Over the centuries one of the most sensitive and contentious issues with which the church has dealt is that of divorce and remarriage. The two reasons for this are pretty straight forward. First, marriages often go badly. There is anger, hatred, physical and mental abuse, abandonment as well as unfaithfulness. Secondly however, within the scriptures, divorce if it is allowed at all, appears to be not generally condoned. The struggle for the church then, has been how to balance these two competing realities: bad marriages on the one hand and the scriptures on the other.
Let's begin with the scriptures. Divorce in the Old Testament is referenced in two passages; Deuteronomy 24:1-4 and Exodus 21:10-11. The Deuteronomy passage contains several important elements. First, a woman could be divorced for "some indecency." The meaning of "some indecency" is not spelled out; however it usually referred to either shameful exposure of the human body or illicit sexual activity. Second, divorce was as simple as a husband giving his wife a piece of paper which stated they were no longer married. Third, if a woman was divorced she could remarry (just as could her husband). In fact she was allowed to remarry as many times as she was divorced, as long as she did not remarry her first husband. The Exodus passage allowed a wife to divorce a husband if he refused to care for her. Interestingly enough neither rabbis nor the church often discussed this passage…guess why.
In Second Temple Judaism (the time of Jesus) the Deuteronomy passage became a focal point of rabbinic interpretation. While the text appears to be pretty clear that reasons for a husband divorcing his wife are limited, the Hillel rabbinic school saw it otherwise. Their focus was not on the word for "indecency" but on the word that preceded it, "some." They reasoned that Moses added that word in order to allow husbands to define what indecency meant. The result was that in the time of Jesus Judaism had the first "any cause" divorce. Any man could divorce his wife for any reason. There was, however a second group of rabbis, followers of Shammai, who claimed that the Hillel school got it wrong. They wanted to keep the words together as a single sentence, thus limiting divorce to infidelity. This was the debate which set the scene for Jesus' comments on divorce.
There are two main references to Jesus speaking on divorce and remarriage. The oldest is in Mark 10:2-12. Here we witness Jesus being approached by the Pharisees who were trying to see on which side of the argument (Hillel or Shammai) Jesus fell, hoping to condemn him. Jesus' response is to return to the most basic understanding of man-woman relationship in Genesis (1:27, 2:24). "God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder." Notice that Jesus refuses to engage in argument over Deuteronomy 24. Instead he lifts up the ideal of creation. This is the part of the creation saga which offers us a glimpse of the way things ought to be in a perfect world. Jesus implies that divorce was allowed because human beings could not live into the perfection of God's creation (vs.5). This same discussion is expanded in Matthew where Jesus comes down on the side of the Shammites when he allows divorce and remarriage for infidelity (indecency in Deuteronomy).
What the church has tended to do with these passages then is to turn them into a legalistic understanding of marriage and divorce. Both divorce and remarriage were unacceptable (except under certain circumstances which had to be documented and approved by the church). The question with which we will deal next week is; did Jesus intend an absolute ban on divorce and remarriage? To give a bit of assurance this week, I don't believe this is what Jesus was actually after, and we will discuss the reasons for this conclusion in the next article.
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