Today’s Scripture: Mark 10:1-12 (ESV-text and audio) (KJV) (The Message)
As you read, consider: What might God be saying to me? Summarize your thoughts in a sentence or two.
My thoughts (Tyler Connoley):
To understand this passage, you have to understand the debates about divorce that happened between two famous Rabbis who lived about one hundred years before Jesus. Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai argued about everything, and many of their arguments are recorded in the Talmud, a Jewish holy book. One of the topics on which these two Rabbis disagreed was the topic of divorce.
In Deuteronomy 24:1 it says, “Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her, and so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house; she then leaves his house.” Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai disagreed on what something objectionable might be. Hillel said it could be anything — even if a man found his wife’s cooking objectionable, he could use that as grounds for divorce. Shammai said the something objectionable referred to adultery, and that this was the only biblical grounds for divorce.
The Pharisees were followers of Hillel and Shammai. And, like those two Rabbis, they were caught up in arguing the details of Scripture. They were literalists who needed to parse every word of the Bible, and they wanted Jesus to parse words with them. They were testing him to see what he would make of this tricky Scriptural question that had tripped up two of their best Rabbis.
However, when they brought their argument to Jesus, he sidestepped it entirely. He knew they were arguing about the wording in Deuteronomy 24:1, but he quoted a completely different Scripture in his answer. Instead of nit-picking language, Jesus pointed out the way people’s lives become fused when they are married. “They are no longer two, but one flesh.” I believe he wanted them to stop thinking only in terms of what’s technically legal and illegal, and start thinking in terms of what divorce does to a relationship. As always, Jesus took the perspective of love over literalism.
Unfortunately, modern day literalists miss the whole point, and now parse the language of this passage as well. Like the Pharisees who used the language of Deuteronomy to allow a man to divorce his wife for any reason, modern literalists use the language of Mark to insist on their cruelly narrow ideas about marriage and divorce. But Jesus says these people have hard hearts.
Thought for the day: Have you been caught up in legalism and literalism on some topic? Let go of those tricky Scriptural questions, and soften your heart to the relationships around you.
We encourage you to include a time of prayer with this reading. If you need a place to get started, consider the guidelines on the How to Pray page.