Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.

Matthew 19:6 (CSB)

John the Baptist had criticised the Marriage of Herod Antipas to his half-brother’s wife Herodias. That landed John in jail, and ended up costing him his head. So when Jesus is asked what he thinks about divorce it’s not an academic question. But it is a very common one: in 2020 the divorce rate in Sweden was around 37%.

Here we have in the Sermon on the Mount a section on divorce as Jesus continues to give examples of what he means by a greater righteousness than the one offered to the people by the Pharisees & Scribes. And I guess it’s not coincidental that he comes to divorce after mentioning both anger, insults & lust. Here is what Jesus says:

It was also said, Whoever divorces his wife must give her a written notice of divorce. But I tell you, everyone who divorces his wife, except in a case of sexual immorality, causes her to commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

Matthew 5:31–32 (CSB)

Now this is not the only place in Matthew’s gospel that this topic comes up, and there is a longer section in Matthew 19 where Jesus repeats & expands on this. So this shorter comment here also serves as a reference to the longer one later that Matthew knows he’s going to include. So we’ll also refer to that passage. We’ve already seen one part of it but here’s the full passage:

Some Pharisees approached him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife on any grounds?”
“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that he who created them in the beginning made them male and female, and he also said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
“Why then,” they asked him, “did Moses command us to give divorce papers and to send her away?”
He told them, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because of the hardness of your hearts, but it was not like that from the beginning. I tell you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another commits adultery.”,
His disciples said to him, “If the relationship of a man with his wife is like this, it’s better not to marry.”

Matthew 19:3–10 (CSB)

Jesus challenge on the issue of divorce (which incorporates a number of prior assumptions regarding marriage) fits the overall challenge that the Pharisees while claiming to uphold the law were instead undermining it. The cup was clean on the outside but not the inside.

Now there’s background to the debate around divorce that comes out more clearly in Matthew 19 than in chapter 5. There were two schools of Rabbinic thought on divorce.

Jesus is clearly siding with the school of Shammai. And in this he sides with women against men. Women were not to be just cast aside on the whim of a husband. They were not to be left without protection, provision, dignity or a future (again all those things reflect God’s relationship with His people). Divorce could be painless for the husband and ruinous for the wife and so this injustice could not be God’s will. Instead only the most serious of reasons could be cause for divorce.

Today Swedish & many western cultures have moved closer back to Hillel. In Sweden, a person can file for a divorce without providing a specific reason or justification. The Swedish legal system allows for “no-fault” divorce, which means that a couple can legally end their marriage without having to prove that one or both parties were at fault for the breakdown of the marriage. The difference being that this right applies to women as well as men and a report from Statistics Sweden in 2019 said women initiated divorce in approximately 68% of cases in Sweden in 2019.

Remember King Henry VIII? Well, then as now, the Catholic Church taught that a marriage could only be ended by death. In fact Martin Luther and his colleagues wondered in Henry’s case that bigamy (taking a second wife) wasn’t more biblically permissible than divorce! Divorce might happen in civil law but not in the eyes of God. The person you married was the person you were spiritually married to in God’s eyes.

But is this what the Bible teaches? Are there any grounds for divorce? Well yes, there are 4 main reasons of which Jesus mentions 1, Paul mentions 2 and the other main category is in Exodus, so Moses.

Just a comment on reason 4 – the Bible doesn’t specifically say abuse the way we use the term. That’s not unusual but I think the description fits. We are told husbands are not to (positively) love their wife as their own bodies and (negatively) not to hate their own flesh.

Hating their own flesh is a powerful description of abuse (sexual, emotional, verbal, physical). It breaks the bonds of love, it damages the image of God, it turns the stronger against the weaker (in most cases). Some churches have struggled here because it isn’t specifically mentioned but then we have the strange situation of a woman being able to leave a marriage if her husband has sex with someone else but not if he’s trying to kill her.

The church is trying to be faithful to scripture but there are far more ways in which people are cruel to each other and in those cases the Bible can end up Bible be used like an unjust prison guard. I think this perspective on all that Bible says means that if a husband (or more rarely a wife) is abusing their partner, the marriage vows to ‘love and to cherish’ have been fundamentally broken and there is no requirement to stay.

But divorce is not required but permitted in these cases. God always leaves room for genuine repentance, for genuine change, for forgiveness & reconciliation. That can happen. But sometimes our hearts are hard. Sometimes there is no remorse, there is no apology, there is no recognition of wrong, there is no repentance and therefore there can be no reconciliation. Marriage is a partnership, it is not supposed to hang together on the whims of just one partner.

Divorce in the Bible entailed the right to remarriage. Husbands of course had this right but so did the wives, that was the purpose of the certificate that Jesus mentioned. It gave the women the right to remarry without dishonour or disgrace. It gave her the chance of a future family and would ensure that she wasn’t forced into prostitution or poverty. So the Bible gives someone who has been wronged in these 4 categories the potential to remarry.

But what about a divorce that isn’t in one of those 4 categories, what then? Or what about the guilty party? Well here the Bible again runs counter to the culture & says in those cases (both Paul & Jesus) that remarriage should be avoided in the hope for reconciliation but the problem Jesus says and this is almost always the case is the hardness of our hearts.

No one gets divorced when things are great. When a marriage is good, loving, supportive, full of deep trust, respect, kindness no one wants to leave that. And let me add that kindness is a spiritual discipline. If you’re in a relationship (married or not yet) or if you’re not take this one to the bank – the daily practice of committing yourself to be kind to your partner will be the greatest protection you can ever have. If both sides practice daily kindness in words, speech, attitudes you’ll get through pretty much everything.

Divorce is the result of something, somewhere going wrong. Going wrong in a thousand small ways, dying slowly day by day or because something exploded as sin is exposed in more dramatic fashion. And in the process and Jesus uses a medical term (sclerosis) to describe a heart that has calcified, hardened so that love & kindness have been squeezed out. So in the case of a broken marriage that doesn’t fit the four categories the Bible says to remain unmarried & to seek reconciliation (1 Cor 7) in the hope that a hard heart would soften.

Blessed are the peacemakers has relevance in the home as much as anywhere. So does Forgive me for my sins as I forgive those who sin against me.

But then what happens if someone remarries what then? Well then, reconciliation is no longer possible (Jeremiah 3) and no longer bound. You can’t solve the problem of one divorce by adding another.

If you have been divorced, if your partner has broken covenant & faith with you – know this. God understands. In Jeremiah 3:8 for example God says:

I observed that it was because unfaithful Israel had committed adultery that I had sent her away and had given her a certificate of divorce.

Jeremiah 3:8 (CSB)

God knows, he says my partner has been unfaithful to me. If that’s the position you find yourself in – with a broken marriage in the rearview mirror then God knows. God cares. These matters are complex, painful, difficult – few things are more exhausting or as heartbreaking as promises to love forever being turned to dust. But there is forgiveness, there is hope, there is redemption – that is after all the message of the cross. The scandal of the cross, that all our sins and failures can be forgiven. That the past can be washed away, that something new can be born in us. That God can begin a new work – it might not be a pain free process, I don’t think God ever promises us that – but he does say it is possible.

That in a world of broken promises and broken hearts we have someone to turn to who will never break a promise, who will always be faithful, who will always be kind and who can heal even our deepest wounds.

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