Matthew 5:31 - 32

I've been dreading this one: "'It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' But I say to you that every one who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, makes her an adulteress; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery"
It's because I know that it has a huge literature attached on the issue of divorce. Laying cards on table: I used to be an indissolubilist and now I'm not. I think I'd like to try, however, to reflect on this without going over all of that debate and keeping it within bounds that both sides might agree on. So that's it, then.







Seriously though: I guess we could all notice that the opening saying of this bit is not from the Law but from the Rabbis, and one rabinnical school's permissive take on the law permitting divorce made it pretty easy for men [not women] to get a divorce. Many women had no means of support, very often, because of the way their society was structured so they were then forced either into prostitution or to find a husband who didn't mind a divorced woman for a wife. So at the very least Jesus and Matthew have in view a situation where divorce is easy and women are vulnerable. Committed marriage supports women in that society from being commoditised any further. Easy divorce quickly becomes serial polygamy and erodes the fabric of society by creating insecurity for children and spouses with the resulting emotional and ultimately financial fall outs. Finding ways to support marriage in the intended sense of a lifelong union is a must.

However, let's also remember the pressures: an individualist culture where fulfilment of the individual is a primary value, longer lives, dual income families, spousal violence, differential responses to cultural change, support networks becoming 'thinner'. The difficulty is that not only is it hard to put the clock back to simpler times [if they ever really existed], but there are a lot of things that make it undesirable anyway. Do we really want a society where women are denied the opportunities to explore their potential beynd the domestic sphere [or men in it]? Do we want to put life-spans back to average less than 70? Do we want women to be in a position where violence and other abuse against them is more likely? Do we want less mobility [maybe yes on that one]? Studies show that most people do believe in the idea of a lifelong union, what we need to do is find ways to support that, including against the very forces and ideas that people internalise which countermand that ideal.

The even bigger shame was those figures recently that showed in the USA that Christians seemed, nowadays, more likely to be divorced than their secular counterparts; something has gone seriously wrong. I fear because there are parts of the UK that seem to be headed down the same road.
No easy answers but it does point to a cultural mission for the churches within and beyond their institutional boundaries.

Crosswalk.com - Matthew 5:31 - 32: