2. Honesty in speech (33)
A Christian’s righteousness: fidelity in marriage and honesty in speech
(Matthew 5:31–37)
The third antithesis (about divorce) follows the second (about adultery) as a natural sequence. For in certain circumstances, Jesus now says, remarriage by or to a divorced person is tantamount to adultery. This third antithesis is essentially a call to fidelity in marriage.
I confess to a basic reluctance to attempt an exposition of these verses. This is partly because divorce is a controversial and complex subject, but even more because it is a subject which touches people’s emotions at a deep level. There is almost no unhappiness so poignant as the unhappiness of an unhappy marriage, and almost no tragedy so great as the degeneration of what God meant for love and fulfilment into a non-relationship of bitterness, discord and despair. Although I believe that God’s way in most cases is not divorce, I hope I shall write with sensitivity, for I know the pain which many suffer, and I have no wish to add to their distress. Yet it is because I am convinced that the teaching of Jesus on this and every subject is good—intrinsically good, good for individuals, good for society—that I take my courage in both hands and write on.
1. Fidelity in marriage (31, 32)
These two verses can hardly be thought to represent the sum total of our Lord’s instruction on the mountain about divorce. They seem to give an abbreviated summary of his teaching, of which indeed Matthew records a fuller version in chapter 19. We shall be wise to take the two passages together and to interpret the shorter in the light of the longer. This is how his later debate with the Pharisees went:
19:3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, ‘Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?’ 4 He answered, ‘Have you not read that he who made them from 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 they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.’ 7 They said to him, ‘Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?’ 8 He said to them, ‘For your hardness of heart Moses allowed 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 unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery.’
We know that a current controversy about divorce was being conducted between the rival rabbinic schools of Hillel and Shammai. Rabbi Shammai took a rigorist line, and taught from Deuteronomy 24:1 that the sole ground for divorce was some grave matrimonial offence, something evidently ‘unseemly’ or ‘indecent’. Rabbi Hillel, on the other hand, held a very lax view. If we can trust the Jewish historian Josephus, this was the common attitude, for he applied the Mosaic provision to a man who ‘desires to be divorced from his wife for any cause whatsoever’. Similarly Hillel, arguing that the ground for divorce was something ‘unseemly’, interpreted this term in the widest possible way to include a wife’s most trivial offences. If she proved to be an incompetent cook and burnt her husband’s food, or if he lost interest in her because of her plain looks and because he became enamoured of some other more beautiful woman, these things were ‘unseemly’ and justified him in divorcing her. The Pharisees seem to have been attracted by Rabbi Hillel’s laxity, which will explain the form their question took: ‘Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?’ In other words, they wanted to know whose side Jesus was on in the contemporary debate, and whether he belonged to the school of rigorism or of laxity.
Our Lord’s reply to their question was in three parts. It is revealing to consider these separately and in the order in which he spoke them. In each he dissented from the Pharisees.
a. The Pharisees were preoccupied with the grounds for divorce; Jesus with the institution of marriage
Their question was so framed as to draw Jesus on what he considered to be legitimate grounds for divorce. For what cause might a man divorce his wife? For one cause or several causes or any cause?
Jesus’ reply was not a reply. He declined to answer their question. Instead, he asked a counter-question about their reading of Scripture. He referred them back to Genesis, both to the creation of mankind as male and female (chapter 1) and to the institution of marriage (chapter 2) by which a man leaves his parents and cleaves to his wife and the two become one. This biblical definition implies that marriage is both exclusive (‘a man … his wife’) and permanent (‘cleave’ or ‘be joined’ to his wife). It is these two aspects of marriage which Jesus selects for emphasis in his comments which follow (6). First, ‘So they are no longer two but one flesh,’ and secondly, ‘What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.’ Thus marriage, according to our Lord’s exposition of its origins, is a divine institution by which God makes permanently one two people who decisively and publicly leave their parents in order to form a new unit of society and then ‘become one flesh’.
b. The Pharisees called Moses’ provision for divorce a command; Jesus called it a concession to the hardness of human hearts
The Pharisees responded to Jesus’ exposition of the institution of marriage and its permanence by asking: ‘Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?’ Jesus’ quotation of scribal teaching in the Sermon on the Mount was similar: ‘It was also said, “Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce”.’
Both these were garbled versions of the Mosaic provision, typical of the Pharisees’ disregard for what Scripture really said and implied. They laid their emphasis on the giving of a divorce certificate, as if this were the most important part of the Mosaic provision, and then referred to both the certificate and the divorce as ‘commands’ of Moses.
A careful reading of Deuteronomy 24:1–4 reveals something quite different. To begin with, the whole paragraph hinges on a long series of conditional clauses. This may be brought out in the following paraphrase: ‘After a man has married a wife, if he finds some indecency in her, and if he gives her a divorce-certificate and divorces her and she leaves, and if she marries again, and if her second husband gives her a divorce-certificate and divorces her, or if her second husband dies, then her first husband who divorced her is forbidden to remarry her …’ The thrust of the passage is to prohibit the remarriage of one’s own divorced partner. The reason for this regulation is obscure. It appears to be that if her ‘indecency’ had so ‘defiled’ her as to be a sufficient ground for divorce, it was also a sufficient reason for not taking her back. It may also have been intended to warn a husband against a hasty decision, because once made it could not be rescinded, and/or to protect the wife against exploitation. For our purposes here it is enough to observe that this prohibition is the only command in the whole passage; there is certainly no command to a husband to divorce his wife, nor even any encouragement to do so. All there is, instead, is a reference to certain necessary procedures if a divorce takes place; and therefore at the very most a reluctant permission is implied and a current practice is tolerated.
How, then, did Jesus respond to the Pharisees’ question about the regulation of Moses? He attributed it to the hardness of people’s hearts. In so doing he did not deny that the regulation was from God. He implied, however, that it was not a divine instruction, but only a divine concession to human weakness. It was for this reason that ‘Moses allowed you to divorce …’, he said (8). But then he immediately referred again to the original purpose of God, saying: ‘But from the beginning it was not so.’ Thus even the divine concession was in principle inconsistent with the divine institution.
c. The Pharisees regarded divorce lightly; Jesus took it so seriously that, with only one exception, he called all remarriage after divorce adultery.
This was the conclusion of his debate with the Pharisees, and this is what is recorded in the Sermon on the Mount. It may be helpful to see his two statements side by side.
5:32: But I say to you that every one who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, makes her an adulteress; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
19:9: And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery.
It seems to be assumed that a divorce would lead to the remarriage of the divorced parties. Only this assumption can explain the statement that a man divorcing his wife without cause ‘makes her an adulteress’. His action could have that result only if she married again. Besides, a separation without a divorce—in legal terms a mensa et toro (from table and bed) but not a vinculo (from the marriage bond)—is a modern arrangement unknown in the ancient world.
Since God instituted marriage as an exclusive and permanent union, a union which he makes and man must not break, Jesus draws the inevitable deduction that to divorce one’s partner and marry another, or to marry a divorced person, is to enter a forbidden, adulterous relationship. For the person who may have secured a divorce in the eyes of human law is still in the eyes of God married to his or her first partner.
Only one exception is made to this principle: except on the ground of unchastity (5:32) or except for unchastity (19:9). The so-called ‘exceptive clause’ is a well-known crux. Commentators are not agreed about either its authenticity or its meaning.
First, its authenticity. I would wish to argue, as do virtually all conservative commentators, that we must accept this clause not only as a genuine part of Matthew’s Gospel (for no MSS omit it) but also as an authentic word of Jesus. The reason why many have rejected it, regarding it as an interpolation by Matthew, is that it is absent from the parallel passages in the Gospels of Mark and Luke. Yet Plummer was right to dub ‘a violent hypothesis’ this easy dismissal of the exceptive clause as an editorial gloss. It seems far more likely that its absence from Mark and Luke is due not to their ignorance of it but to their acceptance of it as something taken for granted. After all, under the Mosaic law adultery was punishable by death (although the death penalty for this offence seems to have fallen into disuse by the time of Jesus); So nobody would have questioned that marital unfaithfulness was a just ground for divorce. Even the rival Rabbis Shammai and Hillel were agreed about this. Their dispute was how much more widely than this the expression ‘some indecency’ in Deuteronomy 24:1 could be interpreted.
The second question about the exceptive clause concerns what is meant by unchastity. The Greek word is porneia. It is normally translated ‘fornication’, denoting the immorality of the unmarried, and is often distinguished from moicheia (‘adultery’), the immorality of the married. For this reason some have argued that the exceptive clause permits divorce if some pre-marital sexual sin is later discovered. Some think that the ‘indecency’ of Deuteronomy 24:1 had the same meaning. But the Greek word is not precise enough to be limited in this way. Porneia is derived from pornē, a prostitute, without specifying whether she (or her client) is married or unmarried. Further, it is used in the Septuagint for the unfaithfulness of Israel, Yahweh’s bride, as exemplified in Hosea’s wife Gomer. It seems, therefore, that we must agree with R. V. G. Tasker’s conclusion that porneia is ‘a comprehensive word, including adultery, fornication and unnatural vice’. At the same time we have no liberty to go to the opposite extreme and argue that porneia covers any and every offence which may be said in some vague sense to have a sexual basis. This would be virtually to equate porneia with ‘incompatibility’, and there is no etymological warrant for this. No, porneia means ‘unchastity’, some act of physical sexual immorality.
What, then, did Jesus teach? N. B. Stonehouse offers a good paraphrase of the first part of the antithesis in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Ye have heard of the appeal of Jewish teachers to Deuteronomy 24:1 in the interest of substantiating a policy which permits husbands freely at their own pleasure to divorce their wives—simply by providing them with a duly attested document of the transaction.’ ‘But I say to you,’ Jesus continued, that such irresponsible behaviour on the part of a husband will lead him and his wife and their second partners into unions which are not marriage but adultery. To this general principle there is one exception. The only situation in which divorce and remarriage are possible without breaking the seventh commandment is when it has already been broken by some serious sexual sin. In this case, and in this case only, Jesus seems to have taught that divorce was permissible, or at least that it could be obtained without the innocent party contracting the further stigma of adultery. The modern tendency of Western countries to frame legislation for divorce on the basis rather of the ‘irretrievable breakdown’ or ‘death’ of a marriage than of a ‘matrimonial offence’ may make for better and juster law; it cannot be said to be compatible with the teaching of Jesus.
Nevertheless, the matter cannot be left there. For this reluctant permission of Jesus must still be seen for what it is, namely a continued accommodation to the hardness of human hearts. In addition, it must always be read both in its immediate context (Christ’s emphatic endorsement of the permanence of marriage in God’s purpose) and also in the wider context of the Sermon on the Mount and of the whole Bible which proclaim a gospel of reconciliation. Is it not of great significance that the Divine Lover was willing to woo back even his adulterous wife, Israel? So one must never begin a discussion on this subject by enquiring about the legitimacy of divorce. To be preoccupied with the grounds for divorce is to be guilty of the very pharisaism which Jesus condemned. His whole emphasis in debating with the rabbis was positive, namely on God’s original institution of marriage as an exclusive and permanent relationship, on God’s ‘yoking’ of two people into a union which man must not break, and (one might add) on his call to his followers to love and forgive one another, and to be peacemakers in every situation of strife and discord. Chrysostom justly linked this passage with the beatitudes and commented in his homily on it: ‘For he that is meek, and a peacemaker, and poor in spirit, and merciful, how shall he cast out his wife? He that is used to reconcile others, how shall he be at variance with her that is his own?’ From this divine ideal, purpose and call, divorce can be seen only as a tragic declension.
So, speaking personally as a Christian pastor, whenever somebody asks to speak with me about divorce, I have now for some years steadfastly refused to do so. I have made the rule never to speak with anybody about divorce, until I have first spoken with him (or her) about two other subjects, namely marriage and reconciliation. Sometimes a discussion on these topics makes a discussion of the other unnecessary. At the very least, it is only when a person has understood and accepted God’s view of marriage and God’s call to reconciliation that a possible context has been created within which one may regretfully go on to talk about divorce. This principle of pastoral priorities is, I believe, consistent with the teaching of Jesus.
2. Honesty in speech (33)
If the rabbis tended to be permissive in their attitude to divorce, they were permissive also in their teaching about oaths. It is another example of their devious treatment of Old Testament Scripture, in order to make it more amenable to obedience. We must look first at the Mosaic law, then at the pharisaic distortion and finally at the true implication of the law on which Jesus insisted.
Again you have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ This is not an accurate quotation of any one law of Moses. At the same time, it is a not inaccurate summary of several Old Testament precepts which require people who make vows to keep them. And the vows in question are, strictly speaking, ‘oaths’ in which the speaker calls upon God to witness his vow and to punish him if he breaks it. Moses often seems to have emphasized the evil of false swearing and the duty of performing to the Lord one’s oaths. Here are a few examples:
‘You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain’ (Ex. 20:7, the third commandment).
‘You shall not swear by my name falsely, and so profane the name of your God’ (Lv 19:12).
‘When a man vows a vow to the Lord, … he shall not break his word’ (Nu. 30:2).
‘When you make a vow to the Lord your God, you shall not be slack to pay it’ (Dt. 23:21).
Even a superficial reading of these commandments indicates plainly their intention. They prohibit false swearing or perjury, that is, making a vow and then breaking it.
But the casuistical Pharisees got to work on these awkward prohibitions and tried to restrict them. They shifted people’s attention away from the vow itself and the need to keep it to the formula used in making it. They argued that what the law was really prohibiting was not taking the name of the Lord in vain, but taking the name of the Lord in vain. ‘False swearing’, they concluded, meant profanity (a profane use of the divine name), not perjury (a dishonest pledging of one’s word). So they developed elaborate rules for the taking of vows. They listed which formulae were permissible, and they added that only those formulae which included the divine name made the vow binding. One need not be so particular, they said, about keeping vows in which the divine name had not been used.
Jesus expressed his contempt for this kind of sophistry in one of the ‘woes’ against the Pharisees (‘blind guides’ he called them) which Matthew records later (23:16–22):
Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘If any one swears by the temple, it is nothing; but if any one swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.’ 17 You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred? 18 And you say, ‘If any one swears by the altar, it is nothing; but if any one swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath.’ 19 You blind men! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred? 20 So he who swears by the altar, swears by it and by everything on it; 21 and he who swears by the temple, swears by it and by him who dwells in it; 22 and he who swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it.
Our Lord’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is similar. The second part of his antithesis, in which he set his teaching over against that of the rabbis, reads as follows:
5:34 But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, 35 or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. 36 And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. 37 Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.
He begins by arguing that the question of the formula used in making vows is a total irrelevance, and in particular that the Pharisees’ distinction between formulae which mention God and those which do not is entirely artificial. However hard you try, Jesus said, you cannot avoid some reference to God, for the whole world is God’s world and you cannot eliminate him from any of it. If you vow by ‘heaven’, it is God’s throne; if by ‘earth’ it is his footstool; if by ‘Jerusalem’ it is his city, the city of the great King. If you swear by your head, it is indeed yours in the sense that it is nobody else’s, and yet it is God’s creation and under God’s control. You cannot even change the natural colour of a single hair, black in youth and white in old age.
So if the precise wording of a vow-formula is irrelevant, then a preoccupation with formulae was not the point of the law at all. Indeed, since anybody who makes a vow must keep it (whatever formula of attestation he uses), strictly speaking all formulae are superfluous. For the formula does not add to the solemnity of the vow. A vow is binding irrespective of its accompanying formula. That being so, the real implication of the law is that we must keep our promises and be people of our word. Then vows become unnecessary. Do not swear at all (34), but rather let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ (37). As the apostle James was to put it later: ‘Let your yes be yes and your no be no.’ And anything more than this, Jesus added, comes from evil, either from the evil of our hearts and its fundamental deceit, or from the evil one whom Jesus described as ‘a liar and the father of lies’. If divorce is due to human hard-heartedness, swearing is due to human untruthfulness. Both were permitted by the law; neither was commanded; neither should be necessary.
Two questions may arise in our minds at this point. First, if swearing is forbidden, why has God himself used oaths in Scripture? Why, for example, did he say to Abraham: ‘By myself I have sworn … I will indeed bless you …’? To this I think we must answer that the purpose of the divine oaths was not to increase his credibility (since ‘God is not man that he should lie’), but to elicit and confirm our faith. The fault which made God condescend to this human level lay not in any untrustworthiness of his but in our unbelief.
Secondly, if swearing is forbidden, is the prohibition absolute? For example, should Christians, in order to be consistent in their obedience, decline to swear an affidavit for any purpose before a Commissioner of Oaths and to give evidence on oath in a court of law? The Anabaptists took this line in the sixteenth century and most Quakers still do today. While admiring their desire not to compromise, one can still perhaps question whether their interpretation is not excessively literalistic. After all, Jesus himself, Matthew later records, did not refuse to reply when the high priest put him on oath, saying: ‘I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.’ He confessed that he was and that later they would see him enthroned at God’s right hand. What Jesus emphasized in his teaching was that honest men do not need to resort to oaths; it was not that they should refuse to take an oath if required by some external authority to do so.
The modern application is not far to seek, for the teaching of Jesus is timeless. Swearing (i.e. oath-taking) is really a pathetic confession of our own dishonesty. Why do we find it necessary to introduce our promises by some tremendous formula, ‘I swear by the archangel Gabriel and all the host of heaven’ or ‘I swear by the Holy Bible’? The only reason is that we know our simple word is not likely to be trusted. So we try to induce people to believe us by adding a solemn oath. Interestingly, the Essenes (a Jewish sect contemporary with Jesus) had high standards in this matter. Josephus wrote of them: ‘They are eminent for fidelity and are the ministers of peace. Whatsoever they say also is firmer than an oath. But swearing is avoided by them, and they esteem it worse than perjury, for they say that he who cannot be believed without (swearing by) God, is already condemned.’ As A. M. Hunter puts it, ‘Oaths arise because men are so often liars.’ The same is true of all forms of exaggeration, hyperbole and the use of superlatives. We are not content to say we had an enjoyable time; we have to describe it as ‘fantastic’ or ‘fabulous’ or even ‘fantabulous’ or some other invention. But the more we resort to such expressions, the more we devalue human language and human promises. Christians should say what they mean and mean what they say. Our unadorned word should be enough, ‘yes’ or ‘no’. And when a monosyllable will do, why waste our breath by adding to it?