Monday Devotional: Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage (Mark 10:1-12)

Pursuing God's ideal

He left that place and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan. And crowds again gathered around him; and, as was his custom, he again taught them.

Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery”(Mark 10:1-12).

File this one under “Passages I Wish I Didn’t Have to Write About.” Nevertheless, there it is, in black and white, at the beginning of Mark’s tenth chapter, so here we go. Marriage, divorce, and remarriage are hard topics for us to talk about in the church today. Much of the time we ignore them or provide simplistic answers that may not address the questions our parishioners have. God created marriage as a lifelong union between a man and a woman. But is divorce ever permissible? May a divorced person ever remarry? This Monday Devotional will be a bit longer than normal.