Can I Get a Divorce?: Daily Thoughts from Mark (Mark 10:1-12)

What is the message of the kingdom concerning marriage and divorce?  This is one of the issues we are most concerned about because the covenant to love one another in marriage has proven so hard for us keep and because we are so committed to our own happiness.

It is a perfect issue for the Pharisees to raise with Jesus because they know how volatile an issue it is and they are hoping he will trip himself up over it and lose support among the people.

And he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again. And again, as was his custom, he taught them.

And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” (Mark 10:1-12, ESV)

The Pharisees were themselves divided on this issue, with the conservative school of Shammai teaching there was no divorce except for immorality, and the more liberal school of Hillel teaching that there were numerous acceptable excuses for divorce.  They were wrestling with the interpretation of Deuteronomy 24:1-4, which says,

1 If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, 2 and if after she leaves his house she becomes the wife of another man, 3 and her second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, or if he dies, 4 then her first husband, who divorced her, is not allowed to marry her again after she has been defiled. That would be detestable in the eyes of the Lord. Do not bring sin upon the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance.

The issue was with the words “something indecent.”  Did that mean something sexually immoral or was it broader in scope.  Jesus basically endorsed the view that it refers to something sexually immoral (see Matthew 19).

Jesus cuts to the core issue, however, the issue of why people even get to the place of wanting to divorce.  It is because of hard hearts.  We don’t love the way we should.  We focus on ourselves instead of one another.  If you aren’t loving me the way I want you to love me then I’ll find someone who will.  We aren’t willing to consider that we are not loving well and that God wants to expose this in both of us and lead us to more unconditional love.

Because of the bond God endorsed and created in marriage He considered it the greatest unfaithfulness to divorce your spouse.  But through Moses He regulated the hardness of men’s and women’s hearts by outlawing the divorce of your spouse and then thinking you could remarry your spouse after an intervening marriage.  He knew how rampant divorce could become if there was this kind of freedom to swap back and forth.

Jesus tells the disciples that divorcing one’s spouse is tantamount to committing adultery, assuming that you will remarry and so break faith with your spouse.

Mark does not deal with the issue of a spouse committing adultery and so being divorced, as Matthew does (Matthew 19).  If immorality has already been committed then you are not committing adultery by divorcing your adulterous spouse.  Jesus doesn’t say you have to divorce that spouse, but only that you are not committing adultery if you do.  The spouse has already committed adultery.

Paul adds some more dimensions to this issue when he talks in 1 Corinthians 7 about marriage between two believers and mixed marriages, a believer with an unbeliever.  He does not counsel divorce in the latter situation, but does note that if the unbelieving spouse leaves the believer is not bound to remain unmarried (my interpretation, but there are others on this passage and the passages in the Gospels).

For sure, if our main concern is finding a loophole to get out of our marriage, we have already failed the question of whether we are learning to love our spouse.  There are, however, situations that demand a divorce because of situations of immorality or danger to family members.  God divorced Israel for her unfaithfulness (idolatry), Jeremiah 3.