Marriage . . . from the Beginning

Matthew 19:3-6

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

The renewal of life [Jesus] offers, in the sphere of marriage as everywhere else, will come through the willing, intelligent obedience of wholehearted women and man who think out what it means to be loyal to God and to other people, especially to their marriage partner, and who take steps to put it into practice (43).

No wonder it’s a hard, costly and wonderful to work at a marriage and truly to become “one flesh.” Jesus’ whole aim was to bring about that renewal of the world in which the intention of the creator God would at last be fulfilled. No wonder he didn’t want us to settle for anything less than the best (44).

A. Orendorff

As usual, Jesus’ response to the religious leaders exposes the shallowness of their thinking. A question about divorce becomes a lesson in creation. Jesus begins by redirecting their approach. “You’re asking the wrong question,” he seems to say, “You want to talk about escape clauses, loop holes and legal technicalities when really what you should be attending to is the reason God made us in the first place.” In the beginning (the very beginning), marriage was written into the fabric of creation as an expression of what it means to be made in the image of God. In marriage, plurality flowers into oneness not so as to denigrate the plurality but rather to complete it. Jesus’ work of restoration therefore does not transcend marriage but enfolds it into the pattern of redemption itself. This doesn’t mean easy sailing. What it means is that marriage—in the kingdom—becomes another signpost of where the gospel is taking creation itself: resurrection by way of the cross.