Marriage is more than not divorce

I’m a huge fan of coffee. My obsession started in the 6thth grade, but it really took off one Christmas seven years later when my grandma bought me a coffee grinder. The first time I used it I realized that freshly ground beans are so much better. Then my wife bought me a coffee tour from Peets coffee. The deal with the Peets’ coffee tour is the beans end up on your doorstep within two days of roasting. All it took was one cup of freshly ground, freshly roasted coffee for me to realize that freshly ground, freshly roasted coffee was even better. Of course, there’s only one way for my obsession to go: roast the beans myself. A non-commercial, at-home coffee roaster will set you back a couple of hundred bucks. Being the cheap kind of guy that I am I didn’t want to shell out that kind of cash. But there is another way to roast beans. You can use an air popcorn popper which costs about $20. As I was researching the popcorn popper method of roasting coffee beans one phrase hit me, “due to the strains that roasting beans puts on the popcorn popper expect it to last less than six months”.

In Matthew 19 Jesus is asked if it’s a-ok to divorce your wife for any reason at all. Jesus quotes from the Old Testament when he says, “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”

The two quotes that Jesus selects are from Genesis 1.27 and Genesis 2.24, the opening chapters of the Bible that includes the creation story. In other words, Jesus goes back to the intended purpose of marriage. His conclusion is drawn directly from how God meant marriage to be. Jesus follows this up with this statement: “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.

For many churches, for a long time now the teachings of the church about marriage have been only two principles: don’t have an affair, and don’t get divorced. Teaching about marriage in this way is a lot like using a popcorn popper to roast coffee beans. It may get the job done, but it’s not how it was intended to be used, and will in all likelihood break down sooner, rather than later.
There are a lot of Christian marriages out there which are in no danger of divorce or of either spouse having an affair that do not reflect the passages in Genesis that Jesus quoted. If a marriage is really a joining together of two people into then each spouse will be looking out for the best interest of the other, each spouse will be trying to serve the other, and each spouse will be looking out for the other as if they were looking out for themselves. Unfortunately, many marriages don’t look like this at all. The spouses have drifted apart, and see their marriage as a burdensome duty. Instead of two becoming one, they’re more like a set of Siamese twins.

This teaching by Jesus has, in many ways, been misinterpreted by the church by putting too much focus on the conclusions of Jesus, and almost completely ignoring how Jesus gets there. The question before Jesus is not one of marriage, but one of divorce, and if we use this teaching to govern our marriages we’re completely missing out on the blessings, and intention of marriage.