THE PHARISEES WERE always testing Jesus, repeatedly putting him on the spot with trick questions designed to get him into trouble. Sometimes the questions were meant to embroil him in the ongoing ideological arguments between Rabbis Shammai and Hillel, whose teachings defined two competing schools of thought. The situation was similar to today’s debates between conservatives and liberals, respectively. And Shammai and Hillel had different ideas about how to read Deuteronomy 24, the passage about divorce we looked at last time.

Shammai took the hard line. When Moses said that a man could divorce his wife if he found “something indecent about her” (Deut 24:1, NIV), he interpreted that strictly to mean that she had committed adultery. Hillel held a much more liberal view: what counted as indecency was up to the husband. It could be adultery, but it could also be that she burned his dinner.

This debate is the background to an episode we find in chapter 19 of Matthew’s gospel. Some Pharisees approached Jesus with a controversial question: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” The question sides with the more liberal school of Hillel. Would Jesus agree, or side with Shammai? Either way, his response was bound to make someone mad.

But Jesus begins by sidestepping the debate. He points the Pharisees to the deeper purposes of God for marriage, going back to Genesis 2:24, a passage still quoted at many weddings:

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” (Matt 19:4-6)

Instead of answering the question about when it is permissible to divorce, in other words, Jesus says that divorce is counter to God’s intention for marriage. But the Pharisees aren’t done. They shoot back, “Then why did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?” (Matt 19:7).

Note again that this overstates the case; Moses neither commanded the man to give his wife divorce papers, nor to send her away. Jesus therefore replies:

Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery. (Matt 19:8-9)

Moses permitted divorce; if there is a command in the passage about divorce from the beginning of Deuteronomy 24, it’s to not commit the sin of adultery. And so Jesus teaches, both here and in the Sermon on the Mount. Notice how in both places, he puts the moral burden squarely on the shoulders of the man who is initiating the divorce. In Matthew 5, as the New International Version translates it, the man who divorces his wife “makes her the victim of adultery,” and turning it around, he himself is guilty of adultery if he marries a divorced woman.

Similarly, in Matthew 19, Jesus speaks only of the man’s adultery. It’s as if he’s speaking to men who divorce their wives capriciously so they can marry someone else. Listen, for example, to how Eugene Peterson translates Jesus’ words in The Message: “I’m holding you to the original plan, and holding you liable for adultery if you divorce your faithful wife and then marry someone else.” In other words: Gentlemen, if you’re being unfair to your wife, don’t hide behind Moses. If you really want to do God’s will, you should be asking how to treat marriage as God intended from the beginning.

Nor should we think that the Pharisees are the only ones getting it wrong. Matthew tells us that Jesus’ own disciples were stunned by what Jesus told the Pharisees, saying, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry” (Matt 19:10). Think for a moment about what they’re saying: What? Is that how it is? We men can’t just send our wives away when we feel like it? If that’s the case, then it’s better not to get married in the first place!

Patriarchy, it seems, was alive and well even among Jesus’ closest followers.

AS YOU MIGHT imagine, what Jesus teaches about divorce in Matthew chapters 5 and 19 has been the subject of much debate — and I am in no position to settle that debate once and for all. But I want to finish this discussion of divorce by pointing us back to what I think are three key takeaways from Jesus’ teaching.

First, while I understand why people would want to approach these passages by asking when divorce or remarriage is or is not permissible, that would be to come at the matter as the Pharisees did. In the context of the Sermon on the Mount, the point of Jesus’ teaching about divorce was to counter this rule-bound way of thinking about righteousness.

Second, I think the key phrase in Matthew 19 is “your hearts were hard.” Yes, Jesus tells the Pharisees, it’s true that Moses permitted divorce. But that was a concession to your rebellious nature. Anyone who heard Jesus’ words and whose hearts were right toward God should have been stricken in conscience. They would stop trying to justify themselves and look instead for what would please God.

Third, each time the Pharisees ply Jesus with their questions, he responds by pointing back to the original purposes of God in creation, to how God meant things to be. In marriage, two are to become one, and no one is to sever that union.

Again, it is not my purpose to tell people what they can or can’t do, nor to pass judgment on the decisions they make. Still, I hope we can all recognize that we can be hard-hearted people. It is hard-heartedness, for example, that allows us to shout murderous insults or look adulterously at others. It was hard-heartedness for a Jewish man of biblical times to use his patriarchal power to simply send his wife away, putting her very survival at risk. It is hard-heartedness to want what we want more than we want what God wants, and to try to convince ourselves otherwise, as the Pharisees did. And even if, in the end, we decide that divorce is our only or best option — whether the situation is adultery, abuse, or something else — we should still grieve all the hard-heartedness we have experienced along the way, both our own and that of our ex.

If we want to pursue God’s kingdom and his righteousness, we need to start with our hearts and minds and not just our behavior. Do we really want what God wants? In the context of marriage and divorce, that means not taking our marriage vows for granted. It means making those promises sincerely and wholeheartedly in the sight of God, wanting to do his will and fulfill his creative purposes. It means not forgetting them after the wedding ceremony is over. And throughout the ups and downs of marriage, it means repenting regularly of our own hard-heartedness — especially in the case of a man who wants to use his power and privilege to do injustice to his wife.

Yes, divorce is permissible. But it is not what God desires (Mal 2:16), and is a concession to our fallenness. That in itself should tell us something about the mercy of God. Even when we break covenant with each other, God doesn’t break covenant with us — even as we struggle to learn what true righteousness means.