The Highest Ideal.

(Matthew 19: 1-9)

Introduction.

1 Now it came to pass, when Jesus had finished these sayings, that He departed from Galilee and came to the region of Judea beyond the Jordan. 2 And great multitudes followed Him, and He healed them there. 3 The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?” 4 And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man separate.” 7 They said to Him, “Why then did Moses’ command to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?” 8 He said to them, “Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for]sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery.” (Matthew 19: 1-9)

The Jewish Idea of Marriage.

Here Jesus is dealing with what was in his day, as it is in our own is a vexed and burning question. Divorce was something about which there was no agreement among the Jews at that time and the Pharisees here were deliberately not only try and trap Jesus, but they were also trying to involve Jesus in the controversy. At this point in world history for 200 years now, no nation had ever had a higher view of marriage than the Jews. Marriage was a sacred, to remain unmarried after the age of twenty, except in order to concentrate upon the study of the Torah, was to break the commandment to "be fruitful and multiply, as they saw it." The Tanach taught, “He who had no children lessened the image of God upon earth."and "When husband and wife are worthy, the glory of God is with them." The Jewish laws of marriage and of was based on the Old Testament scripture, (Malachi 2:16), where God declares, "I hate divorce”. But this hight ideal and actual reality did not go hand in hand. In the time of Jesus there had developed two dangerous and damaging elements.

First, in the eyes of Jewish law, a woman was a thing. She was the possession of her father, or of her husband as the case might be. Technically she had no legal rights at all. Most Jewish marriages were arranged either by the parents or by professional matchmakers. A girl might be engaged to be married in childhood and was often engaged to be married to a man whom she had never seen. There was one caveat that when she came to the age of twelve, she had one chance to repudiate her father's choice but that was almost unheard of except in the most rare and extreme of case.

However,in matters of divorce, the law as it was interpreted said the initiative must always lie with the husband. The Pharisaic law said: "A woman may be divorced with or without her consent, but a man can be divorced only with his consent." The woman could never initiate the process of divorce; she could not divorce, she

had to be divorced. By and large, the law was that the woman had no legal rights, and the right to divorce lay entirely with the husband.

The Jewish Idea of Divorce at the Time of Jesus.

Second, the process of divorce was incredibly easy. That process was founded on the interpretation of a passage in Deuteronomy to which Jesus' questioners referred:

"When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favour in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a bill of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house..." (Deuteronomy 24:1).

The bill of divorce was a simple, one-sentence statement that the husband dismissed his wife. Roam Historian, Josephus writes, "He that desires to be divorced from his wife for any cause whatsoever (and many such causes happen among men) let him, in writing, give assurance that he will never use her as his wife any more; for by this means she may be at liberty to marry another husband."

The one safeguard against the dangerous ease of which the divorce process could be manipulated was the fact that, unless the woman was a notorious sinner, her dowry must be returned. One of the great problems of Jewish divorce lies within the Mosaic enactment of that divorce. That enactment states that a man may divorce his wife, "if she finds no favour in his eyes, because he has found some indecency in her." The issue became how the phrase some indecency was chosen to be interpreted? On this point the Jewish Rabbis were fiercely divided, and it was here that Jesus' interrogators wished to involve him. The school of Shammai were quite clear that a matter of indecency meant fornication, and fornication alone, and that and for no other cause could a wife by divorced. A woman could be seen as troublesome but as long as she did not commit adultery she could not be divorced.

On the other hand, the school of Hillel interpreted this matter of indecency in the widest possible way. They said that it meant that a man could divorce his wife if she spoiled his dinner, or if she went out with unbound hair, or spoke to other men in the streets, or if she spoke disrespectfully of his parents in his presence, if she was a loud angry woman whose voice could be heard in the next house, divorce was permitted.

One extreme Rabbi, even by the standards of that day, a man called, Rabbi Akiba even went the length of saying that the phrase, if she finds no favour in his eyes, meant that a man could divorce his wife if he found a woman whom he liked better and considered more beautiful.

The catastrophe for 1st century Jewish woman was that it was the conservative school of Hillel whose teachings prevailed; and the marriage covenant was very lightly held, and divorce on the most trivial ground was very common.

To complete the picture certain further it is relevant to note that under Rabbinic law divorce was also actually compulsory for two reasons. It was compulsory for adultery, and if it turned out the woman was unable to have children. The object of marriage was the procreation of children; and if after ten years a couple where still childless divorce was compulsory.

Interestingly, insanity was not a ground of divorce. If the wife became insane, the husband could not divorce her, for, if she was divorced, she would have no protector in her helplessness. If the husband became insane, divorce was impossible also, for in that case he was incapable of writing a bill of divorcement, and without such a bill, initiated by him, there could be no divorce.

When Jesus was asked this question, this is what was at the back of it was a situation with all these complications and troubles. However, Jesus was to answer it in a way which came as a staggering surprise to all parties in the dispute, and which suggested a radical change in direction to the whole situation to those who would seek to be followers of Him.

Jesus teaches on Marriage and Divorce.

In effect, the Pharisees were asking Jesus whether he favoured the strict view of Shammai or the laxer view of Hillel; and thereby seeking to involve him in controversy. Jesus' answer was to take things back to the very beginning, back to the ideal of creation and the Garden of Eden. In the beginning, he said, God created Adam and Eve, man, and woman. He points out that in the circumstances of the creation story, Adam and Eve were created for each other and for no one else; their union was by nature of being between the first man and woman, complete and unbreakable. Jesus here says, Adam and Eve are the pattern and the symbol of all who were to come later. In other words, each married couple is a replication of Adam and Eve, and their union and is therefore no less permanent.

The argument is quite clear. In the case of Adam and Eve was completely impossible, for the very simple reason that there was no one else whom either of them to marry. Therefore, Jesus was laying down the principle that divorce is wrong. But at the same time, we must note that it is not the law of God that stipulates we can’t get divorced but it is in fact, a principle, which is a very different thing. Here, at once, the Pharisees saw a point of attack. Again, they turned to Deuteronomy 24:1

Here appeared to be the very chance the Pharisees wanted. They could now say to Jesus, "Are you saying Moses was wrong”? Are you seeking to abolish the divine law which was given to Moses? Are you setting yourself above Moses as a lawgiver?" Jesus' answer was that what Moses said was not in fact a law, but nothing more than a concession. Moses did not command the allowing of divorce for certain reasons; at the best he only permitted it in order to regulate a situation which would have become manipulative or promiscuous. Jesus says this Mosaic injunction was only a concession to fallen human nature. In the Genesis stories we have the ideal set which God intended. The high ideal being that two people who marry should become so inseparably one that they are one flesh. Jesus' answer was: "True, Moses permitted divorce; but that was a concession in view of the lost ideal. The high ideal of marriage to be aimed for is to be found in the unbreakable, perfect union of Adam and Eve. That is what God meant marriage to be."

The Highest Ideal

Let us now go on to see the highest ideal of the married relationship. One which Jesus sets before anyone who are willing to accept his commands. We will see that the Jewish ideal gives us the basis of the Christian ideal.

The Jewish term for marriage was Kiddushin meant sanctification or consecration. It was used to describe something which was dedicated to God as his exclusive and peculiar possession. Anything totally surrendered to God was kiddushin. This meant that in marriage the husband was consecrated to the wife, and the wife to the husband. The one became the mutually exclusive possession of the other. That is what Jesus meant when he said that for the sake of marriage a man would leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife; and that they became so totally one that they could be called one flesh. That was God's ideal of marriage as the old Genesis story saw it (Genesis 2:24), and it is that ideal which Jesus restated here. Clearly that idea had consequences.

(i) Unity.
This total unity means that marriage is not given for one phase in life, however important that act may be, but for all of life . That is to say that, while sex is a supremely important part of marriage, it is not the main thing. Any marriage entered into simply because of a fervent physical desire is doomed to failure. Marriage is given, not that two people should do one thing together, but that they should do all things together. Another way to put this is to say that marriage is the total union of two personalities. The ideal is that in the marriage state two people find the completing of their personalities, real happiness comes when the two halves find each other again, and marry, and so complete each other. Marriage should not narrow our lives it should complete it. For both partners it should bring a new fulness, a new satisfaction, a new contentment into life. It is the union of two personalities in which the two complement each other. That does not mean that adjustments, and even sacrifices, have not to be made; but it does mean that the final relationship is fuller, more joyous, more satisfying than any life in singleness could be for those two people.

(ii) Sharing Difficulties.
We may put this even more practically--marriage must be a sharing of all the circumstances of life. There is a danger in the early days of infatuation the two people will see each other at only their best. They see each other on their best behaviour usually they spend time doing pleasurable things together. But in marriage two people will see each other when they are not at their best; when they are tired and weary; when children bring the upsets to a house and home that only children must bring. When money is tight, and bills become a problem, when meals out become the kitchen sink and walking the floor at night with a crying baby. Unless two people are prepared to face the change of life together the marriage must be a failure. All this leads us to a final practical conclusion, the basis of marriage is togetherness, and the basis of togetherness is nothing other than consideration, putting the other first. If marriage is to succeed, the partners must always be thinking more of each other than of themselves. Selfishness is the destroyer of any personal relationship; and that is truest of all when two people are bound together in marriage.

The true basis of marriage as Jesus presents it is not complicated, it is simply the love which thinks more of the happiness of others person than it thinks of its own. The love that is happy to serve the other person, which is able try and understand, and most importantly is always able to forgive. That is to say it simply, it is Christlike love. A love which knows that in forgetting ourselves and outing the other first we find ourselves, and dying to out own desire we find completeness itself.