Sermon on the Mount

by Scot McKnight

  In addition to dopamine, the brain releases oxytocin and vasopressin, which tell a woman that the man is hers and the man that the woman is his. This kind of bonding is created every time a human has any kind of sexual experience. The feeling of “guilt” or “dirtiness” that arises in a human who experiences sex outside the bounds of biblical morals or fidelity is the brain’s way of saying, “I’m confused.” All of this is to say this: Jesus prohibits illicit sexual encounters, whether physical or fantasy, because God has wired us for sexual fidelity and lifelong rugged commitments of love to one person. Hearts are wired to brains, and brains are wired to commitment.

  The focus of the text here is on male responses to females. It is worth reminding ourselves in this media-drenched age where images of women abound that Jesus apparently was pointing his finger at the appropriate gender: males objectify women into sexualized objects. And it is not that the Bible is against the beauty of a woman, and once again one can’t read the Song of Songs and not be overcome by the poetic beauty. The problem is not beauty but objectification of a woman and the female body so that it becomes an object of self-satisfying pleasure for the male. We also live in one of the most egalitarian societies in history where women too express their own sexual needs and wants, so it needs to be said that women also objectify males and the male body. Jesus’ words in this text prohibit objectification of any sort because he sees the female form and the male form to be fitted for one another only within the bounds of a married relationship.

  We conclude with Simon Blackburn’s exceptional staccato of comparisons between love and lust:

  Love receives the world’s applause. Lust is furtive, ashamed, and embarrassed.

  Love pursues the good of the other, with self-control, concern, reason, and patience. Lust pursues its own gratification, headlong, impatient of any control, immune to reason.

  Love thrives on candlelight and conversation. Lust is equally happy in a doorway or a taxi, and its conversation is made of animal grunts and cries.

  Love is individual: there is only the unique Other, the one doted upon, the single star around whom the lover revolves. Lust takes what comes.

  Lovers gaze into each others’ eyes. Lust looks sideways, inventing deceits and stratagems and seductions, sizing up opportunities.

  Love grows with knowledge and time, courtship, truth, and trust. Lust is a trail of clothing in the hallway, the collision of two football packs.

  Love lasts, lust cloys.28

  Notes

  1. KNT: “trips you up” (and in v. 30).

  2. Famously omitted by the Chronicler (cf. 2 Chr 9:13–28).

  3. See Gellius, Attic Nights 10.23.5. Text can be found online at: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Gellius/10*.html. I found this reference in Garland, Reading Matthew, 66.

  4. This text is not, then, referring to the tenth commandment’s prohibition of coveting a neighbor’s wife (Exod 20:17), even though the same word for desire (here “lustfully”) is used.

  5. The Mosaic Torah stipulated death for adultery (Deut 22:22), but the only surviving evidence about Jesus on that element of the law comes from the disputed text in John 7:53–8:11. If authentic, that law shows that Jesus suspended the death penalty. It is the absence of the punishment in Jesus’ words in Matthew 5 (and 19:18) that indicates that kingdom ethics trade in forgiveness and the transforming power of grace and mercy instead of capital punishment.

  6. There is a slight grammatical debate here: does the accusative (autēn) mean that the woman is lusted after or the one who lusts? The former is almost certain because it is the man who commits adultery in his heart in the last clause of v. 28; see Quarles, Sermon on the Mount, 117–18.

  7. In ACCS: Matthew, 108.

  8. A good example is Tertullian, who wrote an essay on how women should dress: On the Apparel of Women. See Garland, Reading Matthew, 66–67.

  9. Allison, Sermon on the Mount, 72.

  10. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 125.

  11. A present active participle. Some today see “present tense” and think “ongoing action,” but the Greek present participle is designed to speak not of time but of how the author wants to depict the action. This is an action that is depicted as vivid, dramatic, and characteristic: “the one who stares” is more accurate than “the one who keeps on staring.”

  12. For a sketch of how “lust/desire” was understood in the ancient world, see Keener, Matthew, 186.

  13. See also Job 31:1; 2 Pet 2:14; 1 John 2:16. Eve’s sin in Gen 3:6 is not sexual, though it too began with the eyes.

  14. See C. S. Keener, Paul, Women and Wives: Marriage and Women’s Ministry in the Letters of Paul (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1992), 27–31.

  15. This “now-but-not-yet kingdom” is the theme of Ladd’s The Presence of the Future. Ladd has been influential with his theory that the kingdom is “present without consummation.”

  16. J. Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke (trans. D. W. Torrance; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), 1:118–19.

  17. R. J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline (rev. ed.; San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 143–57.

  18. D. Bonhoeffer, Life Together (trans. J. W. Doberstein; New York: Harper, 1954), 108–18; quotation from 109.

  19. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 465. The person to whom Bonhoeffer confessed was Bethge. See John W. De Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit: Bonhoeffer’s Friend Eberhard Bethge (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 27, 43, 62–63, 208. My thanks to Katya Covrett for bringing this to my attention.

  20. Winner, Girl Meets God, 206–15.

  21. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 126.

  22. A wide-ranging sketch, and not always favorable to the Christian ethic, can be found in Simon Blackburn, Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). The Roman Catholic view can be seen in John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006); a recent evangelical approach is Lauren Winner, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005).

  23. On the history of interpretation, see Luz, Matthew 1–7, 243–44.

  24. Luther, Sermon on the Mount, 86.

  25. See D. Fitch, The End of Evangelicalism: Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), 88–97.

  26. Stott, Message, 88.

  27. I borrow here from my book One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 128–30.

  28. Blackburn, Lust, 2. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=N0y60xZcSsgC&print sec=frontcover&source=gbs_ViewAPI#v=onepage&q&f=false.

  Chapter 7

  Matthew 5:31–32

  LISTEN to the Story

  31“It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’1 32But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”

  Listening to the text in the Story: Genesis 1–3; 12; 15; Deuteronomy 24:1–4; Song of Songs; 1 Corinthians 7:1–16; Ephesians 5:21–33.

  Divorce confuses the church today because marriage confuses. And marriage confuses the church today because love confuses. Love is understood through the lens of romance, personal fulfillment, self-expansion, sexual satisfaction, and whatever the lasting impressions are in Hollywood’s movies, relationship TV specials, and novels and books about marriage, love, and relationships. When someone says they are getting divorced, we are horrified or tongue-tied or say something as trite as “I hope you find someone who makes you happy,” or “Not all marriages work out.” We often don’t know what to say because we don’t know what to think, and we don’t know what to think because love, marriage, and divorce are confusingly connected.

  All of this is to say that the “story” that shapes what we think of divorce in Western culture is as far from the Bible’s Story as Dickens’s A Christmas Carol or Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is from th
e biblical understanding of Christmas. Our commentary series wants to set each passage in the context of the Story of God in the Bible. This means we can’t understand divorce until we understand its Storied contours.

  Those contours include a number of things. God created humans and divided them into “male and female” as God’s own image-bearers (Gen 1:26–27). God made “male and female” to govern this world together on God’s behalf, and one way they were to govern was to procreate with one another. Furthermore, God gave Eve to Adam as his ʾēzer k e negdô (NIV “helper suitable for him,” 2:18) because she was his perfect “companion.” Furthermore, Adam and Eve broke their relationship when Eve and Adam chose to eat the fruit, hide from God, and blame one another. Scripture predicts but does not prescribe that Adam and Eve would be at one another’s throat—with Adam wanting to control and Eve also wanting to control (3:1–16). The charge to human beings as male and female to govern the earth (1:28) would be doubly complicated, God told the primal pair, because of their choice to act like gods (3:14–19).

  There are examples of married couples in the Bible, including Abraham and Sarah and Moses and Zipporah, but the gloriousness of love and marriage is depicted in the Song of Songs. That book is nothing other than the delightful playfulness of love, relationship, and pleasure. Sadly, Song of Songs is often neglected in books on a “biblical” view of marriage.

  Alongside this “story” of relationship, the Bible’s Story grounds all love in God’s covenant love (Gen 12; 15). My own way of framing this covenant love is to use three prepositions: that God covenants to be with us and to be for us unto full redemption—that is, until we are in the kingdom, are Christlike, and become the holy and loving people of God. This covenant understanding of love means marital love reflects God’s love, which means a divorce destroys the reflection of the God who is utterly faithful. Marital love, then, is defined by God’s love: our love for our spouse is to be with them, to be for them, and to be unto God’s formative purpose for each of us. The three principles of love are thus presence (with), advocacy (for), and formation (unto).

  To end the confusion about marriage we have to grasp what love means. I have one more element to add to these three prepositions. The church’s faith unfolds to reveal that God is triune. Once we set our teeth into the firm Christian conviction that our God is a One-and-Three God, we are led to the conclusion that the relationship “within” God is a relationship theologians called perichoresis. This Greek term describes the mutual indwelling and interpenetration of Father, Son, and Spirit. If this is who God is and what God is, we have another dimension of love. Since God’s relationship is “perichoretic” and since our love participates in God’s way of loving, then marital love is “perichoretic.” That means, above all, that marriage is a relationship of mutual indwelling and interpenetration. Divorce destroys perichoresis, our indwelling of one another.

  The utter horror Jesus expresses about divorce emerges from the factors sketched above: Adam and Eve’s intent, design, and task; the glory of loving relationship; the covenant relationship of God with us as the One who is for us, and how this defines biblical love; and the perichoresis of the Trinity. Hauerwas gets it exactly right here: if we come to this text looking for reasons to justify divorce, we miss the whole point. What this text does is to redefine marriage and to anchor it in the new community of Jesus, a community that will make possible both the single life and fidelity.2 Jesus calls his followers to a better way, to the way of love and marital faithfulness. His Ethic from Beyond contends we can have a surpassing righteousness; his Ethic from Above lays the demand before us. He is the Messiah of this ethic, and he gives a community in which this kind of life is embodied.

  We dive now into one of the vexing issues of marriage and divorce. It vexes at the level of understanding what the Bible says. It vexes at the personal level, where divorce emerges out of a relationship fraught with issues, problems, histories, and personalities. And it vexes us at the challenging task of loving people in their marital challenges.

  EXPLAIN the Story

  This third antithesis in Matthew 5 begins with a text, “It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce,’ ” and Jesus follows with his antithesis. But this time his antithesis reveals his view of the Torah. In his day, the text quoted was understood as a minimal condition for justified divorce, but Jesus trumps that interpretation by appealing to the strictness of what Moses himself said: divorce is wrong except for one condition. Because this text is a collection of problems to solve and the discussions are remarkably complex, we will deal with one problem at a time, and we will have to weave in and out of the text, options, historical context, debates, and implications.

  The Mosaic Law

  Jesus does not quote but instead summarizes Deuteronomy 24:1, and because that text (24:1–4) is so important for this passage, the text needs to be quoted in full:

  1If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, 2and if after she leaves his house she becomes the wife of another man, 3and her second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, or if he dies, 4then her first husband, who divorced her, is not allowed to marry her again after she has been defiled. That would be detestable in the eyes of the LORD. Do not bring sin upon the land the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance.

  Permission and Inviolable Union

  Divorce was not part of the Creator’s design, as Jesus will state up-front in Matthew 19:8–9. Moses only permitted divorce because the Israelites had hard hearts and didn’t want to bear the full burden of God’s holy law. In fact, Jesus believes Genesis 1–2 comprehends marriage as an inviolable union created by God—the man and the woman become “one flesh” (19:5–6). For Jesus, marriage is about “with-ness” and the perichoretic indwelling of one another. In addition to this holy union and divorce-as-a-permission, the Mosaic law also prohibited divorce under any circumstances when the union itself was irregular (Deut 22:19, 28–29).

  Permission to Permissiveness

  But when divorce occurred, in spite of the requirement to surrender the dowry as well as pay off the marriage payment of roughly one year’s wages (called a ketubbah), Moses’ permission had become a license in the hands of some (Jesus calls them “hard-hearted” in 19:8). One prophet who railed against the laxity was Malachi (Mal 2:13–17), who discerned that the holy union of marriage was specifically designed for procreating holy children (2:15). Permissiveness is precisely in question when the Pharisees, who fashioned themselves both as observant and the guardians of Torah observance, ask Jesus: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” (Matt 19:3).

  It should not, however, be supposed that all Jews were lenient as this, for the more conservative Jews opposed permissiveness and had tighter regulations (e.g., the Essenes of Qumran in 11QTemple 57:16–19).3 But even the rigorous believed divorce was sometimes necessary. Matthew 1:19 makes clear that Joseph, engaged to Mary, felt obligated to divorce Mary on the basis of her pregnancy. For the righteous, sexual interference between husband and wife demanded divorce in order to maintain purity.4 Rigor, however, was not the problem Jesus faced. Josephus, the Jewish historian, provides an example of laxity with respect to one’s marriage covenant in his autobiography:

  At this period I divorced my wife, being displeased at her behaviour. She had borne me three children…. Afterwards I married a woman of Jewish extraction who had settled in Crete. She came of very distinguished parents.5

  On the basis of Exodus 21:10–11 the most common set of obligations for a husband was to provide food, clothing, and shelter as well as some sense of marital love and intimacy. Thus, Papyrus Yadin 10 records the commitment of a Jewish husband to his wife in these words: “I will feed you and clothe you and I will bring you into my house.”
6 Divorce could be granted when one of these conditions was denied, and later rabbis make it clear that “marital love” could be strained to the point of divorce for repulsiveness and cruelty.7 These are the conditions Jesus is countering in our text.

  Divorce Certificate

  Moses demanded that the man who divorced his wife (and there is evidence that women could divorce their husbands in the Jewish world as well; see Mark 10:12 and immediately below) was required to give her a “certificate of divorce” (Matt 5:31). This certificate, called a geṭ in Hebrew,8 entailed the legality of the dissolution of the marriage and the permission of the woman to remarry. Thus, here is the text from Mishnah Giṭṭin 9:3, with italics added:

  The text of the writ of divorce [is as follows]:

  “Lo, you are permitted to any man.”

  R. Judah says, “Let this be from me your writ of divorce, letter of dismissal, and deed of liberation, that you may marry anyone you want.”

  The text of a writ of emancipation [is as follows]:

  “Lo, you are a free girl, lo, you are your own possession.”

  These legal texts are from the angle of a man divorcing his wife. Contrary to what is often said, one of the texts discovered at Wadi Muraba‘at, though just slightly later than the New Testament period, reveals that women too could divorce men—and such texts confirm that a freedom clause was involved. Here are the appropriate lines from a man’s and then a woman’s divorce settlement:9