“Do you think England has any chance?” “What about Brazil?” …“Portugal?” What am I talking about? How do you know that? How do you know I’m not talking about ice hockey… or war?
“What about Caledonia? Do you think they’ll find a solution?” What am I talking about? How do you know that? How do you know I’m not talking about Scotland?
We assume a lot of things when we talk with people – it would just be too cumbersome and time consuming to do otherwise.
If you want to understand an answer, you first have to know what the question is. And to understand the question, you have to know what is assumed by all the people involved.
This is the last in a short series on “hot topics,” Money, Manhood, Boundaries, and now Divorce. This text in Matt 19 has caused a great deal of pain to a great number of people, and I know that no matter what I say here this morning some people are going to be upset. However, I would suggest that much of that pain has been the result of misunderstanding what was assumed by everybody involved in the conversation.
Most of scripture is pretty easy to understand because it explains itself. However, in places it can be a little difficult to figure out what they’re talking about. This is one of those places. And it’s made all the more difficult because, at first sight, it appears obvious what the discussion is about.
3 Some Pharisees came to [Jesus], and to test him they asked, “Is it
lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”
It appears that the Pharisees are asking Jesus whether it’s allowed for a man to divorce his wife, “for any and every reason.” And it appears that Jesus’ answer is that the only grounds for divorce are marital unfaithfulness. I want to suggest that actually the discussion is much more involved than that and that Jesus is, in fact, saying something quite different. We’re going to bounce back and forth between this passage and the Old Testament, not because I think Old Testament laws necessarily apply to us, but because that is what Jesus and the Pharisees are talking about, and we need to know the context to understand the issue.
Just as you all assumed earlier that I was talking about the World Cup, there are a couple of things in this conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees that are just assumed. The first is…
[If I’m talking to Will about a worship song and I say that after the second bar the chord changes from a G to a C, I don’t explain what a “bar” is or explain how to form G and C chords. We’re both guitarists. Things like bars and chords are shared knowledge for us. We assume that the other person knows what we’re talking about when we use those words.]
[As a pastor I’m regularly asked what I think about the Left Behind series of books and movies. I’m asked things like, “When do you think Armageddon will happen?” “What will happen at the rapture?”
At one level those are questions about a series of books. But at a deeper level they are questions about how I understand certain passages of scripture, especially in the book of Revelation. Now, when someone asks me about the final battle and Armageddon, they don’t usually start the conversation with, “Robin, in reference to Rev 16:16 and in particular to the word Armageddon, do you think…?” No, when they ask me about Armageddon, they expect me to know what they’re talking about. I’m a pastor. I’m supposed to know these things.]
In the same way, when the Pharisees come to Jesus and begin to ask him about divorce, they expect him to know what they’re talking about. They expect him to know, without them telling him, that they’re not asking him for his personal opinion. They’re asking him for his interpretation of a certain Old Testament passage. In this case it’s Deuteronomy 24:1.
“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…
How do we know that this is the text they’re talking about? Because of that phrase “something indecent” which only appears here and in both Matt 5 and Matt 19, where divorce is mentioned. And because of the phrase, “certificate of divorce.” It appears here in Deuteronomy and it is only ever referred to in two passages in Isaiah and Jeremiah, and in the gospel passages we’re looking at this morning.
Just so we’re clear, a certificate of divorce was legal proof that the woman was no longer married. It was there to protect her from accusations of adultery because it was signed by her former husband and to be legal it had to contain the words, “she is free to marry whomever she wills.” The idea that someone could be divorced but banned from remarrying would never have occurred to anybody in first century Palestine. That was a later church development. In Jesus’ day, the whole point of a divorce was to release the person from their vows so they could remarry.
So, Jesus and the Pharisees assumed they knew which passage of scripture they were discussing. They also assumed…
Deuteronomy 24 is one of two fundamental Old Testament texts about divorce. The other is Exodus 21:10-11, which is about the rights of a female slave whose master has taken her as a wife.
10
If he marries another woman, he must not deprive
the first one of her food, clothing and marital rights. 11 If he
does not provide her with these three things, she is to go free, without any
payment of money.
This is in a section about Hebrew slaves and it basically says that if a man buys a woman as his slave and then decides to marry her, she gets all the rights of a wife. If he takes another wife, he still has to fulfil his obligations to her, obligations to provide food, clothing and marital rights, or she is free to leave. The rabbis argued that, if this applied to a slave woman, then surely it applies to free women too. (It’s called arguing from the lesser to greater, Jesus does it all the time, like when he says, “If God cares for the little sparrows, won’t he also care for you?”)
When you put these two texts together you get the basis for divorce in first century Jewish society. From Exodus we get material neglect (failure to provide food and clothing) and emotional neglect (failure to provide marital rights). From Deuteronomy we get marital unfaithfulness. These three things were the accepted grounds for divorce among first century Jews.
Now, I want you to hear this clearly. There is no reason to believe that Jesus did not accept all three grounds for divorce. He explicitly mentions unfaithfulness because that was part of the text under discussion. Unless he explicitly rejected the other two, material and emotional neglect, which he didn’t, people would have assumed that he agreed with them.
So what is happening in Matt 19? What was
the question? “They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for
any and every reason?””
In recent years there has been a huge debate in Canada over who can marry whom. Can homosexuals marry each other? You’d have to be a hermit not to be aware of the debate.
In the first century, when Jesus was teaching, there was a similar debate going on, only it wasn’t about marriage, it was about divorce. The battle lines were drawn over this text in Deuteronomy, in fact over just two words in the text, “something indecent.” In Hebrew it literally reads, “a matter of indecency.” One group, the Shammaites, held to the traditional interpretation that the phrase “a matter of indecency” referred to inappropriate sexual behaviour, usually adultery. Another group, the Hillelites, came up with a novel interpretation. They said that we shouldn’t read the text as “a matter of indecency.” It was actually two different things, “a matter” and “indecency.” So instead of one ground for divorce, “a matter of indecency,” you got two, “indecency” and “a matter.” In fact, according to the Hillelites, a man could divorce his wife for “any matter,” burning the toast, not being as pretty as she was when they met, bad breath, whatever. (These terms may sound strange to us but “any matter” divorce was as well known to Jesus and the people around him as “joint custody” and “irreconcilable differences” are to us.)
So the real question the Pharisees are asking Jesus is this. “Whose side are you on? Are you for the traditional interpretation or do you follow this new interpretation that allows easy divorce?”
Jesus doesn’t respond directly. That wasn’t unusual for him. When the priests tried to trap him with questions about paying taxes he asked if they had a coin and basically said, “The coin is Caesar’s, let him have it.”
When a woman by a well asked him how he was going to draw water Jesus started talking about the possibility of living water flowing out of her heart.
And when the Pharisees ask about his position on the legal question of the day, Jesus goes back behind the law given in Deuteronomy. He goes back behind the law, to creation, to Genesis chapters 1 & 2, the first chapters of the Bible.
4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator
‘made them male and female,’ 5 and said, ‘For this reason a
man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two
will become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two,
but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”
Rather than address the question of how to get out of a marriage Jesus addresses God’s initial intention. One man and one woman together for life. After quoting from Genesis Jesus adds his own interpretation, Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate. Those words are so common to us from the marriage ceremony, that we don’t realise how shocking they would have been for his hearers. It’s clear that they’re shocking because, in verse 10, Jesus’ own disciples figure that if they can’t get out of a marriage easily, it’s better to stay single.
And that’s not a bad idea. One young man we know recently got married without the knowledge of any of his family, “because he wanted to do something crazy.” I always tell people that if you’re not a little scared as you head into your marriage then you just don’t realise how serious it is.
What Jesus is doing is restating the ideal. At a time when divorce was getting easier and easier, Jesus draws the Pharisees’ attention to the fact that, instead trying to find new ways for people get out of their responsibilities, they should be helping to strengthen marriages and maintain God’s intention of people staying married for life.
The Pharisees don’t like that idea, so they come back with a follow-up question of their own, referring back to the same passage in Deuteronomy. “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”
Isn’t that what’s in Deuteronomy? Doesn’t is say that a man should divorce his wife and send her away if she’s been unfaithful? That’s clearly what Joseph thought. When he heard that Mary was pregnant, he intended to “divorce her quietly because he was a righteous man.” But Deuteronomy doesn’t command that a man divorce his wife in this case. All it says is that if he does, and she marries another man and gets divorced again, he can’t marry her a second time.
This is Jesus’ point. 8 Jesus
replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts
were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.
Jesus is saying that divorce is allowed because of failure to make the marriage work. It’s a concession to our fallen-ness. It isn’t a right, and it certainly isn’t a command, but it is a possibility. In fact, when he talks about the hardness of their hearts, he’s probably referring to Jer 4 where God is said to divorce Israel for her hard-hearted unfaithfulness.
(For those of you who have suffered through a divorce, it might help to know that God understands. Through the prophets he speaks of himself as a husband, married to an unfaithful wife, Israel, and in the end he has no option but to divorce her. But that’s another sermon for another time.)
Finally, in verse 9 Jesus drops another bombshell. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery. They must have though they misheard him. How can a man commit adultery is a polygamous society? It’s not possible. But Jesus is saying that men owe the same level of loyalty to their wives as wives have traditionally been expected to show to their husbands. The church in East Africa is preaching this text as a response to AIDS, which is often picked up from a prostitute then passed by a husband to his wife.
The Pharisees asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” They got more than they bargained for. They wanted a debate over a point of law. What they got was a redefinition of marriage as a lifelong commitment of a man and a woman, with the same requirement of faithfulness from both sides. They thought that the Old Testament required a divorce in at least one case. Jesus said, “No, it only permits it. You can still try and make it work.” They wanted a basis for easy divorce. Jesus’ answer is, “No. You can’t slice and dice scripture to make it easier to get out a marriage.” Essentially he says that “no fault” divorce, which is what “any matter” divorce was, is a bad idea. Marriages fail for a reason, or reasons, and it’s important to face up to that fact.
Also, although “no fault” divorce was pushed by women’s groups to gain freedom from oppressive marriages, the reality is that it may have hurt more women than it has helped. Women almost invariably come out worse economically from a divorce than men do and “no-fault” divorce, which makes it easier for men to just walk out, has been part of something called the “feminization of poverty” where women, especially single moms, make up larger percentages of those loving in poverty.
So, the question was not whether or not Jesus would allow divorce. Of course it was allowed, but only on the Biblical grounds of material neglect, emotional neglect and unfaithfulness. What Jesus rejects is easy divorce, probably because of its effect on vulnerable women and children, which was an overwhelming concern in the Old Testament. The care of husbandless women and fatherless children.
So what does all this mean?
If we are to follow Jesus’ response to the question about divorce we have to start with a commitment to lifelong marriages. Apart from anything else, that means doing everything we can to help couples make a success of their marriages.
Having said that, the Bible does recognise grounds for divorce, all of them rooted in hard heartedness: those are material neglect, emotional neglect and unfaithfulness. However, Jesus was explicitly asked about easy, no-fault divorce and he said it isn’t an option.
We need to stop making divorce the unforgivable sin. I know that most of the church for most of history has taught that marriage is indissoluble and that divorced people can’t remarry. But they got it wrong. The whole point of divorce in the Bible is so that people can remarry. The certificate of divorce was intended to prove that a woman was free to marry “whomever she chooses.”