Scripture Daily

Context No. 1045 of 4322 · Mark

Context · Reflection

Mark 10:1-9: in context

1He arose from there and came into the borders of Judea and beyond the Jordan. Multitudes came together to him again. As he usually did, he was again teaching them. 2Pharisees came to him testing him, and asked him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3He answered, “What did Moses command you?” 4They said, “Moses allowed a certificate of divorce to be written, and to divorce her.” 5But Jesus said to them, “For your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment. 6But from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female. 7For this cause a man will leave his father and mother, and will join to his wife, 8and the two will become one flesh, so that they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.”

The Pharisees come testing Jesus with a hot-button question: is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? Jesus turns it back: what did Moses command you? They cite the permission Moses gave for a certificate of divorce. And Jesus makes a crucial distinction: Moses wrote that provision because of your hardness of heart, but that was a concession, not the design. From the beginning, he says, God made them male and female; a man leaves father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two become one flesh. What God has joined together, let no one separate.

The key move is Jesus reaching back past Moses' concession to God's original intention. The Pharisees frame the question around what is permitted, the legal loophole, and Jesus reframes it around what God designed from the beginning. He does not deny that Moses allowed divorce, but he names it for what it was, a concession to human hardness of heart, a legal accommodation to the fact that people wound each other and marriages break. That is a tender and honest thing to admit, that some of the law's provisions exist because our hearts are hard, not because God's ideal was ever divorce. And then he lifts their eyes back to the design: two becoming one flesh, a union God himself joins, meant to be permanent. The point is not to load extra guilt on the broken but to recover the beauty and seriousness of what marriage was made to be, a one-flesh bond God joins and that people are not meant to tear apart. Jesus takes marriage more seriously than the loophole-hunters, precisely because he takes God's original design as the real standard.

Do I read God's commands looking for the loophole of what is permitted, or do I want to recover his original design, taking seriously what he intended from the beginning?

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