- In the beginning: no divorce.
- Marriage = symbol of the unbreakable union between God and humanity.
- So “divorce” doesn’t even belong in the original divine design.
- Then comes human hardness.
- Because human hearts are dark and coarse, the marital covenant gets abused.
- If there were no legal way out, a truly hard-hearted, murderous man might simply “solve” his problem by killing or violently mistreating his wife.
- So Jesus, through Moses, introduces divorce as an exceptional concession, a lesser evil to prevent worse evils (like murder).
- The problem: good, self-righteous people misused the exception.
- The law was meant as an emergency “escape” for extreme cases (hard-hearted abusers).
- But the “righteous” elite adopt it as a normal, respectable tool: “We’re good people managing our marriages properly; the Law permits it; we’re fine.”
Jesus’ question to them:
“So you claim to be righteous and not like murderers… yet you happily use a law given precisely for the murderous and cruel. Are you admitting you’re one of them?”
- Jesus on the Mount: putting divorce back into its real category.
- He says: “Because of your hard hearts Moses allowed it, but from the beginning it was not so.”
In my reading, He basically says:
“Let the true hard-hearted and abusers resort to this exceptional law if necessary, but you who call yourselves righteous have no business touching it.”
- Then the hard saying: “Whoever divorces his wife… makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
- Mainstream reading: the divorced woman + her new partner are adulterers; the first husband is guilty if he remarries, but not if he stays single.
- My objection:
- This doesn’t fit Jesus’ concern.
- Jesus is clearly warning the one who initiates divorce; yet mainstream focus shifts blame onto the new couple.
- Also, given the “urinating away semen” theme, it’s odd to treat the original husband as “clean” if he stays single: he still caused the whole mess.
- My proposed correction: the core sin is stumbling others.
- When a man divorces his wife in that world, she is almost forced, for survival, to seek a new husband.
- Jesus’ statement that she and the man she marries “commit adultery” serves to highlight how grave the divorcer’s act is:
- He has caused others to fall into adultery.
- Like causing “little ones to stumble,” it’s better for him to be thrown into the sea than to bear that guilt.
- Now let's plug in the Qur’anic law about triple divorce.
- Divorce three times → final; ex-wife cannot return to first husband unless she truly marries another and that second marriage ends.
- On the surface, this:
- protects the woman from a cycle of abuse (“take you back / throw you out / repeat”),
- and heavily discourages men from casual divorce.
- For most people this pragmatic reasoning suffices.
- But I say the deeper spiritual logic lines up with Jesus’ teaching:
- The divorcer has caused her to (potentially) become an adulterer.
- If he later wants her back, he must taste his own medicine:
- Because she is now divorced herself, he now “marries an adulteress” and becomes an adulterer by his own former act.
- His technical status humiliates him and strips away self-righteousness.
- Humiliation → humility → mercy. He can no longer boast.
- That humiliation is a practical repentance, lived in the body and the social order.
- So my grand claim:
- Divorce is always bad for the divorcer:
- If he stays single, he remains the one who stumbled others.
- If he remarries her after she has been with someone else, he takes on the legal/technical stigma of “adulterer” himself and is humbled.
- The Qur’anic rule, in my view, is a providential midrash-like clarification of Jesus’ logic:
- It operationalizes the principle: you made others adulterers, now you must consent to wearing that stigma yourself if you want to heal the damage.
- For Muslim audiences, the deeper Jesus-logic is hidden but still present; those who seek to know more are invited to the Gospels.
- Divorce is always bad for the divorcer:
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