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The pastor finishes reading the Gospel text and the people squirm more than usual. What will he say? What can he say?

The passage he has just read proclaims a chain of hard sayings, some of them impossibly harsh, condemning sin and strengthening the commandments. Anger, insulting speech, adultery, lust and swearing oaths are all roundly condemned. But it is the stark prohibition against divorce that has the people wondering what he will say.

In the text, Jesus clearly says, "No divorce." The pastor must be faithful to the text. At the same time, he wants and needs to be known as a sensitive, compassionate, caring person. He knows there is hardly a family or an individual in his congregation that has not been touched by divorce or its long, long shadow.

For many, the wound is still gaping; the guilt still being carried about; the hurt more suppressed than healed.

The marriages of some other members, he knows, exist in name only, the couples long since having rent asunder what God once joined together until all that remains is a legal contract, two people sharing little more than an address and a phone number, and a relationship that is mutually dissatisfying if not mutually destructive.

Finally, he fears, there may be a few in the congregation self-righteous enough to want to hear divorce and the divorced criticized as always and in all cases wrong (or at least morally irresponsible) and maybe even beyond the redeeming grace of God. These "give 'em hell" types he fears the most and pities the most as being yet a long, long way from the kingdom.

The pastor wants and needs and is called to speak a clear word, a resounding word in support of lifelong trust, commitment and faithfulness on the part of those who choose to marry. He is called to announce God's will that marriages be permanent, riding out the storms of pride and passion. Brides and grooms promise to remain faithfully committed to each other so long as they both shall live, not so long as they both shall love. They do well to remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer's words to his friends on their wedding day: "It is not your love that sustains your marriage," Bonhoeffer wrote, "but your marriage that sustains your love."

Can he say these things without heaping more guilt on the heads of the already guilty, more grief of the hearts of the still grieving, more sorrow on the souls of the already sorrowful? He knows only a few (but there are indeed a few) who have chosen divorce as the apparently easy way out, a convenient end to an inconvenient relationship. The others have already suffered too much, forgotten by those who used to be friends to say nothing of self-recrimination and the anguish they see in the eyes of children who do not -- and perhaps cannot ever -- understand.

So the pastor has a dilemma. He stands at a point where the biblical witness and the lives of his people intersect. And the tension is enough to rend him asunder.

Part of him wants to run. To find refuge in the second lesson or the psalm and preach on them instead. Or focus exclusively on that paragraph of the Gospel about reconciling with an estranged brother or sister in the faith before offering one's offering at the altar. That would be a piece of cake compared to this.

But he knows himself well enough to know that precisely when he feels inclined to run, that's the time to stand firm and tough it out. Jacob and his family were blessed because Jacob wrestled with an angel, not with a piece of cake.

Nor can the pastor water down the text, explaining it away with a bit of scholarly misdirection or sleight-of-hand -- pointing out, perhaps, that a mere 14 chapters later in Matthew's Gospel, Jesus opens the door to divorce on the grounds of unchastity. No: the stakes are far too high for such theological manipulations. It was precisely such legalism and searching for loopholes and attempts at self-legitimization that Jesus is challenging in this sermon of his. His antitheses ("You have heard that it was said... but I say to you...") set up a contrast between the old way of thinking and living and the new way Jesus teaches about and ushers in.

The religious leaders of the day debated endlessly about what the law permitted and allowed; Jesus proclaimed what God commands. The people wondered about their rights under the law; Jesus announces God's holy will: the creator's righteous intent that marriages be indissolvable.

So the pastor must allow the prohibition against divorce to stand, and to stand in all its stark and intimidating simplicity. God intends the marriage of one man and one woman to be an unconditional commitment of lifelong faithfulness, come what may. And that is precisely what brides and grooms promise to each other in their vows: "I take you for better or worse; for richer or poorer; in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until in death we part. This is my promise to you."

God intends the "come what may" unconditional nature of marriage to be an earthly intimation of God's "come what may" unconditional love for his people.

But as long as those people, scorched by divorce or not, hear with old ears and think only what is legal and permissible, they will miss this point entirely. Worse, they will say to themselves, "As if my life weren't messed up enough, now I've got Jesus against me, too."

The pastor knows his people will not be set free by moralism and demands, by threats and recriminations. That's the old way of hearing and living and believing. They need to hear and appropriate Jesus' new way which is not to relax God's commands and figure out ways around them, but to hear in them God's loving will as good news for their lives, however bruised and broken and burned those lives may be.

And that can happen only when they die to the old, legalistic, Pharisaic way of listening and are born anew to listen and hear as children of God.

The word that kills is precisely Jesus' word: "Moses gave you this law and these loopholes for your hardness of heart."

That is not a concession, but a judgment upon all of you, divorced or not. It is evidence of your stubbornness and your coldness. It is an accusing finger pointed continually at you. You are people with a heart of stone, interested not in hearing and hearkening to God's will, but in manipulating, conniving, and finagling your way around it. You are cold and unmoved and hard of heart and those words describe not a living being, but a petrified fossil, long dead.

That is the word that kills. But that is not the last nor the only word. Jesus speaks another, and that word makes us alive.

He speaks to us this time not as moral guide or judge but as the heavenly bridegroom. As he calls each of us by name and rouses us from our sleep of death, we hear what he is saying to us: "I take you for better or worse; for richer or poorer; in sickness and in health, to love and cherish. You are mine, come what may. And as I have death behind me, not even death or all its fearsome force can part us. Because I live, you shall live also. This is my promise to you."

The one who justly accuses us of hardness of heart is the very one who touches those hearts and speaks to our hearts to revive them and to make them new, soft and warm and open and beating and tender. He speaks forgiveness and reconciliation to the divorced and offers them a new beginning. He cradles in his loving arms those whose marriages are but a hollow shell or a battleground and offers them new hope. He touches the hearts of the self-righteous "give 'em hell" types and invites them, too, into his father's kingdom.

Against such a one, we need no more defend ourselves. From his will, we need no more protect ourselves. For in him and in him alone, our death is turned to life. In his will, and in his will alone, our brokenness is at last made whole.

The pastor finishes reading the Gospel text and the people squirm more than usual. What will he say? What can he say?

He stands at a point where the biblical witness and the lives of his people intersect. And at last, by the grace of God, he sees clearly that that intersection is in the shape of a cross.