Studying Matthew 19 3-9
This week we’re studying two texts that arguably speak to the topic of “the Christian home in a modern world.” The texts are Deuteronomy 6:3-9 – the shema and the ve’ahavta, a text we’ve studied before [with some notes here from that time] – along with Matthew 19:3-9, which is Matthew’s record of Jesus’ response to a question about divorce. We might have to do some thinking about how these texts work together to build up a picture of “the Christian home in a modern world.” But in the meantime, here are a few notes on the Matthew text:
BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT
Since we’re in Matthew’s gospel, we’ll want to remember that the overall context is a presentation of the life of Christ that emphasizes Jesus’ teachings and authoritative interpretation of the law and the prophets, as well as his organization of a community of disciples who will pass on what they themselves have learned and are learning. [Because, “remember, I am with you always …” (Matthew 28:20).] Matthew’s gospel has the reputation for being heavy on references to Jewish customs and practices, which it seems to assume the readers will be thoroughly familiar with – that is, without much translating or explanation. That may be relevant for our reading of this particular text, as it happens.
By the time we get to this particular teaching on divorce, we are nearing the end of the story. The Transfiguration has taken place; Jesus has gathered his group in Galilee, briefed them on the trip to Jerusalem and its upcoming events [not to say they have grasped the import of the project], and now he’s made his way to “Judea beyond the Jordan” (Matthew 19:1) – that is, where John the Baptist was conducting his inaugural ministry and where Jesus began his own public ministry (Matthew 3). The teaching and healing that takes place in Matthew 19 and Matthew 20, then, is immediately preparatory to Jesus’ entry into the city of Jerusalem in Matthew 21. This context may point us toward a deeper meaning in Jesus’ remarks here.
We probably need to be aware of a couple of raging controversies of Jesus’ own day that seem to be embedded in or pointed to by this text. One was the status of divorce, and the grounds for divorce, in rabbinic interpretation. In Jesus’ day, the leading rabbis would have been Shammai and Hillel, the last of the zugot, or “pairs,” who contributed to the rabbinic interpretive tradition. One of their well-known differences of opinion specifically concerned divorce. [Here’s more on this, along with some information on where that difference went, and why, in later rabbinic tradition.] This seems likely to have been the background for the question in v3.
The poster children for wanton divorce – as well as for flouting other laws, like those against marrying one’s close relatives – were Herod Antipas, the current ruler of the territory, and his former sister-in-law but now wife, Herodias. Their sensitivity about the problem had already led to the execution of John the Baptist, who’d railed against their marriage as unlawful. (See Mark 6:17-18.)
This fact presumably makes Jesus’ remarks politically sensitive, as well as religiously meaningful. That’s if we’re thinking of “religion” the way “modern people” do, as something separated – divorced, if you will – from every other aspect of daily life.
The lectionary includes the related synoptic text Mark 10:2-16, but not this one, and not Luke 16:18, which presents a word from Jesus on divorce as an out-of-the-blue commentary on Pharisaic inclination to soften the requirements of the law. That makes Jesus’ limited allowance of grounds for divorce, namely the cause of sexual immorality, something we wouldn’t know was in the Bible if all we knew were the lectionary.
CLOSER READING
When the Pharisees “come” to Jesus “to test him” they are presumably aware of the religious and political controversy surrounding the question of divorce, and have some agenda related to that controversy when they pose their test question.
In v4, the word translated read – “have you not read” – would in many other contexts be translated “recognized.” It might be worth thinking about any difference in meaning we detect between reading and recognizing.
What Jesus is asking the questioners to recognize, or to have read, is the action of God in creation, making humanity “male and female” (Genesis 1:27), and then saying – in what we now think of as a second, slightly different account of creation from the first – “on account of this a man will leave his father and mother and be joined [literally, glued] to his wife and the two will become one flesh.”
That God-made union then becomes the basis for Jesus’ reasoning: what God has joined – paired together, the Greek word that gave Hebrew the word used to describe the relationship between the schools of Hillel and Shammai, by the way – man should not separate.
The questioners persist, by asking why Moses included a command, to issue a paper of divorce and to send her away.
Jesus responds that this was because of their hardness of heart – using the Greek word that gives us our terms sclerosis and sclerotic. That is, permission to divorce at all is already a concession to a problem people have. Or maybe we should say, a problem men, specifically, have, since the issue in question is men divorcing their wives, and not at all the other way around. [Although for that matter, we probably don’t actually think women never have the problem of hardness of heart themselves. In this legal environment, however, they’re forced to deal with it differently.]
In v9, then, Jesus sums up his teaching: a man who divorces his wife, except because of sexual immorality, commits adultery; a man who marries a divorced woman also commits adultery. That exception to the “no divorce” rule, for sexual immorality, tracks along with the school of Shammai. And the teaching is, in effect, an indictment of the reigning Herod Antipas.
Some extra thoughts …
In the ancient world, we think we know, most women depended on men for the basic necessities of life. Women’s options for securing basic survival independently of a husband or male relative were extremely limited. Reciprocally, most men depended on women, and the specific kinds of work women specifically did, for basic elements of their daily lives. The pressure to marry was enormous, and practical, if nothing else.
The world we live in is different – to a degree, at least. It’s still the case that single women with dependent children are at much higher risk for poverty. The poverty rate for single mother households is approximately 28-30%, compared to around 17% for single father households, and around 5% for married couple households. Single life may not bear the same stigma it once did, nor widowhood the same life-threatening perils. Nevertheless, even in our modern or post-modern world, we recognize people are made for connection and community of life. Pursuing that connection through marriage is still a privileged means to that end; losing it through divorce still feels traumatic.
But among the things we ourselves recognize are the many ways human hardness of heart can manifest itself, and the imperative to make a way of escape for those on the receiving end of that hardness of heart. In particular, we no longer – I hope – insist that faithfulness to God demands that people continue to expose themselves and their children to violence and abuse in their own homes. Surely, the abundant life Jesus Christ came to make possible for people includes not having to be continually on guard against assault and grievous bodily harm, especially from their own intimate partner.
As one author has said,
Divorce is a fire exit. When a house is burning, it doesn’t matter who set the fire. If there is no fire exit, everyone in the house will be burned!
Mehmet Murat-Ildan, quoted in Adrian Warnock, “Christian views on divorce and remarriage – a spectrum,” April, 2024And as we know in the “modern world,” while we’re not supposed to prop the fire exits open, we’re also not supposed to block them up. Much as we hope no one will ever need to use them.
Some questions on this week’s texts are here.
Image: “Feuchtwangen Pfarrkirche – Vorhalle Fresko Evangelist Matthäus” (cropped), Wolfgang Sauber, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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