Jesus' Hard Teaching on Divorce

There might not be any teaching from Jesus that is more counter-cultural, and more difficult for many of us, than His teaching on divorce and remarriage.

I get it, and having endured a civil divorce many years ago, I'm not speaking from some kind of ivory tower here. I know the pain, I know the "justifications" we may or may not have, the guilt or shame involved, the blame, and the like.

I know there are some painful situations that we must escape because, sadly, sometimes it's not safe to remain. This is all real. It's hard. And there's no sugar-coating it. I say all that to say this: I've been there, so if this is hard for you, well, it was hard for me, too. Even Jesus' disciples, immediately after Jesus gives this teaching, struggle with it.

And what good would these daily e-mails be if I didn't touch the "harder" topics from time to time?

So it's okay to struggle with this. I do not want to soften His words, or try and read things into certain clauses that give us an "out" or a loop-hole to make his teaching a little easier to swallow.

I want to sit with the struggle for a bit, because there's a lot more good news in this text than most of us even think about.

Because Jesus is really getting at something much deeper here than the circumstances of a "failed marriage." He's driving at something more fundamental about His love for us.

In our culture, we ask about almost every task, every acquisition, any relationship: what is it good for?

When your phone battery no longer holds a charge, it's useless. You go get a new one. When the dishwasher stops working, you don't leave it there in the kitchen because you're fond of it. You haul it out to the curb. We hardly give it any thought at all, because the logic seems natural. A thing has value while it serves a purpose. When it stops functioning, when it is on longer useful to us, it stops mattering.

The trouble begins when we apply that same logic to our relationships with other people—and to our relationship with God.

If we are honest, many of us carry a hidden fear that we are loved only so long as we are useful. We suspect that if we stopped producing, stopped helping, stopped being the kind of company someone enjoys, then the people who say they "love us" would leave us.

And if we're doubly-honest, many of us have the same suspicion of God. And it goes both ways. If he stops being "useful" to us, people say, "well, I tried religion and it didn't work for me." But more—what about when we stop being useful to Him?

This is why so many of us struggle with Jesus' words about marriage and divorce.

In Mark's Gospel, the Pharisees press Him on the lawfulness of divorce, and He refuses to argue on their terms. Instead He goes back to the beginning: "But from the beginning of creation, '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.' So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate" (Mark 10:6-9).

There's nothing here at all in our contemporary logic. He says nothing about marriage as a "social arrangement" to be preserved for the sake of stability; because the family-unit is the building block of our society, and because without it, our society will crumble. There may be some truth in that, but that's not what Jesus teaches here. He says nothing about how well a marriage is "working," how much we "feel" in love with our spouses, or whether the marriage "works."

He appeals to creation, to God's original design. Before anything in the world was broken.

So we must go back to the beginning as well.

In Genesis, before there was any sin, God looks at the man He has made and says, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner" (Genesis 2:18).

We often read "helper" and hear "assistant," someone brought in to get the chores done. But the Hebrew word here, ezer, is most frequently applied in Scripture to God Himself. "My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth" (Psalm 121:2).

An ezer is not a tool. An ezer is one who comes alongside you as a saving presence. Eve is not given to Adam so that he can come up with more creative names for the animals, so he can tend the garden a little faster, and get on with his day so he doesn't miss his football game.

God gives Eve to Adam so that he might no longer be alone, so that the image of God in him, which is an image of self-giving love, might finally connect with another, that it might have a destination, and that Adam might receive the same self-giving love in return.

No other animal in the garden could do that, An ox might be "useful," but it cannot do for Adam what his wife could. And Adam, likewise, cannot experience the love of God with an ox because Adam cannot give himself to an ox that way.

This is the heart of the matter. God made humanity in His image, and God is love. But love cannot exist in a vacuum. It cannot exist in isolation.

Marriage, from the beginning, was meant to be the place where human beings learn to pour themselves out and discover that they are not diminished, but elevated by the kind of love that gives oneself away. As such, marriage was never, in the beginning, about usefulness. It was about communion.

That is why Saint Paul can take this very verse from Genesis and explain: "This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church" (Ephesians 5:32).

Marriage is an icon. It points beyond itself to the way God has bound Himself to His people. The prophets saw this long before Paul. "For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name" (Isaiah 54:5). And through Hosea, to a people who had been repeatedly unfaithful, an adulterous spouse, God says, "And I will take you for my wife forever; I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy" (Hosea 2:19).

Now suppose we imposed our "culture's question" about usefulness and function upon God.

What use are we to God?

Saint Paul tells the Athenians that God is not "served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things" (Acts 17:25).

He lacks nothing. He has never once needed our help.

If marriage were merely a functional arrangement, God would have had just cause to walk away from us on our very wedding day.

And yet He has espoused us to Himself no less. "But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).

This is the promise that we often struggle to grasp when we wrestle with Jesus' difficult teaching here. When He says that what God has joined no one may separate, He is not only defending human marriage.

He is revealing the character of the One who has joined Himself to us.

His fidelity does not rest on our usefulness. It rests on His own nature. "If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself" (2 Timothy 2:13).

It is no accident that the story of the rich young man follows immediately. "Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, 'You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me'" (Mark 10:21).

The man goes away grieving. His blindness is the same blindness the Pharisees showed about marriage: he values everything in terms of earthly gain or loss. He evaluated all things according to his worldly attachments. He cannot imagine that following Jesus, losing himself in that way, might be the only way find His true self, a self elevated by divine love.

Saint Thomas Aquinas defined love as to will the good of another (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 26, a. 4).

It's not about usefulness. It's not about finding someone who "meets our needs" (as we define those needs). It's not about what we can get from the other person on account of loving them. Love is to simply will their good. This is what Jesus is driving at. Marriage is valuable not because it serves us; rather, it has worth because it's not about what we "get" at all, it's a communion that is meant to raise us above this-worldly gain or loss.

The hard truth is, no matter how the situation panned out, or who was to blame, many of our marriages in our culture "fail" because we go into it for all the wrong reasons. We go in saying, "well, this person fills a hole in my life," and by saying it that way, with words we actually think are somehow romantic, we're actually saying, "I love this person because of what they do for me."

What we don't usually think through, though, is what's left when they no longer "fit" that function for us? What happens when the other ceases to be useful, or might even be anti-useful, more of a burden than a blessing, when it comes to our practical, worldly, pursuits? Is this person making me "happy" anymore?

The problem with our pursuits of happiness is that we're looking for it in all the wrong places, in the things of this life that will never ultimately give us what we most desperately seek.

What if the problem isn't the other person, but what we've attached our "happiness" to, to begin with?

What if true contentment, true joy, isn't about this world at all, but about finally becoming who we were made to be in the beginning?

And who were we made to be?

God's beloved; who receives Him as our beloved. We were made in His image, and since God is love, that is our very purpose. It's not about what we feel, what we get, or how useful the arrangement is. It is to simply rest in Him, and to offer ourselves back to Him in a way that does not diminish ourselves, but makes us infinitely more.

What if God only delighted in you insofar as it works for Him? Well, the glorious truth that Jesus is teaching us about marriage here is that His espousal to you is not based on your usefulness, your function, or even what "warm feelings" He gets from you. And this espousal is inviolable. You can walk away. You can be unfaithful, and reject the benefits of this marriage (this is not a once-saved-always-saved teaching). But that will not change His love for you, it will not change the fact that He's chosen to and desires above all to be one-flesh with you.

So here is the practical question for today. Do you rest in God only insofar as it "works for you"?

When prayer feels dry, when He seems to ask more than He gives, do stick with it, or walk away? Sit with the truth that He has no need of you and has chosen you anyway. Let that undo the fear that you are loved for your usefulness. Then look at one person in your life today—your spouse if you are married——and will their good without calculating what they're doing for you. Ask for nothing back. I'm not saying never speak your needs to those you love. But we should not demand a return on an investment of love—because then the investment is not love at all.

So, do a single, small act of love with no strings attached. Expect nothing back. That small act of unprofitable love is the image of God coming alive in you. It might not feel like much in the moment. But it is a communion in the espousal of which Jesus says, "let no man separate."