Patrick Comerford
The 50-day season of Easter, which began on Easter Day (20 April 2025), came to an end on Sunday with the Day of Pentecost or Whit Sunday (8 June 2025), and once again in the Church Calendar we are in Ordinary Time.
I am about to head off on the bus to Oxford, where I am going to spend much of the day in the Churchill Hospital with a another series of tests and consultation monitoring my pulmonary sarcoidosis and its impact on my heart. Before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, to reflect, to pray and to read in these ways:
1, reading today’s Gospel reading;
2, a short reflection;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
Matthew 5: 27-32 (NRSVA):
[Jesus said:] 27 ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.
31 ‘It was also said, “Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.” 32 But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.’
Today’s Reflection:
The Gospel reading at the Eucharist today (Matthew 5: 27-32) continues our readings from the Sermon on the Mount, and, at first, the statements on adultery, divorce and remarriage may sound harsh and judgmental. So, this morning, I am going to look carefully at this passage in some detail before any further reflection or coming to any conclusions.
Verses 27-28:
‘You have heard’ … the Mosaic code states that you shall not commit adultery. Legally, adultery is sex with another person’s partner, more specifically, with another man’s wife. Under the Mosaic Law, consensual sex between two people who were not married was settled in marriage and so legally it was not adultery. However, adultery carried the death penalty (see Leviticus 20: 10; Deuteronomy 22: 22). But when it comes to God’s perfect law, lust is as good as the deed, thus ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’
In this passage, ‘a woman’ (γυνή, gynē) implies specifically a married woman. When a man looks at her lustfully, he already conjures up the thoughts and the images of intercourse with her. But here the construction may also express the result.
Verses 29-30:
We now move to two parabolic sayings in which Christ speaks of the crucial importance of taking any necessary measures to control any excessive passions that flare out of control (see also Matthew 18: 8-9; cf Mark 9: 43-48). These sayings are more like crisis parables than ethical illustrations.
Of course, Christ is not advocating radical surgery or self-mutilation, nor is he suggesting that this kind of surgery can rid us of sinful desires will be exorcised. Nor is he saying we must blind ourselves to what is wrong, in the sense of closing our eyes to it, like the three monkeys who ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.’ But we must deal radically with sin, and the language of hyperbole expresses radical action.
Verses 31-32:
Is divorce always against the will of God? Is the ‘one-flesh relationship’ between a man and a woman to be permanent and for all time? What does the Apostle Paul have to say? Where may the law end and grace begin?
Think of the consequences in those days for a woman if her husband divorced her. And whatever about a man divorcing his wife, what about a woman divorcing her husband?
The Mosaic law, recognising the human condition, regularises marital separation by the requirement of a ‘document of dismissal’ (Deuteronomy 24: 1). By the time of Jesus, this had become little more than publicly-sanctioned adultery. But where the Church has taken the ideal and enshrined it in legalism, have we become more like the Scribes and the Pharisees? Christ exposes our state of sin, but does he seek to burden us with a weight too hard to bear? Is this an ideal to strive after or a law to be obeyed?
There is an exception, but Matthew alone notes this, while Mark and Luke give no grounds at all for ending a marriage. Matthew is describing cases where one partner has destroyed marriage through πορνεία (porneía), which can refer to illicit sexual intercourse, adultery, fornication, homosexuality, intercourse with animals, sexual intercourse with close relatives, sexual intercourse with a divorced man or woman. It is the word that gives us ‘pornography’, but it is also used throughout the Bible to talk about the worship of idols and the defilement of idolatry, incurred by eating the sacrifices offered to idols.
The word was originally used of sex with a prostitute, but took on a wider sense to include all sexual acts outside of marriage. In Deuteronomy 24: 1-4, the ground for a divorce was ‘something indecent’, but Christ now severely limits the understanding of what constitutes an ‘indecent’ act.
Should a man divorce his wife for other reasons, he is effectively trying to condemn her as an adulteress. In Jewish society it would be extremely difficult for a woman to survive without a husband. A divorced woman would be forced to take another husband and be seen as an adulterer. The responsibility for this situation properly rests on the man who divorced her.
Reflecting on the reading:
I wince and even imagine physical pain when it comes to the discussion of physical mutilation in the first part of this reading.
As a priest who is divorced and remarried, I find the topics in this reading a challenge every time I read it, even though I have dealt with these topics on many occasions when I have preached in a parish and pastoral context, in preparing couples for marriage, and in my own life. I wish some of my priest colleagues had been as generous to me in the recent past as I hope they are to their own parishioners when it comes to providing true pastoral care, understanding and support.
Later in this Gospel (Matthew 19: 11-12), the discussion about divorce and remarriage causes me even greater confusion and all my attempts to understand its context still leave me in search of meaning and understanding. But then even the text itself warns that some readers will not be able to receive what is being said.
Jesus’ words seem to find echoes in Saint Paul’s writings when, for example, he seems to advocate remaining single if someone is called to do so (see I Corinthians 7: 24-28), yet says it is wrong to forbid marriage to anyone (I Timothy 4: 1-3). However, both Jesus and Paul stress that relatively few people were called to a life of celibacy, a lifestyle that was generally unacceptable socially in their time.
People who go through a marriage breakdown and divorce, and still cling on to going to church, perhaps just by their fingernails, may well ask, ‘Where is the Good News this morning?’
The Pharisees were divided on the legality of divorce and the grounds for divorce. The Law of Moses allowed a man to divorce his wife, if he finds ‘something objectionable about her’ (Deuteronomy 24: 1). It never said a woman could divorce her husband.
A man could simply ‘write a certificate of dismissal’, without going through any formal legal proceedings. ‘Something objectionable’ could cover a multitude, from adultery to an eccentric hair-do on a bad hair day. Indeed, by the time of Christ, divorce was allowed for the most trivial of reasons, and was so common that many women suffered.
There are other places in the New Testament where Christ, and Saint Paul and Saint Peter, accept that a man may divorce an unfaithful wife. Saint Mark alone mentions the possibility of women also divorcing. This may have been normal in non-Jewish contexts, but cases of Jewish women initiating divorce are rare.
Christ devotes much of his teaching time interpreting scripture in a way that gives priority to human wellbeing. For example, the Sabbath is made for us rather than we being made for the Sabbath. Similarly, we could say he is saying here that the order of marriage is made for us, not that we are made for the ordering of marriage, or worrying about the minutiae in the details religious people construct around marriage.
The way Christ interprets scriptural law ought to provide a clue to how we interpret his teaching.
Today, many of us may appear to be on the side of the Pharisees on the question of divorce. Divorce is common today and most of us accept it as a reality. Our laws and our customs, like those of the Pharisees in the Gospel accounts, assume divorce happens.
Christ appears to be harsh and uncompromising on a first reading this morning. But many marriages get stale or toxic, relationships can dry up or lose focus, self-destruct, or break down. Things go wrong for far too many reasons.
A divorce may be a burial for a dead marriage. Divorces do not kill marriages any more than funerals kill people … although one of the great tragedies today is that far too many couples are burying their relationship when it is only sick or injured.
Is it not possible that the promise to be together until death can refer to the death of the relationship as well as the death of the person?
Is it not possible to recall that the original intent of our loving and caring God who gave us the gift of marriage was to make our lives better?
Does that desire of God evaporate when we are no longer in a marriage?
In other Gospel passages, when Jesus is asked about divorce and remarriage, people are trying to set a trap for him. But marriage is not a trap and not a matter of expediency in which the wife is the property of the husband.
Of course, the covenant of marriage is still just as valid today. Ideally, when two people marry, they commit themselves to an exclusive relationship of love and devotion in a new entity. But it is easier to say thar than it is to face up to reality, which includes the complexities of child-rearing, careers and competing religious, social and economic claims and responsibilities.
Ideally, we are not to live alone, but in loving and committed relationships. Indeed, in an ideal world, there would be no such thing as divorce. But we do not live in an ideal world. We live in a fallen and broken world in which human nature always falls short of the glory of God. Whether we like it or not, divorce is a reality and we have to live with that.
Sadly, when people go through a divorce, the church is often the last place they can turn to for help and understanding.
But divorce is like a death. It is the death of a relationship, and so people grieve, and they need sympathy and to be consoled. Would we dare chastise someone who was grieving after the death of a family member?
I was reminded once by a divorced priest in the Church of Ireland that when God says: ‘I hate divorce ... I hate divorce’ (Malachi 2: 16), that of course God hates divorce because God has gone through the sufferings and grieving of divorce through our faithlessness and wandering.
God hates divorce because God has suffered divorce.
It was a profound insight.
Too often, in debates, passages of Scripture taken out of context, or one-sided interpretations of the tradition of the Church can be used to set a trap so that people are forced to accept only one standard or practice for marriage in the world today. Let us not use this reading to trap Jesus through hardness of heart. And let us not use this reading to trap vulnerable, suffering and grieving people who remain open to loving and being loved.
We must face questions about marriage and divorce, about who can be married and who can be divorced, as challenges that ask us to think outside the box, without trying to trap Jesus or to trap those who are faced with honest questions about marriage and about divorce.
Today’s Prayers (Friday 13 June 2025):
‘Pentecost’ is the theme this week (8-14 June) in Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel). This theme was introduced on Sunday with reflections by Dr Paulo Ueti, Theological Advisor and Regional Manager for the Americas and the Caribbean, USPG.
The USPG prayer diary today (Friday 13 June 2025) invites us to pray:
Spirit of God, in the same way as you did at Pentecost, humble us to open your word up to all who may want to hear it, making us faithful ambassadors of Christ.
The Collect:
O Lord, from whom all good things come:
grant to us your humble servants,
that by your holy inspiration
we may think those things that are good,
and by your merciful guiding may perform the same;
through our Lord Jesus Christ,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post Communion Prayer:
Gracious God, lover of all,
in this sacrament
we are one family in Christ your Son,
one in the sharing of his body and blood
and one in the communion of his Spirit:
help us to grow in love for one another
and come to the full maturity of the Body of Christ.
We make our prayer through your Son our Saviour.
Yesterday’s Reflection
Continued Tomorrow
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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