Letter Eight: Jesus and Marriage
My Dear Family,
The first letters in our “table talk” covered background issues in preparation for thinking, feeling, and acting like Jesus through moral issues. We already gave an example of this in a prior letter with Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. We have another example in Matthew 19 where Jesus is confronted with the moral issue of divorce. This is our segue into Jesus’ teaching on marriage and sexuality.
The Pharisees again tried to catch Jesus in a dilemma. They asked Him if it is lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause. Evidently, this was a great moral issue of the time; and reflects the vulnerability of women who had no legal protection. The Mosaic Law even allowed for it. If Jesus answered “yes,” then He supports this “good-old-boy” arrangement. If he answers “no,” then He sets Himself against the Law and the patriarchal “establishment.”
In response, Jesus takes them back to creation, to “original” time and design, to Adam and Eve before the Fall. Adam, though made in the image of God, was incomplete in his original state of solitude. Sure, he had the animals, and what is far more, God Himself, but he needed someone equal, someone who could complete him. When God made Eve, Adam’s gasp of delight and surprise said it all, “This at last is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh…” The original design is that a man should “leave his father and mother, and cling to his wife, to become one flesh.”
Since the fall, “historical” humanity, that is, humanity bereft of original glory and in a sinful state, will try to find every conceivable way to avoid this original design. The Pharisees wanted a loophole to get out of the union which God has put together. Jesus tells them that creation pre-empts even Moses’ law allowing for divorce “because of the hardness of their heart.” This means that in Israel’s willful, sinful state, they were, as a culture, in no condition to live up to God’s original design.
But now, Jesus is teaching that we can, empowered by the same Holy Spirit that empowers Him, achieve original design, the pristine union God intended a man and woman to experience. I realize that many in our church family have broken marriages, and we will talk about this later. Here we must begin with the original design and work from there with grace and compassion into the complexities and challenges that beset us.
Yours in Christ,
Father John Worgul
Takeaway
By pointing us back to creation, Jesus reminds us of God’s beautiful plan for humanity and marriage, and through the Holy Spirit He gives us the strength to live according to God’s original design in love and fidelity.
Discussion Questions
- How do the practices and beliefs of today’s culture differ from God’s original design for marriage?
- How does Jesus’ teaching call us beyond cultural norms to God’s original design?”