Divorce – Matthew 19:1-9

Pastors have had many couples come to them with sad stories about their marriages and often with one partner saying they want out. There is nothing that causes more a feeling of helplessness than trying to repair a marriage where one has already checked out. And I’ve seen few that register emotional pain on a scale with those who have been divorced. I’ve seen too many excuses as to why a partner thinks they need to divorce their mate.

What does Jesus think? I wish the Pharisees had really wanted to learn from Jesus on this matter rather than just test him. But that serves for our instruction.

Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan. And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his 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.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.” (Matthew 19:1-9 ESV)

Jesus is now moving deliberately toward Jerusalem, where he will be killed, and the opposition intensifies.  The Holy Spirit is with him to heal people but the Pharisees are more concerned about how to make him unpopular with the people.  So they test him on the issue of divorce.  The two prominent schools of the Pharisees disagree on it, one saying there has to be a sexual impropriety for divorce to be valid, the other allowing many causes.  The same kind of division exists today among Christians.

Jesus does the unexpected (we should expect that) and goes back to the creation model of marriage arguing that God showed there the way he wanted marriage to be conducted, no one breaking the one-flesh bond at all.  No one, he said, should separate what God has joined.  But the Pharisees go to their favorite passage, Deuteronomy 24:1-4, where Moses says that anyone who divorces his wife for “uncleanness,” then she remarries, cannot turn around and remarry her first husband if her second marriage ends.  The strict school says “uncleanness” is sexual, the liberal school says it goes beyond that.

Jesus makes it clear that Moses’ injunction was a concession to the hardness of the human heart and the difficulty humans have at keeping their vows and maintaining a conflict-free marriage, but that God’s intention was no divorce originally.  Jesus then seems to land on the stricter side among the Pharisees by defining “uncleanness” as immorality (any kind of sexual sin) and teaching that unless that is the cause of the divorce you are breaking the one-flesh relationship and causing the divorced party, when they remarry, to commit adultery.  This is why in 1 Corinthians 7 Paul urges believers who divorce to remain unmarried and seek to be reconciled later to their spouse and remarry.

Jesus is not saying that if you get divorced for a cause other than immorality and remarry you are living in a perpetual state of adultery and should divorce that second spouse.  That would be committing the same sin of divorce all over again.  It is fascinating that Jesus takes the more strict view of divorce and we may judge from this that other such morality issues he did not speak to would also surely fall within this stricter perspective.

Is sexual immorality on the part of one partner the only possible valid reason for divorce? I think it could be argued that marital violence is another, and here, as with the Pharisees, we might argue the meaning of violence. But threat to one’s life outweighs the commitment to stay married. Jesus would not urge us to stay with someone who is harming us, nor should the community we live in. The violent person should be dealt with justly.