and adapted to the context of the day. In fact since the Resurrection there has been a move to marriage being between one man and one woman, but it has been an equal affair. Women have had no property or wealth rights and no vote up until the past 110 years.
In my lifetime and when my wife and I were married we took out an ante-nuptial contract giving my wife rights to her wealth. A quick look at Western history would show that our modern concept is different to the concepts of the past 1900 years.
What has dramatically changed today? By mid-1800s, aided by authors like Jane Austen, the notion of a husband and wife being equal was forming and finally came to fruition in the mid 1900s. So the first change is that women have achieved equality with men. What has further underpinned the independence of women is ‘the Pill’.
The second enormous change is that homosexuality has been decriminalised. Homosexuals are normal people under the law. Those of us who have friends and relations who are Gay know them to be just that – normal people wanting the same things that we want – community and family; belonging and recognition. I was reminded how recently the decriminalisation of homosexuality is. The first State to decriminalise homosexuality was South Australia in 1975 and the last to do so was Tasmania in 1997. That’s only 20 years ago.
All I am asking of you is not to vote on the basis of a false notion that marriage has always been only between two equal and independent persons of the opposite sex. That notion of marriage is only about 100 years old if that long. And as Christians we are to consider what would be just and kind in this instance.
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Peter C Whitaker, Leighmoor UC: 27/08/2017
pgwhitaker@tpg.com.au
/ www.leighmoorunitingchurch.org.au
