Published by Next to abortion no religious issue comes as close to dividing us as that of divorce, the dissolution of the marriage contract. Conservative religious groups, Catholic and Protestant, strongly oppose divorce, though differing in the degree to which it should, if at all, be condoned. Yet divorce is common in our society; one New York Times article (Hurley: April 19, 2005) suggested the rate of divorce to be 41% among all people who have ever married. But did Jesus truly forbid divorce? And does remarriage after divorce constitute adultery?
In the Gospel According to Matthew, Jesus said that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness (or in other translations, “unless the marriage is unlawful”), and marries another woman, commits adultery (Matthew 19, 9). Some Protestants claim this means that once spouses undermine the marriage by carrying on extramarital affairs, it constitutes the “unfaithfulness” referred to by Jesus and under which divorce should be allowed. Catholics counter that Jesus could not have meant this, because it would encourage spouses to cheat on each other just to break up the marriage. Supposing another meaning altogether to Jesus’ words, neither side is accurate.
According to Matthew’s gospel, Jesus said that what God has joined together, let no man separate (Matthew 19, 6). This presupposes marriage as something not only beyond mere civil union but beyond common human weaknesses of greed, selfishness, or vanity—that is, joined by God means joined by the love that is intrinsic to our being, a spiritual contract beyond the civil contract. Even for agnostics, marriage represents a commitment not only at a physical or even emotional level but at a potentially deeper level of the psyche. This is commitment at a “soul level” and is what consummates the marriage.
Suppose, however, that the soul-level commitment of love and cherishment was never realized from the beginning, or if it was, that it was replaced by the human weaknesses contrary to it. Marriage vows in these circumstances represent only form and not substance, mere civil contract and nothing more. The marriage becomes a sham, a marriage not characterized by love but by self-serving motives, and, as based on human failings, a joining not by God but by Man. Since the element of the divine was either never there or has become missing, Man should be allowed to separate what Man has joined together. In this light Jesus would not forbid the divorce of a marriage lacking its spiritual element nor consider a subsequent remarriage as adultery.
What about the case of a strong marriage characterized by loving commitment? No doubt that commitment, embodied by each spouse’s vows to love and cherish the other until death, is broken upon the spouse’s abandonment of the marriage. According to Jesus, even when a married man looks at another woman with desire, that is adultery (Matthew 5, 28). Thus, where there has been a strong spiritual bond between two people, a failure of the heart, the mere thought of sexual relations with someone other than the spouse, represents unfaithfulness to the marriage and, in Jesus’ view, adultery itself.
Do we ever truly approach that kind of total self-control in our hearts, free from thoughts that would weaken our marital commitment? Indeed Jesus suggests that some of us may not be suitable for the commitment that marriage entails and, thus, should never marry (Matthew 5, 28). If someone who is inherently unsuitable for marriage should marry, one could argue that the marriage is unlawful on its face and that that person should be allowed to divorce. In other words, given human weakness, the lack of a true commitment in accordance with marital vows, divorce is inevitable. Given that we so often fail Jesus’ main teaching to love our neighbor (And who could be more closer to us as a neighbor than a husband or wife?), Jesus is not so much condemning divorce as he is condemning our failures as human beings.
Divorce, like abortion, is not an easy path. The inherent difficulty in assessing the strength of the marriage, whether or not the spirit of love is still present to salvage that marriage, suggests a long period of careful thought before following that path. And while Jesus neither condemns nor condones it directly, divorce may simply be a necessity when two people fail to realize their potential for love.
