OVER THE YEARS, I’ve had the privilege of officiating many weddings, and often get to help couples prepare for their life together as well. Many couples (and the bride especially!) give an extraordinary amount of time and energy to planning a wedding ceremony and reception that will last for less than a day. But they spend little if any time preparing for the marriage that comes after, the relationship that they vow to cherish for a lifetime.

I’ve walked couples through a host of difficult but important conversations, trying to give them the tools they will need to do this for themselves. This is often completely new to them. Nobody has ever taught them the basics of talking through differences and other hard things in a way that doesn’t lead to a shouting match, or a struggle for control, or someone storming off in anger.

When we come to the ceremony itself, the bride is beautiful and all aglow; the groom is as dapper as he will ever be. There is glitz and glamor and joyous celebration. The photographer captures endless photos of smiling faces. And yet as the bride and groom stand before me and I lead them through their mutual vows, I am sometimes silently wondering if they will make it.

Even when I have concerns, it’s not my job to tell couples not to get married. After all, some couples that seem least likely to succeed somehow pull it together unexpectedly. But I will tell them where I think the pitfalls will be if they do marry. And it is my job, during the ceremony, to remind them of the depth of the commitment they are making before God and the guests they’ve so carefully assembled. I will help them understand the importance of their vows, of the solemn promises they make to love and honor one another “till death do us part.”

Unfortunately, of course, I sometimes hear later that some of the couples have in fact parted.

The good news is that the divorce rate in the United States has been consistently declining since it peaked in 1979; by some calculations, it is now less than two-thirds of what it was then. The bad news is the reasons couples still split. It can be as major as the betrayals of infidelity or abuse, or something that on the surface may seem less serious, like an inability to communicate or to tolerate each other’s annoying habits.

It is not my place, however, to pass judgment on anyone who divorces. I understand the reasons and would not pretend to understand the suffering that some spouses endure in an unhealthy marriage. But I do lament the way our contemporary American culture sometimes treats divorce as if it were an expected norm, as in the idea of “starter marriages.” One marriage expert, for example, reported overhearing a conversation between two women at a wedding reception. Speaking fondly of the bride and without a hint of irony, one woman said, “She’ll make him a good first wife,” while the other nodded approvingly.

This is not how marriage was meant to be.

IN A CULTURAL context such as ours, then, it’s not surprising that Jesus’ words about divorce are some of the most controversial in all of the Sermon on the Mount:

It has been said, “Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.” But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. (Matt 5:31-32, NIV)

Jesus again picks up the theme of adultery from the immediately preceding verses, and this context is important. What he taught in those verses is not that adultery is some rare event of which only the most heinous of sinners is guilty. Quite the contrary. Anybody who has looked covetously at someone else is guilty — which means pretty much everybody.

Furthermore, he doesn’t then downplay the seriousness of adultery the way we might by saying, “Well, if everybody does it, it’s not that bad.” Again, quite the contrary: he teaches that once we stop kidding ourselves about our righteous innocence and recognize our guilt for what it is, we should take drastic measures to keep ourselves from sin in the future. We don’t have to literally gouge out an eye or cut off a hand — but we should take serious concrete steps to stop putting ourselves in the path of temptation.

Thus, when Jesus refers to divorce in the larger context of Matthew 5, the first thing he is doing is giving yet another example of the way people need to think differently about righteousness in the kingdom of heaven. It’s meant to illustrate the kind of self-justifying legalism in which people can count themselves righteous if they can tick the right behavioral boxes. You’re divorced? Hmm. Did you file the right papers? Well, all right then, you’re in the clear.

With his teaching about divorce, Jesus seems to be referring back to what was already written in the Law of Moses:

If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, and if after she leaves his house she becomes the wife of another man, and her second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, or if he dies, then her first husband, who divorced her, is not allowed to marry her again after she has been defiled. (Deut 24:1-4)

Understandably, anyone who cares about the personal and legal rights of women should find these words disturbing — I certainly do. Please bear with me, because there are five things I want us to notice here.

First, it is the man who hands his wife divorce papers and sends her away; as the process is described here, the woman has no voice and no rights. Second, he is also the one who unilaterally decides what counts as “displeasing” and “indecent.” Third, the passage assumes that the woman is likely to try to remarry, because in a highly patriarchal society, she will be economically destitute if she doesn’t. Fourth, Moses doesn’t actually command this process — the point of verses 1 to 3 is to set up the prohibition in verse 4. Fifth and finally, the prohibition is that the woman’s first husband isn’t allowed to remarry her if her second husband divorces her, because she has been “defiled” — meaning that she is unclean or ritually impure.

Now try to imagine how such a passage would be interpreted in a strongly patriarchal culture, especially from within a Pharisaic way of thinking about righteousness. The man who decided — for whatever reason! — to divorce his wife would file the papers and send her away, feeling confident that he had done right according to the Law of Moses. This made women highly vulnerable to the whims of their husbands.

But by tying divorce to adultery, Jesus seems to be reminding his hearers that Moses was not giving men carte blanche in the matter. The mere writing and delivery of a certificate of divorce was not enough to guarantee one’s righteousness; there were still questions of the heart.

And to reinforce that point, we need to look at the other place in the gospel of Matthew where Jesus teaches about divorce. Let’s look at that next.