Friday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
Joel and I had lunch with a friend this week who is moving to another state to start a new job. We'll be very sorry not to have him close by: he's been one of those true friends that Sirach speaks about today (Sirach 6:5-17). Talk about testing! He's been there for us from the time of our move to Dayton to when Joel lost his job through the birth of one of our children and so on. And he's always been one of those friends you can call at any time for any kind of help. We try to be that kind of friend to him as well.
That kind of friend really is one in a thousand, as Sirach notes. We will miss him very much - but as I think true friends do, we'll see him again, I am sure.
I am struck by the fact that both Sirach and the gospel reading today speak of testing (Mark 10:1-12).
In the gospel, though, it is the Pharisees who test Jesus as they often do. They ask trick questions, which are tricky precisely because if he answers one way, he'd be seen as politically in one camp, and if he answers another way, he'd be in another camp. Either way, half the crowd will hate him - and that, perhaps, is exactly what the Pharisees are aiming for in trying to discredit Jesus.
Jesus is always too nimble-minded to fall into those kinds of Q&A traps, however. In today's case, he avoids the trap of saying a simple yes or no to the question about divorce. Instead, he reframes the question entirely, suggesting that divorce was an exception God had once made because of the peoples' hard hearts. The Pharisees (and others) might like what the letter of the law says - that it permits divorce. But Jesus says that if they REALLY want to follow God, they'll be aiming for the spirit of the law. The spirit of the law, in this case, is to recognize that God desires for us to have good and loving and long-lasting faithful relationships with each other. Divorce law in Jesus' day tended to treat women especially as objects because men could divorce women for any reason at all, but women could not. Once a woman was divorced, she had very very little opportunity to make a good livelihood. Jesus is thus raising the bar, asking the Pharisees and us, too, to treat each other as people who need love (and I think this applies both to married and unmarried people, by the way).
While the Pharisees' testing of Jesus isn't quite the same as the way Sirach suggests we test our friends, Jesus' testing does indeed show us that he is a true friend. That is - Jesus doesn't need to pick a "winning" side in the argument or make sure that he's saying all the correct things so that others will think well of him. Jesus already IS the winning argument. And he shows that by not allowing himself to be caught up in the worldly tests the Pharisees throw at him.
Today let us reflect more on what it means to see Jesus as a true friend, and let us pray for grace to be true friends to each other.
- Jana M. Bennett