Yesterday I spent most of a day on a question I could not ask anywhere else. Not whether people should separate — that argument is over, and I am not trying to reopen it. The question was narrower and stranger: why the subject cannot be discussed at all. Thirty years in prisons, and I have watched the same pattern come round three times now in the same families. I can describe it. I can count it, in the loose way you count anything you see every week. What I cannot do is say it out loud in a room of people paid to work with it.
We got a fair way and then I parked it. Not because it was resolved. Because I wanted to sit with it.
This morning I sat down to read. I am working through Matthew, and Matthew 19 was next. It was not chosen. It was simply the next thing.
It read differently this morning.
The Pharisees come to him with a question about grounds. Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause? They were arguing about where the door should sit, and how wide it should open. That argument is settled where I work. It is lawful. The door is open, and people go through it, and no one is asking me whether they may.
What I see is what happens on the other side. A man comes into my care with children he no longer lives with, raised by a woman he is no longer with, who has children by another man who is also somewhere else. I could name a dozen without stopping to think. Their children will do the same. I have been at this long enough to have watched it happen — the boys I met in their twenties have sons in their twenties now.
So I was not asking whether it was lawful. I was asking what I could do about it.
He does not answer the question.
He asks them what they have read. Have you not read that from the beginning he made them male and female? And then a sentence out of Genesis, before any of the argument existed — a man leaves, and is joined, and the two become one. What God has joined, let no man separate.
They asked about the grounds for leaving. He answered about the joining. He did not tell them their question was improper, and he did not tell them what to conclude. He put something in front of them that they already knew and asked whether they had read it.
They push back. Then why did Moses command a certificate of divorce? And this is where I had always read the passage as a tightening — Moses allowed it, Jesus takes it back. That is not what it says.
Because of your hardness of heart, he says, Moses permitted it.
The certificate was not permission to be rid of a woman. It was the piece of paper that stood between a dismissed woman and destitution. It named her free. Without it she was neither wife nor widow and had no standing anywhere. The concession was not made to the hardness. It was made to the person the hardness would otherwise crush.
And then: from the beginning it was not so.
Not — this is how it is now. From the beginning it was not so. The hardness is real, and it is accommodated, and it is not the last word about them.
Some time ago I sat with a woman. Successful, capable, well into a third relationship, and glad to tell me about it. This one was wonderful. This was what she had always wanted. Everything was now the way it should be.
I did not challenge her. I asked her whether she had thought that about the first one, at the start. She said yes. I asked whether the second had felt right too. Yes — and then she had learned it wasn't.
But now she knows better. And perhaps she does.
Then she asked me about my own marriage.
Forty-three years, I said. Still together. And I told her that there had been times I wanted to leave, and times I am fairly sure my wife wanted me gone, and that we had stayed. Not because we were better at it. Because the wanting to leave passed, and we were still there when it did.
I went to Matthew this morning with a question about what I could do, and the passage did not tell me. It showed me.
He did not condemn the men asking. He did not tell them what to conclude. He asked them what they had read and took them back to the beginning. He told them plainly what it cost, and did not press them to accept it. When his disciples said it was unbearable, he agreed that not everyone could receive it. He did not soften it and he did not chase them.
Hardened hearts are hard. That is the whole difficulty. Nothing I say will make one soft. I stopped trying a long time ago. What is different now is the name it goes by. She had not hardened. She had learned. That is what she would say, and I am not sure she is wrong.
Sitting with my wife not long after my cardiac events, she told me how she had felt coming home from the hospital that first night. By herself. Alone in the house. For the rest of her life.
She had not chosen that. It was very nearly chosen for her. And what she was sitting in the dark imagining is a thing a great many people decide on, and go through with, because of a hard heart.
I am not sure what the antidote is. I think it has something to do with appreciating what you have.
I almost lost everything. So I am thankful for what I still have, and determined to say so every chance I get.
The chapter that follows, read the same way: Still Counting — the labourers in the vineyard, and the only men in the story who agreed a figure.