THE LAW OF
DIVORCE
1And he left
there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds
gathered to him again. And again, as was his custom, he taught them.
2And Pharisees
came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his
wife?”
3He answered
them, “What did Moses command you?”
4They said,
“Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.”
5And Jesus said
to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6But
from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’
7‘Therefore a
man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, 8and the two
shall become one flesh.’ So, they are no longer two but one flesh. 9What
therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
10And in the
house the disciples asked him again about this matter.
11And he said to
them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against
her, 12and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits
adultery.”
MARK
10:1-12
Lord Jesus just
returned from Galilee to the region of Judea, ready for his last missionary
trip of his earthly life. Wanting to prolong his time, he did not enter
immediately to Jerusalem, but passed to the eastern shore of the Jordan river,
away from the city center and preach to the poor masses of the outskirts.
As usual, the
Temple Jews came to tempt him, asking him hard questions that may drive him to
contradict Scripture and thus, condemn him to death for heresy.
In that occasion
they asked Jesus if it was ok to divorce your wife, in the manner Moses had
prescribed in the Torah.
The fact that
they considered a worthy question to ask, indicates that not everyone had the
same opinion over the grounds of divorce. In fact, Judaism had just suffered
Hellenization during the Greek invasions of Alexander and the subsequent reign
of the Hasmonean dynasty, to later be taken over by Imperial Rome. These two western
powers held similar laws about divorce than the western world today. Most of us
would understand and accept the legal logic behind their legislation, but they
differed in the way Jewish Law understood divorce.
Based on these differences,
many ‘westernized’ Jews must have adopted the Greek and Roman view, and
therefore betrayed Judaism. And so, they pushed Jesus to answer with the
intension to find in him also fault to the Law’s principles.
But Jesus
answered by asking them what Moses said in regards to divorce, and so they
quoted that Moses allowed any discontent as legal reasons for marriage dissolution.
Jesus, without
discrediting the work of Moses, expands in the explanation that the Law Giver
ordered that because people were of hard spirits, incapable of sustaining
altruistic ideals. Since they were primitive and insensitive in comparison with
the time of Jesus, God allowed them to divorce for any reason, after a just
financial settlement.
This story is partial,
because it is the shortest gospel. But the same story gets narrated in Matthew
5:32 and 19:9; where our Lord cancels all reasons to break up a marriage,
except through commitment of sexual immorality (πορνείᾳ).
JESUS recovered the essence of commitment. Marriage is
a sacred commitment before God, where a couple promise to support each other
sexually, physically and emotionally for a lifetime, and into that unit, they
will bring children into the world, making a Godly family, the base of society.
To destroy something as sacred as that, it was wrong. So, Jesus in his category
of God, abolished the Mosaic regulations, and reverted the conditions of marriage
to the original essence when God instituted it (Genesis1:28), so he removed all
unworthy causals, leaving only one, sexual immorality, which can take different
forms, especially infidelity, because it destroys the bond that holds together
a man and a woman before God, and which was the initial reason of their
commitment before the Creator.
Without fidelity, it cannot be marriage. And that is
another reason how we know Christian marriage is monogamous. Because even in
plural marriages, when a man is ‘married’ legally to more than one woman, the
moment he sleeps with a second ‘wife’, and she cannot sleep with another man, ‘sexual
immorality’ has occur. And if a man and a woman sleep with other partners,
things not considered in polygamy, there also there will be ‘sexual immorality’.
Jesus’s example of marriage can only make sense within
a monogamous relationship.
Omar Flores.
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