Divorce

Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash

1. D-I-V-O-R-C-E

In her famous song D-I-V-O-R-C-E, Country singer Tammy Wynette imagines herself standing before her four-year-old son and spelling out the words she doesn’t want him to understand.

And one of those words is divorce. She says:

I spell out all the hurtin' words and turn my head when I speak
'Cause I can't spell away this hurt
That's drippin' down my cheek…

Let’s admit it: the subject of divorce is one of the most painful ones there is. It names some of the greatest hurts we bear. Whether divorce is a sudden shock, or divorce is a relief after years of a sorrowful marriage, it is rarely anything less than traumatic – not just for the partners but for others around them as well. Divorce frequently appears on lists of the top five traumatic life experiences, alongside the death of a loved one and serious illness.

So as we open the Scriptures and hear Jesus’ teaching on divorce, I just want to recognise that this may be a very sore point for many of us. And it will be sore in very different ways: just as every marriage is unique, so every divorce is unique, too. We never really know what happens in someone else’s relationship and it can be hard to untangle what has happened in your own, too. This is a subject that needs much prayer and patience – neither to water down Jesus’ teaching nor to miss the note of grace and mercy in what he says.

But what we must not do is go looking for loopholes. If Jesus truly is our Lord, we will not treat his teaching with contempt in that way. There are no loopholes with Jesus.

As before with the Sermon on the Mount, you might be coming from two opposite poles. You might be complacent, or you might be crushed. You might need to be shocked out of your self-congratulation. Or you might need to be comforted as one mourning for your sins. I’ve found it very hard to prepare these sermons knowing that there’ll be people coming from both places.

So I am going to ask you to self-diagnose: which are you? Because Jesus has news for both. One message is: God demands far more than you ever thought. But the other is: God’s grace is larger than you ever dreamed.

2. The certificate of divorce vs 31

This passage is one of two places in Matthew’s gospel in which Jesus teaches about divorce and remarriage. The other is Matthew 19 – and so we’ll sometimes refer to that passage to flesh out what Jesus is teaching.

Jesus starts here by reminding us of the law of Moses and what it said about the subject of divorce. He’s just spoken about adultery and reminded us that God’s pattern for marriage was one of lifelong faithfulness. In Matthew 19, he reminds everyone of the pattern for marriage set up in Genesis 2, that a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. And Jesus adds ‘What God has brought together, let no one separate’.

Let’s be clear: Jesus takes marriage with utmost seriousness as a life-long, unbreakable union created by God.

But what about divorce? The law of Moses certainly allowed for divorce and remarriage. Well, that’s not quite right: it recognised that divorce and remarriage happen and gave some protections and stipulations around it.

But you know what humans do? They take protection and permission and they make it into a loophole.

By the time of Jesus, a kind of no-fault divorce was being practised by the Jews and by the Romans, too. You could divorce your wife or your husband for “each and every reason”. You may have grown tired of them or there was something that displeased you about them. They were a bad cook or had lost their looks, or were loafing about the house, or whatever. One scholar says: ‘The impression one gains from ancient Jewish sources is that divorce was relatively easy and was not considered a grave misdeed’.¹

That helps us get what Jesus is saying here: ‘You’ve heard it said that all you need to do to divorce your wife is give her a certificate and you're done’. Now that’s not what Moses meant, but that’s how he was being taken in Jesus' day. It was a lax view: you could divorce for any reason, couldn’t you?

3. No divorce, except for sexual immorality vs 32

But not according to Jesus. Listen to what he says:

But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

The Lord Jesus certainly does not side with a permissive view of divorce. He has no truck with that whatsoever. Marriage is not a social convention, but a design of the creator from the beginning of days. And it is intended as a life-long union.

So there are no loopholes. No one can pretend that Moses or Jesus think that divorce is anything but the opposite of what God intends.

For Jesus, there’s only one exception – and that’s behaviour that strikes at the heart of the marriage bond. Marriage is a sexually exclusive union, and so behaviour that disrupts that union loosens that bond.

Now that’s interesting because Jesus says that there is a permissible reason for divorce - which means that there is a permissible reason for remarriage, too. But it’s not your wife’s cooking or your husband’s body odour or even that you’ve grown apart. It’s allowable in the extreme case of sexual infidelity.

But in most cases, that’s not on the table. According to Jesus, what happens when you divorce your spouse and they remarry or you remarry is adultery – because they are still one flesh with someone else.

4. How to receive this teaching

Now, once again, I hope Jesus has got our attention. How can we possibly live this out?

When he repeated this teaching in Matthew 19, people said to Jesus: ‘Well then it is better not to marry!’

You can understand this reaction, can’t you?

So what would Jesus have us do? How would he have us live? The answer to that involves something I’ve been trying to show from the whole sermon on the mount: and that is that we need to move from loophole thinking to wholehearted discipleship. Not ‘What can I get away with?’ but ‘How can I follow Jesus with my whole heart?’

So what are we to do?

It’s worth saying again that this is not an abstract question but involves our real lives and real pains and disappointments – and the complexity of our most personal relationships. And I realise too that we are all at different places with this: some are unmarried, some are divorced and remarried, some are married and happy, and some are married and struggling.

The first thing we need to do is to hear what Jesus is saying about marriage. It’s not merely a human construct, but a gift of God uniting a woman and man in a lifelong union where the two become one flesh, blessed and established by him.

Divorce is never the will of God; and is only permitted because we human beings are hard-hearted. Sometimes it is sadly necessary, but let’s not pretend it is anything less than sadly necessary.

We take vows on a wedding day for ‘as long as we both shall live’. The scope of marriage is intended by God to be for life. Knowing that, we should invest our time and resources in our relationships – in preparing for them, in being people who are good to be married to, in maturing ourselves, and more. We’ve too often bought the romantic lie that life with our soul mate will be automatically fulfilling without any effort. One certain truth is that you, a sinner, have married another sinner. So being prepared and realistic about that is essential to a successful marriage.

But in hearing Jesus say this about marriage, I think we should also be those who celebrate and honour singleness. Like most societies, ours makes an idol of coupledom, if not marriage. And yet Jesus himself was not married! The apostle Paul said that it was good to remain single. We honour marriage more if we also honour those who decide for whatever reason that marriage is not for them.

And that means we as a Christian community have a role: to support and honour each other in both states, whether married or single.

And we need to support one another when marriage goes wrong, too. This is always a tricky balance: because we need to uphold Jesus’ teaching here with the compassion and mercy that he would also want us to show – and which he models himself. We’re frail creatures, so easily broken; and we need to recognise that in each other while at the same time not just disregarding what Jesus says. We will want to help each other to reconcile. As Christians, that is always our goal as far as it is up to us – since we want to be like our Lord.

I don’t underestimate how hard that can be. But that is why we are taught repentance and forgiveness, patience and acts of service. To love your neighbour as yourself – and your spouse is surely your nearest neighbour – means learning what is best for them. A marriage is, after all, not a competition with your spouse for vindication or attention. The counsellor Ester Perel says ‘Do you want to be married, or do you want to be right?’

I’ve counselled couples who I think were looking for me to score them a points victory over the other person. If you want someone to baptise your divorce, don’t come to me – I am sure you’ll be able to find a secular counsellor who tell you what you want to hear.

But what about when a relationship is irretrievable?

Jesus says that divorce is not what God wants for his followers. But in a sinful world, divorce will happen even amongst the followers of Jesus.

And it’s worth saying here that the Bible has more to say about divorce and remarriage than Jesus says here. Paul, who knew Jesus’ teaching, adds that desertion by an unbelieving spouse frees you to remarry. And I think that helps us consider what Jesus had in mind. Marriage is a covenant of committed, faithful love that is meant to provide safety, protection and sustenance: and whatever destroys that covenant destroys the marriage. Spousal abuse or neglect are examples of actions by one partner to another that do this. And I think that’s worth emphasizing.

I hope it was never said of me as a pastor that I would encourage a person to leave their spouse. However, I have encouraged those who’ve suffered abuse at the hands of their partners to first seek safety and secondly that they are free to divorce.

There is no doubt in my mind that spousal abuse is grounds for divorce.

But the more we consider the possible grounds for divorce, the more we are likely to fall into loophole thinking. We start looking for technicalities. We say ‘I was deserted by my spouse’ when they left because you drove them to leave by your awful treatment of them.

So let me tell you what I am trying to do as a pastor when I speak to people seeking remarriage.

What I am looking for is to see that the gospel has taken root in your heart and that you have grasped the nature of God’s mercy to you. Which means: have you accepted your part in what has happened? Have you named your sins and confessed them to God? Do you come as a forgiven sinner, or do you come as entitled Pharisee?

Let me set aside the cases where abuse, desertion, and adultery have taken place. I think these are clear Biblical grounds for divorce and remarriage. But even so, it’s possible for loophole thinking to creep in. And I would say: it’s important to look in your own heart as you stand before God and ask whether these conditions truly apply – since only you and God know the truth.

But in other cases: I want to know, have you understood the tragedy of your divorce? Have you truly considered the impact of the divorce on all concerned? Do you have anything to apologise for to your former partner? Is there outstanding business between the two of you? Is your posture before God one of self-justification, as if God owes me my next marriage, or is it one of repentance leading to forgiveness? Given what has happened in the past, what have you learnt? And why should your future spouse trust you with your promises, since you’ve broken them before?

A Christian man I know, for example, was deserted by his wife. It was sudden and awful. Technically, I suppose he was free to remarry. But everyone could see how poorly he treated his wife over the years – he neglected her, he was argumentative, he didn’t do anything around the house. He starved her of love.

What would Jesus have him do?

I think Jesus would have him first of all hear the gospel of grace and mercy: that even the sins he committed in his marriage are forgiven by the blood of Jesus Christ. But that means repentance on his part: acknowledging his sins in his marriage, even though he was also sinned against. He would need to change and hear afresh the demands of Jesus to a surpassing righteousness.

And then, should God grant him the grace of a new partner, I think he might remarry, but not because he had found a loophole, but because he had found in Jesus Christ the grace of God and in it the forgiveness of his sins.

The gospel of Jesus is good news for the divorced, as it is for all of us – not because it waters down the demands of righteousness but because it invites us to know the mercy of God for us in the cross of Jesus Christ.

1. This is from the Matthew commentary of Davies and Allison.