In the year 311 BC a marriage contract in Egypt was drawn up for Heraclides and Demetria, both from the town of Koan.
The contract specified that the bride was bringing into the marriage clothing and bling worth a thousand drachmas. Heraclides, meanwhile, agreed to support Demetria according to what was fitting for a freeborn woman. As to where the two of them would live, that would be whatever they both agreed to after consulting with each other.
This marriage, like some that we read about, also had prenuptial conditions, as far as divorce was concerned. If Demetria did not act in an appropriate manner, Heraclides could send her away without any of the wealth she’d brought into the marriage but only — and this was key, if three men agreed he was right, and both husband and wife had to agree on this three person panel!
Conversely, if Heraclides brought in other women to live in the house to shame Demetria, or had children by other women, or if he wronged Demetria in any way whatsoever she would not only keep the wealth she brought into the relationship but he would have to give her an extra thousand drachmas. Once again, a three person panel was involved, and both sides had to approve the arbitrators.
Unlike many marriage customs around the world, not only in the ancient past but in the present, that give all the power to men and none to women, these two Egyptian freeborn people seem to have entered into an agreement where there were safeguards to protect both of them.
Certainly it doesn’t sound as if women had any degree of mutual protection in biblical times, judging from the way the Pharisees describe the law of Moses.
Or did they?
This present scripture has been used in the past to guarantee almost a master/slave relationship between husbands and wives. It has been used to force women to stay in abusive relationships. It has meant, in practical terms, that in some churches those who are divorced against their own wish find they cannot be a part of the life of the church they grew up in. They become pariahs, and in the end are driven away from the church.
What did Jesus mean by these words? What do these words really mean?
Perhaps a clue is to be found in the second part of today’s gospel passage where the subject shifts from the rights of wives, or the lack of them, to the place of children in the kingdom of God. Because, as we will see, Jesus is speaking about two very vulnerable groups, who at that time, and in most times, had very few legal protections.
Let’s look at the first part first. The passage as we have it seems simple enough. Jesus is busy teaching the people when some Pharisees came to ask him a question with the specific intention of testing him and trapping him. To a certain extent they did not really care about the answer. They simply hoped that whatever Jesus said, aye or nay, would give them sufficient grounds for condemning Jesus on the charge that he did not follow the law of Moses.
Note that the incident begins with the phrase “Some Pharisees...”. Some Christians seem to think that all Pharisees were villains, evil Bible misinterpreters who tried to hold people in the chains of legalistic interpretations of scripture. This is simply untrue. We’re only talking about the stinkers here. If we lived in first century Judea, we would have attended a synagogue which was administered by a leader who was a Pharisee. Our pastor would probably have been a Pharisee. He would have been the person who stood up for us, preached on the scriptures for us, and looked after our spiritual needs. Unlike Sadducees who had little interest in common people, or the communal societies like the Essenes which raised the bar very high when it came to standards of behavior, we would have found the Pharisees to be our kind of people.
These particular Pharisees, at any rate, seemed to be recognizing Jesus had authority when it came to interpreting scripture, for they asked him a question about the law of Moses — “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”
Though it seems like a compliment, they were of course trying to trap him. And Jesus, as he did on more than one occasion, answered a question with a question. “What did Moses command you?”
By Moses, Jesus is referring to the Torah, the first five books of our Bible. These ancient books told the history of the people and gave case law. To Jesus’ question these Pharisees gave a simple reply: “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.”
They were referring to Deuteronomy 24:1-5. I’m going to read you the first two verses of this passage. I’ll read the other three verses in a few minutes, for reasons you’ll understand a little later.
Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her, and so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house; she then leaves his house and goes off to become another man’s wife.
The law seems to be very clear — if the man decides for whatever reason he wants a divorce, he gets a divorce. It is cut and dried. What’s to argue about?
But if you read the law of Moses from beginning to end you’ll begin to notice something odd — there’s no wedding service in the Bible. Weddings took place, and were probably performed according to custom, but most of the words that may have been spoken at your own wedding, or a wedding you attended have come from human custom and practice.
The same is true when it comes to divorce. Divorce took place among God’s people, again according to the customs that had developed among them, but the references to divorce in the law and the prophets only indirectly referred to these practices. This particular scripture speaks to only a few specific incidents.
These Pharisees were literally taking what was meant to be case law for a specific instance and applying it literally and universally.
Poet and scholar Robert Alter, in his translation of the Torah, rendered the phrase “something objectionable” as “he finds in her some shamefully exposed thing..” The Jewish Publication Society’s translation said “he finds something obnoxious” about her. Duane L. Christensen’s translation for the Word Biblical Commentary is very literal: “...because he finds in her ‘a naked thing...’” The implication is that she is engaged in public lewd and sexual misbehavior. It has nothing to do with whether she has failed to please her husband in the ordinary course of events.
So there’s more than meets the eye in this passage. Deuteronomy goes on to say:
Then suppose the second man dislikes her, writes her a bill of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house (or the second man who married her dies); her first husband, who sent her away, is not permitted to take her again to be his wife after she has been defiled; for that would be abhorrent to the Lord, and you shall not bring guilt on the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a possession.
Some commentators suggest that this passage in its entirety is stating that men could not divorce their wives, marry another, then divorce that wife and remarry the first wife as a way of swapping wives and still staying within custom and law. This piece of case law goes even further. Deuteronomy 24:5 says, “When a man is newly married, he shall not go out with the army or be charged with any related duty. He shall be free at home one year, to be happy with the wife whom he has married.”
This addition to the law about divorce is designed to stop people from divorcing their current wife, then temporarily marrying another woman, in order to avoid military service, and then remarrying their first wife. So far from giving men carte blanche to divorce wives casually, this law prevented them from divorcing to swap wives or dodge the draft.
Jesus knew this. Jesus knew scripture. He ought to. Jesus also knew that the Hebrew words were referring to extraordinarily lewd public behavior, so he replied, scornfully one imagines, that this law had more to do with their hardness of heart — something we associate with the tyranny of a Pharaoh, than permission to divorce as one pleased.
Jesus, as elsewhere, pushed the law to its limit for these individuals, and in doing so fulfilled the law, as he put it elsewhere. Remember the Sermon on the Mount? Jesus said “You have heard it said...” and told those listening that while the law forbade murder, those who insulted their brothers and sisters were murdering the self-esteem and integrity of another human being, through their verbal abuse. He said that the law forbade adultery, but those who lusted in their heart were committing adultery as well. He said that the law told us to love our neighbors, and that even our enemies were our neighbors, and we were to love them too.
Jesus goes back further than Deuteronomy, all the way to the deeps of time and creation. Genesis goes back farther than Moses. Jesus showed that marriage is hallowed by God at the beginning of time, and therefore those who interpret this law from Deuteronomy as something that allowed them to divorce a spouse for the slightest reason were opening themselves up to the charge of adultery. He therefore created a whole new case law for those who thought they could dispose of women on a whim. They couldn’t.
Later, when his disciples in private seemed to worriedly ask about this, Jesus repeated what he had said. Whoever divorced their spouse and remarried is an adulterer.
More insight can be gained by looking at the next four verses of today’s passage. People brought little children to Jesus, hoping for even a touch from the master’s hand, and the disciples, like many church busybodies, did their best to keep the children at bay, but Jesus, when he saw this, responded indignantly, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.”
At the time of Jesus, children represented one of the most vulnerable populations. They had no rights, and relatively little value, until they were able to share in the family’s craft or agriculture. They were expected to work, and until they worked, they were a waste of time for someone like Jesus, at least in the eyes of the apostles. But Jesus told us that those on the margins of society — little children, women, women who have been divorced — are ones God favors. God’s law protects them. God’s people ought to encourage them.
When Jesus said “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it,” he may not have been saying what we usually think he was saying — that there is something pure and innocent about childhood and we need to bring that to the table. No, Jesus was saying that in order to be part of God’s people we can’t act like God owes us anything, as if we were workers paid by the hour or by the job.
Jesus was suggesting that despite our high opinion of ourselves we have no apparent monetary value, much like children before they’re able to help with the family business. Therefore we all, whether we have a high opinion of ourselves or not, depend on God’s grace. All of us are in that position of being given the priceless gift as a child — our value comes from God’s estimation, and not the work we do.
That is what that whole grace thing is about.
If you want a good example of what Jesus thinks about the divorced — see the story about the woman at the well, in the gospel of John. This woman had been married five times, and she wasn’t legally married to her current beaux. Yet Jesus asked her for a drink of water, demonstrating that whatever barriers his society put up against the two of them conversing he was willing to ignore. Jesus offered her the living water, which would sustain her spiritually. And this woman became the evangelist that brought her whole village into the fold.
The truth is, just like that marriage contract I referred to at the beginning of this message, God’s people had worked out over the centuries equitable ways to protect people in marriage, and to protect them in divorce as well.
Divorce is never a great outcome. No one goes into a wedding thinking, “If this doesn’t work out I’ll just bail on the whole marriage thing.” But there are abusers and there are abused people, and no one has the right to tyrannize another human being. In our own time we are recognizing that those who are terrorized, abused, and misused, male or female, have a right to begin anew.
Rather than being hard-hearted, at least until we ourselves are forced to throw ourselves before the throne of mercy for much-needed grace, let us offer each other kindness and understanding. Let us dedicate ourselves to protecting the most vulnerable in our society This is how it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, in the kingdom of grace and good news.
Amen.