MARK 10.2-16 follows Prayer Book priorities: marriage first, children afterwards. One conclusion that stands out from both sections of this Gospel is that there was disagreement — then, as now — about the proper order and management of family relationships.

There is a conspicuous hole in the dialogue. Where is the teaching on women divorcing their husbands? This omission was not problematic for the first Christians, or for their Jewish forebears. The Jewish writer Josephus remarks that “it is only the man who is permitted to send a document of divorce,” while “even a woman who has been divorced may not remarry without her [ex-]husband’s consent” (Jewish Antiquities 15.259).

What Jesus tells the Pharisees about divorce is that Moses allowed it as a concession to weakness, but that they should follow a superior ideal instead: “What God has joined together, let no one separate.” If divorce is no longer permitted for any reason, by either party, then all objections that the teaching discriminates against women fall away.

In modern society, marriage and divorce remain sensitive matters. In no other aspect of human existence are we as quick to detect judgement or censure in the reactions of others as we are when it comes to intimate relationships. Is our life partner the right race, or colour, religion, or sexual orientation? What about their socio-economic and intellectual background?

To read that our Lord — the Lord of forgiveness — accepted no justifications for the dissolution of such relationships is more than just “challenging”. It is excruciating. We all know good people whose marriages and life-partnerships have withered and died. Not all of them had fault on both sides, or were caused by a lack of commitment. There could be elements of neglect, or abuse, or exploitation; or the sheer unendurable hardness of living together under pressures that we are in no position to imagine. What is more, not all damage is visible.

Many of us accept that some marriages need to end. When it comes to history (at least the sort concerned with the doings of “the great”), the future of our nation once rested on finding a solution to the “failure” of an ageing wife to produce a son. Irresistible force (human passion; the hunger for posterity) met immovable object (dynastic self-protection; hierarchical inflexibility).

Yet, it is not only grand divorces that fracture the intricate patterns of our interlocking existences. Within the nuclear family, too, pressures on fault lines turn once firm ground into crumbling sand, rippling outwards in waves of turbulence.

There is another option, of course: to annul a marriage, sneakily sidestepping Jesus’s hard teaching. But I am unconvinced that pretending that a marriage was not a marriage is somehow “better”, on a practical and a moral level, than admitting the breakdown and accepting the necessity of divorce. The word “divorce” (divortium) once meant the dissolution of a marriage by consent (the alternative, dissolution without consent, was repudium). But that reflects Roman, not Bible, law. No help for divorcing Christians here.

When Jesus asks what Moses taught, the Pharisees refer to the concession that Moses had allowed because of human weakness. But Jesus trumps the prophet’s authority by pointing to God’s. One commentator concludes that “Mark’s Jesus allows us no lower aim” than “God’s design for unbroken, lifelong marriage”. How many preachers will be brave enough to tackle that this Sunday, instead of the easier lesson in Mark 10.13-16?

Jesus is condemning divorces that lead to remarriage rather than divorce per se. It is left open whether divorce without remarriage is permissible. Matthew’s Jesus provides a potential exit clause (5.32). But these exceptions are small comfort to those whose marriages are over. Like my commentator, I see no way to reconcile my adherence to Jesus’s meaning here with the non-judgemental, accepting attitude to divorced people which I (along with most Christians I know) think is a better reflection of the whole “good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God” (Mark 1.1).

Readers may now be expecting an “Aha!” moment, a rabbit-out-of-a-hat solution. I have none. I understand what Jesus taught. I accept it as a Christian ideal. All I can offer is an appeal to Augustine’s principle that any interpretation of scripture which does not fit with the love of God and neighbour cannot be right — and my conviction that Milton was right to put this promise in Christ’s mouth: “I shall temper so Justice with Mercie” (Paradise Lost 10.77-8).