This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. 

Our Scripture readings in the lectionary last Sunday included the Gospel reading from Mark 10, where Jesus talks about divorce. In it, Jesus tells the Pharisees that divorce was only permitted due to their hardness of heart and then goes on to say to the disciples, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

As a priest and pastor, I always wince at this reading, particularly given how it has so often been interpreted over the years, the way it has been used to wound those who have gone through the pain and trauma of a divorce. So today I’d like to break the myth of what Jesus really means when he talks about divorce. 

The first thing to do with any difficult text is always to be attentive to the context. Our reading for today from Mark 10 occurs in in the context of a test. The Pharisees have come to Jesus in order to test him, to ask him a difficult question in the hope that they can trip him up, discredit him, and recover their own religious power. They’re not interested in learning.

After all, the interpretation of this law has created division and controversy in their own time. There was significant debate in first-century Judaism when it came to what constituted legitimate grounds for divorce. Some said it was only allowed in cases of sexual infidelity. Others said that it was allowed whenever a husband found fault with his wife. Some even said the fault could be as simple as finding another woman more desirable. 

And this question of what constituted appropriate grounds for divorce was one with profound impact in the ancient world. Because if a man issued a woman a certificate of divorce, she was left on her own. She lost most of her rights, including the right to own property. She would often find herself indigent, vulnerable, and at risk, needing to do whatever she could do to survive in a world that could not conceive of a woman as a full and equal person in her own right. 

What Jesus does is to take this test of the Pharisees and flip the question on its head. They want to know, “How do you get rid of your wife?” Jesus instead asks them why they had a wife in the first place. He points them back to creation, to the divine realization that it was not good for someone to be alone in this world. God exists in a trinitarian relationship of persons and humans, created in God’s image, are also meant to exist in relationship. 

And do you notice what Jesus does when he points the Pharisees back to Genesis? He reminds them that a man leaves his father and mother to become one flesh with his wife. He reminds men, specifically, that in marriage they let go of their other ties in order to bind themselves to their wives. And then, when the disciples press Jesus to more fully explain this teaching, he does say that marriage after divorce—when you discard someone to whom you’ve been bound—runs the risk of being adulterous… but did you notice what else he said? “If she divorces her husband.” If she divorces her husband? This was a radical idea in ancient Judaism, the concept that a woman could conceivably end a marriage on her own. 

Everyone wants to know what is and is not allowed, when can I get rid of my wife, when can I divorce my spouse? But Jesus is not with what is allowed. He is much more concerned with what is intended when it comes to life in the kingdom of God. And knowing those intentions, what choices do you, as an individual, feel called to make?

And when you remember the intent of marriage, you know that in a perfect and ideal world divorce would never occur because both people in the marriage would continually and fully give themselves to the other. Jesus says that he knows the hardness of human heart, and so the law permits divorce. He knows how the hardness of the human heart means that sometimes the intent of marriage has failed, and the only option left is divorce. 

What Jesus will not do, however, is to tell first-century Jewish men that they can discard their wives by following the letter of the law. Because you can always follow the rule of the law and still miss its purpose. 

So when a person today finds themselves in a marriage where hardness of heart or brokenness of spirit has utterly decimated the relationship, the answer is not found in pulling out this obscure verse from Mark. The answer is found by considering the intent of marriage, as Jesus invited the Pharisees, to ask what is the best way left to you to honor the image of God in your spouse. 

Because sometimes the only way left to honor the humanity of two people in a marriage is to let the marriage end… and to know that our God is a God who always delights in bringing life from the death we fear. And when you make that choice, when you are not discarding someone because it is inconvenient, but you are allowing the marriage to end because it is the only way left to honor the humanity of your spouse, to honor your own humanity, then I think Jesus would say you have chosen well. 

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.