Among Jesus’ most controversial teachings are his words on the subject of marriage and divorce, and two of them are found in the Gospel of Matthew:
“Furthermore it has been said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that whoever divorces his wife for any reason except sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a woman who is divorced commits adultery.”
Matthew 5:31-32
This brief statement is found in the middle of what is known as The Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus taught a large crowd of people gathered near a mountain in the region of Galilee. After affirming his commitment to fulfill the OT Scriptures rather than destroy them (Matt. 5:17), he began to challenge some of the popular interpretations of the law. Among these was the Mosaic requirement that a man who wanted to divorce his wife because of some indecency he found in her must give her a written bill of divorce. As we noted when we discussed Deut. 24 earlier, this was not instituting divorce in Israel but regulating a practice that was already a part of the cultural fabric. Moses was making divorce more difficult and therefore less likely in Israel than among her neighbors. However, by Jesus’ day the Mosaic teaching on divorce was being interpreted by many men as a license to divorce their wives for almost any reason at all, and, on the basis of the Mosaic law, they claimed that their actions were sanctioned by God himself.
What Jesus says in response may be a bit difficult to understand at first. He says that if a man divorces his wife for any reason other than sexual immorality (we’ll discuss the meaning of that phrase later) he causes her to commit adultery. How exactly does a man divorcing his wife, presumably his innocent wife, cause her to become an adulteress? I think William Hendriksen is probably right when he suggests an alternative translation here: “Whoever divorces his wife except on the basis of infidelity exposes her to adultery.” Hendriksen reasons that since the Greek verb “to commit adultery” is in the passive voice, it “states not what the woman becomes or what she does but what she undergoes, suffers, is exposed to. She suffers wrongs. He does wrong.” The last clause makes this plain, because whoever marries an innocent woman who has been divorced by her husband commits adultery against her, and her first husband is responsible for the wrong that has been done.
Jesus’ response is consistent with the high view of marriage that we saw throughout the Old Testament, and it was intended to be a check against the loose morals of Jesus’ day and the rampant divorce and remarriage that was being practiced among the Jews. He was challenging them to rethink their positions and practices. If a man hastily divorced his wife, thinking that the Mosaic exception from Deuteronomy 24 meant that they were both free to remarry without consequence, Jesus was letting him know that there were indeed dire consequences to his behavior, not the least of which is that he would be exposing his wife to the sin of adultery. If he was truly a follower of Yahweh, he would think twice before committing such an act!
Indeed, instead of seeking a legal excuse to get a divorce, Jesus called the people to return to a Genesis 1 & 2 view of marriage, namely, that it was instituted by God and involved the joining together of one man and one woman into a new person that could only be separated by death. If that is what marriage is (and the OT law is abundantly clear that it is!), then no mere piece of paper could dissolve a marriage bond, even if it comes with all the authority of Moses behind it. As Charles Spurgeon put it, “Let us not be among those who take up novel ideas of wedlock and seek to deform the marriage laws under the pretense of reforming them. Our Lord knows better than our modern social reformers. We had better let the laws of God alone, for we shall never discover any better.”
But what about that “except sexual immorality” clause that Jesus mentioned? Apparently there is at least one case where something other than death can dissolve the marriage bond, sexual immorality. But here we face a challenge, because it is not clear what exactly constitutes sexual immorality in Jesus’ view. I’m not saying that Jesus didn’t know what sexual immorality was, just that the word he uses, porneia, is a very broad term that encompasses all sorts of sexual sins, and not the more specific term for adultery, moicheia, that one would expect. Is this a case of Jesus simply using different terms for the sake of variety, or is there some significance in the meaning of sexual immorality as distinct from the sin of adultery? I’m not sure that there’s enough information in this brief passage to make it clear, and we do not have enough space to tackle the various views that scholars have put forth. The “exception clause” is repeated again in Jesus’ dispute with the Pharisees over this issue in Matthew 19:3-12, and we will examine that passage next.