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Did Jesus really mean the part about marriage?
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Are Jesus’ words too harsh?
Sometime next year, after gospels about the Transfiguration, Jesus’ curing a boy with a demon, his telling us to become as little children, and assuring us that the Father is like a shepherd who cares even about the straying sheep, after we are lulled into thinking Jesus is a loving, healing, forgiving Lord, we are brought up short with his unbending response to the Pharisees in Chapter 19 of Matthew.
Always testing, they ask him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?” A yes answer on this will make Jesus popular with the men in the crowd, because there are times when marriage is tough.
Instead, Jesus answers unequivocally:
“Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ 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’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Divorced Catholics struggle with this teaching
As a divorced, even though annulled and not remarried, Catholic, I always cringe when this gospel is read—particularly when the homilist chooses to dwell on it. Although I tried to discern the path God might be leading me on, it feels as if I have missed the mark here, failing to live up to the ideal I aspired to when I said my vows.
That’s about what Jesus is showing us in this story: a principle, an ideal held up for us to aim for.
The Pharisees, as it turns out, represented two sides of an ongoing debate at the time. One group, the Hillel, was somewhat liberal, seeing divorce as allowable when the circumstances were right—when the woman had committed adultery, or even when she was just hard to live with. (Women, of course, could not initiate the process.) The stricter group, Shamai, insisted that divorce was only an option when there was an out-and-out breech of vows on the woman’s part.
Getting Jesus to take sides
As so often happened, Jesus was being tricked into taking sides, so that one side or the other would be disillusioned with him. He eludes his questioners by stating the ideal: God’s creation of man and woman to become one in marriage.
I no longer agonize for my own situation. My former husband and I are still friends and our children are very conscious of having two loving parents. Our living apart no longer matters so much, since they all have families of their own.
Marriage is an issue that still challenges the Church
The Church still agonizes over the status of the divorced and remarried and whether they can receive communion. But that’s hardly the real issue today, when we now have legally married same-sex couples seeking a blessing for their unions. Protestant churches are even now debating this issue. Jews tend to favor it, but this also varies according to age and generation, as well as by denomination.
In the case of same-sex marriage today, as in the divorce question of Jesus’ time, the Catholic Church comes down with Jesus on the principle: In the beginning God created them male and female, and “what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
When Jesus made this statement, even the disciples were shocked. “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” Jesus does not, as he did with the followers in John 6, whom he allowed to leave when they objected to his teaching on the Eucharist, let them go rather than soften his words. He said to them, “Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given.”
When we hear Pope Francis urge church leaders to be pastoral, I think we are hearing Jesus’ own admission that it must take special grace to live out the teaching on the ideal of marriage in any age. The challenges of Jesus’ time were not less than those of today, but ours are different. Today, Catholics live in a society where marriage has a whole different connotation than it once did. Where society once more or less mirrored our values, it has now come to see men and women and their relationship through a different lens.
Our challenge is to understand and treasure the ideal Jesus holds up to us, and to learn how to make that ideal visible and attractive to a world that no longer sees it.
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About the Author
Frances Rossi is a seasoned Catholic, product of a practicing faith-filled family and Catholic schools. She has studied Scripture and the documents of the Church, and trained in both liturgy and catechesis. She spent years as a Director of Religious Education as well as serving as music director in several parishes. She is mother to three grown children, and happy grandmother of six. She currently serves as a liturgical musician in a small parish.
She is also active in Democrats for Life of Colorado, a chapter of the national DFLA, Democrats for Life of American, and writes for their newsletter, as well writing letters to the Denver Post.
