Hard Hearts

Mark 10:1–12

¹And he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again. And again, as was his custom, he taught them. ² And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” ³ He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” ⁴ They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” ⁵ And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. ⁶ But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ⁷ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, ⁸ and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. ⁹ What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” ¹⁰ And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. ¹¹ And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, ¹² and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

This is always a challenging text as we work through the minefield of a culture that embraces disposable relationships. The Pharisees are seeking to make Jesus look guilty of a crime against Jewish law and so approach Him with what they believe to be a difficult question. It was difficult because the Jews themselves had conflicting ideas of what God said about marriage and divorce. The intent of the Pharisees was not to gain instruction about this topic, but instead to find reason to accuse Jesus of blasphemy. As with all of these conversations, Jesus didn’t fall for the trap and instead turns the conversation into a lesson on the ways of God. The portion of Mosaic Law the Pharisees are referencing is found in Deuteronomy.

Deuteronomy 24:1–4

¹“When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, and she departs out of his house, ² and if she goes and becomes another man’s wife, ³ and the latter man hates her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter man dies, who took her to be his wife, ⁴ then her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled, for that is an abomination before the Lord. And you shall not bring sin upon the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance.

The divorce question was made to order, since they themselves were not agreed on the proper interpretation of Moses’ words. Those who followed Rabbi Shammai said the only reason for divorce was moral indecency; those who followed Hillel said anything in a wife that did not please the husband was grounds for divorce. They expected Jesus to side with one or the other, and they would then have the opportunity to criticize him publicly.

Wicke, H. E. ©1988. Mark (p. 139). Milwaukee, WI: Northwestern Pub. House.

Jesus met their challenge. First, he told them that Moses’ regulation, which they had quoted, was simply a concession to their hardness of heart. It was an attempt to keep reasonable order in society and not at all a statement whereby God approved of divorce. Next, Jesus referred back to creation and called their attention to the principles God established for marriage. Then he gave them his own judgment, based on those principles: “So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”

There is much that could be said about this passage but for today, the phrase that leaps off of the page is “Because of your hardness of heart”. So much of what happens to us today is a result of our hard hearts. Our willingness to throw away a marriage relationship is truly only just an example of the consequences of this hardness. You could extrapolate out into almost any other aspect of life and find that we have hardened ourselves against the Word of God. God’s solution to that hardness was the life and death of Jesus Christ. Only in His saving work do we find redemption for those hard hearts. The shocking thing is that, even as He was speaking these words, Jesus was shortly to be hanging on the Cross for these hard hearts.