By Timothy Paul Jones
[Associate Professor of Leadership and Family Ministry, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky]
In September 2011, television host Pat Robertson declared that a man might be justified in divorcing his Alzheimer’s-afflicted spouse as long as the man enlisted someone to look “after her” and to provide “custodial care.” Robertson defended his declaration by defining such diseases as “a walking death” wherein the diseased person is already “gone.” Appealing to the husband’s need for “some kind of companionship,” Robertson declared that forbidding such a divorce was “the last thing” he would do.[1]
I was not exactly in unbiased circumstances when I first heard this news. I was sitting beside a dying man in my parents’ living room. The dying man was my father.
Less than a month earlier, the physician’s assistant had clicked through a half-dozen scans of my father’s cranial cavity. An undetected tumor in his left lung had sown four, perhaps five, cancerous lesions in his skull. Viewed from that inadequate perspective in which the body is a machine to be repaired if possible and discarded if necessary, no hope remained. Seen from the standpoint of the resurrection, these results signaled that a time was approaching when the “last enemy to be defeated” would rend my father’s spirit from his flesh (1 Cor 15:26) until that future moment when the risen Christ returns for his own.
At that point, my mother made a decision. Not yet knowing if her husband’s body would persist many months or a few weeks, or what pain might mark his final hours, she chose that she would care for him to the end. If necessary, she would do this alone. She chose to walk this path without question or hesitation. From her perspective, nothing less could uphold the vows that she had affirmed nearly six decades earlier, when she herself was barely sixteen: “For better or for worse; in sickness and in health; until death do us part.”
In this way, my mother, my wife and I, some siblings, and a niece began a journey alongside my father down that long dark hallway marked “Death.” He would not die in a sterile cell amid a conglomeration of medical experts. He would pass from this life among all the earthy oddities of home, surrounded by a community of amateurs—“amateurs” both in the modern meaning of “non-experts” and in the etymological sense of those who do what they do out of love.
And so, we watched and waited as a country pastor who had previously devoured multiple books every week became incapable of assessing whether his newspaper was right-side up. Calloused fingers that had turned raw lumber into furniture and shaped simple chords on the neck of a guitar now clenched into gristly knots. Sentences once spoken with an inescapable Ozarks twang disintegrated into unaccented grunts and finally into silent, liquid stares.
It was during these weeks that I first heard the religious broadcaster’s advice. I readily recognize the distinctions between the relatively-rapid course of brain cancer and the slower processes of such diseases as Alzheimer’s and dementia. And yet, this sense that one is dealing with a soul that is already gone remains quite similar. By this point, my father’s existence no longer even qualified as “a walking death.” Walking had given way to a wheelchair, and wheeling a chair was quickly giving way to lifting and turning, feeding and diapering.
Contract or Covenant?
When Pat Robinson allowed for divorce in such circumstances, his unspoken assumption seems to have been that, once a terminal illness has stolen every possibility of companionship from a spouse, the vow to remain together until “death do us part” has been fulfilled. “Death” is thus defined in terms of the dying partner’s potential for a reciprocal relationship. When all such potential has ceased, “death” has already occurred.
Others have addressed how such advice makes a mockery of the gospel and reveals a defective view of the human body.[2] But there is an underlying, underexplored layer of thinking that enabled this faulty reasoning in the first place. What Pat Robertson’s line of reasoning revealed was a fundamental confusion regarding two very different concepts: covenant and contract.[3]
A contract joins two parties in an agreement regarding a mutual obligation. If either person fails to provide a particular benefit, the contract may be renegotiated. If marriage were a contractual agreement, the end of reciprocity might rightly mark the death of the relationship. But marriage is not a contract. Marriage is a covenant. In covenants, persons do not simply agree regarding a set of abstract obligations; they give themselves to one another in loyal love. Covenants persist far past the capacity for reciprocity. Covenants bind people together in lasting communities of spirit and flesh, sweat and blood.
And so, when God chose to cut a covenant with Abraham, he commanded the patriarch to hew five creatures in two, and God bound himself to Abraham by passing between these halved haunches and heads (Gen 15:7-21). Although the patriarch’s descendants failed to fulfill their part of this covenant (Jer 11:10), God’s faithfulness never faltered. Before it was all over, God went so far as to establish a new covenant by means of the broken and bleeding body of his only Son (Luke 22:20). This new covenant stretches far beyond Abraham’s descendants to embrace all who will find their rest in Abraham’s crucified offspring (Gal 3:15-18; Eph 2:11-14).
Marriage is a divinely-designed picture of this covenant that God the Father established through his Son (Eph 5:25-33). And thus, for the Christian, marriage can never be a contract negotiated for the sake of mutual benefit. Marriage is a covenant witnessed in the context of community, then consummated by the giving of two bodies as gifts to one another. “With my body, I thee wed,” the older liturgy declared, and this wedding of bodies does not end when one partner loses the capacity for companionship.
What marks the finalization of the marriage vow is nothing less than death itself with all the sting that this dark enemy brings. This is how Jesus has loved us, though with a single momentous point of distinction in light of the empty tomb: Because Christ has now endured and defeated the death that we deserve, not even death can derail his covenant with us. The Christian’s lifelong faithfulness in the momentary covenant of marriage allows the world to glimpse a shadow of the new covenant in Christ that not even the cemetery can stop.
“What If Grandpa Forgets About Jesus?”
This distinction between covenants and contracts is no mere academic discussion. It matters at the most mundane and practical levels of life and faith. On one of my family’s many long trips to care for my father, a small voice from the back seat broke an extended silence.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, Skylar?”
Our nine-year-old stretched her head upward, and I saw two worried eyes in the rearview mirror.
“What if Grandpa forgets about Jesus before he dies? Where will he go?”
It was an understandable question. A month or two earlier, Skylar and I had discussed why no one could be saved apart from explicit faith in Jesus. Over the past week, she had watched my father lose the names of children, grandchildren, and long-time acquaintances. What if the same lesions that were leaching his awareness of family and friends and basic bodily functions misplaced his memories of Jesus as well?
Several seconds slipped by before I could speak past the lump that had lodged in my throat.
“Skylar,” I finally said. “What matters most is not whether Grandpa remembers Jesus but whether Jesus remembers him. God turned Grandpa’s heart to trust him many years ago, and Jesus will never forget him. No matter what, Jesus never forgets.”
That simple assurance was possible solely because we serve a God who operates not in terms of contractual reciprocity but on the basis of covenantal fidelity. Christ’s commitment to his people does not depend on whether his bride provides him with “some kind of companionship.” It depends on a covenant that has been engraved in his flesh and confirmed by his blood.
Epilogue
On the eighteenth of September, about the time my father would typically have finished preaching his Sunday evening message, he opened his eyes and began to breathe in deep, ragged heaves. His last sensations in this life were the kisses of his wife and her assurances of love. She remained beside him to the end, past any time when he possessed any capacity to return her love. Such is the nature of a covenant.
On the first day of fall, we planted my father’s flesh in the stony red soil of southern Missouri. There, his body awaits the spring of resurrection, the consummation of the new covenant, the death of death itself. “For the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.… Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 15:52, 57).
Notes
- “700 Club,” Pat Robertson, Christian Broadcasting Network, September 13, 2011.
- Russell D. Moore, “Christ, the Church, and Pat Robertson” (September 15, 2011): http://www.russellmoore.com; Matthew Lee Anderson, “Why Pat Robertson is Wrong About Divorce”: http://www.relevantmagazine.com.
- My thinking about contracts and covenants has been substantively shaped by Elmer Martens, God’s Design (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981), 72-73.
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