Human judges cannot govern thoughts; they are not justiciable. But before God the human being is a single unit, irreducible, indivisible. Therefore, one is to love God with the whole heart, soul, and strength (Deut 6:4). The trinity of “heart, soul, and strength” encompasses everything that is human: from the heart, the innermost sphere of the human, through the realm of communication (“soul” in Hebrew = “throat,” “speech”), to the external, material sphere that surrounds us (“strength” in Hebrew = “ability,” “property”). It is as this all-encompassing, indivisible unity that a human being is to love God.
No one can honor God externally while remaining far from God in one’s heart. In essence Jesus did nothing in the first antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount but set before the eyes of his audience this basic knowledge of the Torah about the indivisibility of the human. Certainly in doing so he was being provocative and speaking with the utmost radicality. But for him it was about the Torah of Sinai.
Divorce Is Forbidden
In very similar fashion Jesus provokes his audience in the third antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount. The antithesis form is secondary here.27 Also, the clause that permits divorce in the case of adultery was added by Matthew or the tradition before him. Originally the prohibition of divorce was probably worded something like this: “Anyone who divorces his wife causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (Matt 5:32).28
What is he saying? We can only understand it if we are familiar with divorce law in Palestinian Judaism. Divorce was permitted—for the man. He was allowed to divorce his wife by appealing to Deuteronomy 24:1, should it be that “she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her.” In light of that very loose formula it was relatively easy for a man, at least as far as the law was concerned, to dissolve his marriage to his wife. He only had to utter the formula of divorce, “You are no longer my wife, and I am no longer your husband,”29 and hand her the writ of divorce. The marriage was at an end. But only the husband could do it. A wife could not dismiss her husband from their marriage.
Other parts of Palestinian-Jewish marriage law based on the Torah also show how unequally the wife was treated under the law. Thus a man who had intercourse with another woman by no means violated his own marriage; at most, if the other woman was married, he committed adultery against her husband. It was a different matter for the wife! In committing adultery she violated her own marriage. Here it is quite clear that the wife was not regarded as a partner but as part of her husband’s property; he had an almost material right to treat her as he wanted. By committing adultery a wife diminished her husband’s property; he, in contrast, by committing adultery could at most diminish the value of another man’s property.
Only when we consider this social background can we understand why Jesus formulates his prohibition of divorce altogether in terms of the husband. The wife had no right in any case to divorce her husband, so Jesus speaks to the man. He puts this before his eyes: anyone who divorces his wife may force her to seek another husband because otherwise she cannot exist economically. So with the new husband she violates her first marriage, and her first husband is guilty of it because, in sending her away, he has driven her into that situation. But the new husband is also committing adultery, namely, against the first marriage from which the wife had been dismissed. To us the prohibition of divorce in its Matthean version seems extremely complicated and awkward, but Jesus had to speak that way against the background of the Palestinian-Jewish marriage law then in force. But this is by no means an adequate explanation of Jesus’ harsh prohibition.
We first have to be clear about what it means for Jesus to declare that divorcing a wife or marrying a divorced woman is adultery. According to the Torah, adultery was a capital crime deserving punishment, in fact, the penalty of death (Lev 20:10; Deut 22:22-27). But that means that Jesus calls something the Torah presumes permissible a capital crime. That was, obviously, a massive provocation.
But the provocation was all the greater because Jesus clothes what he says about divorce in the form of a legal decree. There are such decrees in the Torah, with the form “Anyone who does X shall be held guilty of Y” (e.g., Lev 17:3-4; Num 35:16-21). In legal statements of this sort the first clause is the “definition of the deed” and the subsequent clause is the “determination of the legal consequences.” Jesus’ prohibition of divorce follows this model exactly. First, in the initial clause, the action is defined: “Anyone who divorces his wife.…” In the subsequent clause this action is further defined as a serious sin, namely, causing adultery: “…causes her to commit adultery.” In this case the “determination of the legal consequences” need not be articulated because everyone knew it: if adultery was proved, the punishment was death by stoning.
So Jesus uses a legal degree as provocation. But does he really intend to establish a law? Certainly not. He is not making law here any more than he is when he says “If you are angry with a brother or sister you are liable to judgment.” The intention of his words is to shake people up, to uncover the truth, to show up the falsity of the divorce practice of his time. It is true that he plays on the form of legal decrees, but not in order to give a new law; rather, he means to carry his contemporaries’ practice ad absurdum.
And what is Jesus’ attitude to the Torah in this instance? Is he destroying it? Is he declaring it invalid, at least on the question of divorce? Is there a concrete point at which he shows how questionable it is for him? None of these questions does justice to Jesus’ true intent. First of all, we must point out that the Torah contains no specific law that permits divorce. Deuteronomy 24:1-4 forbids any man to remarry a woman previously his wife whom he has divorced and who has then married another man. The procedure for divorce through the giving of a writ appears rather incidentally, namely, as background to the whole legal problem. The process is thus assumed as the normal course of things. So Jesus does not speak against an ordinance, certainly not a commandment in Torah, but instead against the old common law to which the Torah does not object.
Moreover, Jesus appeals, against this common law, to the true will of God—in fact, and this is crucial, to the will of God as expressed at the very beginning of the Torah. This we see in Mark 10:2-12, where Jesus refers to Genesis 1:27 and 2:24:
But from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate. (Mark 10:6-9)
According to Mark 10, then, Jesus appeals to the Torah itself against a common law the Torah presupposes. He appeals to the creation story, which is part of the Torah. He appeals to the deep, inseparable unity there promised to the two marriage partners.
This should make it clear that Jesus’ prohibition of divorce is not directed against the Torah as such but instead clarifies a particular point of Torah. With his provocative statement, clothed in legal language, he extends protection to the wife who is handed over to the man’s whim and degraded to the status of a thing, and he also protects the true will of God, whose original purpose, obscured by common law, is no longer perceptible.
Jesus against the Fourth Commandment?
The next sample belongs to a completely different part of the Jesus tradition. Matthew and Luke (Matt 8:21-22 // Luke 9:59-60) both offer a saying of Jesus that calls for discipleship with the utmost harshness. In Luke’s version it reads, “To another he said, ‘Follow me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the [reign] of God.’” Today we can only be shocked by the irresponsibility of the saying, but at that time it must have had a far more dreadful and disgusting impact on the hearers, for throughout antiquity, and especially in Judaism, it was an obvious and positively sacred obligation of a son to bury his parents with honor. Still more, in Judaism it was not merely a pious duty; it was ordered by the fourth commandment of the Decalogue.