The Kingdom on Foot: JESUS' Tender Words on Divorce (Matthew 5: 31-32)

This episode steps into one of the most difficult and often misunderstood teachings of Jesus—His words on divorce and remarriage in Matthew 5:31–32.

For many people, this passage hasn’t felt like good news. It’s been a source of confusion, shame, or even deep personal pain. Instead of rushing past that, this conversation slows down and makes space for the real human weight behind these words. What has this teaching been used to say? Where has it been mishandled? And what was Jesus actually addressing in His own time?

We walk through the Old Testament background in Deuteronomy, the debates happening in Jesus’ day, and how His original audience would have heard this teaching. Rather than offering a cold legal standard, Jesus speaks into a culture where covenant was being treated casually and people—especially women—were being left vulnerable under the cover of religious justification.

This episode also takes time to bring clarity to the language Jesus uses, especially the word “adultery.” Not as a weapon or label, but as a way of understanding how deeply God values covenant, trust, and relational faithfulness. From there, we gently explore what Jesus’ words might mean for remarriage, repentance, healing, and moving forward in a life shaped by truth and grace.

This is not a conversation about drawing hard lines or handing out categories. It’s an invitation to see the heart of Jesus more clearly—His seriousness about covenant, His concern for the vulnerable, and His commitment to truth that heals rather than condemns.

If this topic has ever felt heavy or personal, this episode is meant to meet you there—with honesty, care, and a deeper look at what Jesus is really saying.

Transcript

There are some teachings of Jesus that people hear as good news right away. They hear blessing. They hear mercy. They hear invitation. They hear the voice of Jesus opening a door that religion had closed. And then there are teachings like this one, where many people do not hear good news at first. They hear fear. They hear shame. They hear the voice of a pastor from years ago telling them they failed. They hear the silence of a church that did not protect them. They hear the pain of being told to stay in something destructive because someone treated a few words from Jesus like a cage instead of a call into life.

So before we talk about Matthew 5:31-32, I think we need to slow down. Because this is not an abstract topic. Divorce is not just a theological category. It is a wound for many people. Sometimes it is the wound of betrayal. Sometimes it is the wound of abandonment. Sometimes it is the wound of abuse. Sometimes it is the wound of trying with everything you had and still watching a marriage fall apart. And sometimes, honestly, it is the wound of being mishandled by the people of God afterward.

Jesus says, in Matthew 5, that a man who divorces his wife must not treat the certificate of divorce as the whole moral issue. That is where we have to begin. Jesus is not giving a cold legal formula. He is confronting a culture where men could hide behind religious paperwork while leaving women exposed, vulnerable, and blamed.

The Old Testament passage behind this is Deuteronomy 24:1-4. In that passage, Moses describes a situation where a man divorces his wife, gives her a written certificate, sends her away, and then she marries another man. If that second marriage also ends, the first husband is not allowed to take her back again. The passage is not really written as a celebration of divorce. It is regulating a broken situation. It is creating boundaries around something already happening in the community.

And this matters because by Jesus’ day, Deuteronomy 24 had become a debate. The issue was the phrase about finding “something indecent” in the wife. The school of Shammai read that more narrowly, while the school of Hillel read it much more broadly. Later Jewish tradition preserves this debate, even describing Hillel’s side as allowing divorce for something as trivial as a spoiled meal, while Rabbi Akiva’s view could allow divorce if a man found another woman more attractive. 

So when Jesus speaks, he is not dropping random marriage advice into the Sermon on the Mount. He is stepping into a real moral crisis. Men were asking, “What am I technically allowed to do?” Jesus is asking, “What is happening to the person you are discarding?” That shift matters.

The audience hearing Jesus would have understood that marriage was not just romance between two private individuals. It involved family, economics, honor, survival, and social belonging. A divorced woman in that world could be placed in an incredibly vulnerable position. So when Jesus says that a man who wrongly divorces his wife “causes her to commit adultery,” he is not blaming the woman as if she is the villain of the story. He is placing moral responsibility back on the man who used the law to abandon her.

That has been missed so badly.

Too often, this passage has been used to put pressure on the person already carrying the deepest wound. Someone was betrayed, and then told they were permanently marked. Someone escaped harm, and then was told Jesus was disappointed in them. Someone was abandoned, and then the church treated them as suspicious. But in context, Jesus is not protecting the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable. He is doing the opposite.

This is part of the larger movement of Matthew 5. Jesus keeps saying, “You have heard… but I say…” He is not loosening the heart of the law into something shallow. He is taking people deeper than surface obedience. Murder is not only about the final act; it begins in contempt. Adultery is not only about the final act; it begins in the way desire turns a person into an object. And divorce is not only about whether the paperwork is correct; it is about whether covenant has been treated casually, selfishly, or violently.

That is why this teaching belongs in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is forming a people whose righteousness goes deeper than technical compliance. He is not asking, “Did you find a loophole?” He is asking, “Did love tell the truth? Did covenant become a shelter or a weapon? Did you use the law to serve faithfulness, or did you use it to excuse harm?”

And we need to say something carefully here. Jesus takes marriage seriously. He does not treat covenant as disposable. He does not bless the kind of spirituality that uses people and then moves on when they become inconvenient. In a world where some men could dismiss their wives for almost any reason, Jesus says no. You do not get to baptize selfishness with Scripture. You do not get to call abandonment righteousness because a certificate was signed.

But taking marriage seriously is not the same thing as forcing people to remain in destruction. That is where pastoral care has to be honest. The Bible’s vision of marriage is covenant faithfulness, mutuality, protection, love, and truth. When a marriage becomes a place of violence, coercion, serial betrayal, or spiritual manipulation, we are no longer talking about the beautiful covenant God intended. We are talking about something holy being profaned.

And this is where the church has often failed. We have sometimes protected the appearance of marriage more than the actual people inside the marriage. We have sometimes been more concerned that a divorce happened than that harm was happening long before the divorce. We have sometimes made the preservation of the institution the highest good, when Jesus consistently shows us that God’s heart is for people, for mercy, for truth, for the wounded, for the crushed, for those with no advocate.

When Jesus references sexual immorality as an exception, Matthew uses the word often discussed as porneia, a broad word connected to sexual unfaithfulness and sexual sin. Scholars and pastors debate the full scope of that exception, but in Matthew, Jesus is clearly rejecting casual divorce while acknowledging that covenant can be broken in serious ways. 

And even there, the point is not, “Here is the only pain God recognizes.” The point is that covenant is not fake. What we do with our bodies, our vows, our faithfulness, and our betrayal matters. Jesus is not being less serious than Moses. He is being more serious. He is saying that divorce cannot be treated as a clean little legal mechanism when it may actually be covering over a deep moral failure.

If we bring in Matthew 19, we see Jesus go even deeper. When questioned about divorce, he points back beyond Deuteronomy 24 to Genesis. He talks about God’s original intention, about two becoming one. But he also says Moses permitted divorce because of hard hearts. That phrase is important. Hardness of heart is not a small thing. It is what happens when love can no longer reach the places it was meant to reach. It is what happens when covenant is bent by sin, selfishness, domination, betrayal, or refusal to repent.

So Moses’ command about certificates was not the dream. It was a mercy within a broken world. It gave structure and protection in a situation already marked by failure. Jesus is not denying that mercy. He is confronting the way people turned mercy into permission.

That distinction is everything.

Because some people hear this passage and think Jesus is saying, “God hates divorced people.” He is not. Some hear, “Your life is over if your marriage ended.” It is not. Some hear, “No matter what happened to you, you should have stayed.” That is not the heart of Jesus. Jesus is confronting those who use religious language to abandon covenant responsibility.

The mystical depth of this passage is that Jesus is always calling us back to reality. Not the image. Not the paperwork. Not the public story. Reality. What actually happened? Was there faithfulness? Was there truth? Was there love? Was there repentance? Was there safety? Was there a real covenant, or was covenant language being used to hide control?

God lives in truth. And wherever we refuse truth, even with Bible verses in our mouths, we step away from the light.

For someone listening who has been divorced, I would want to say this gently: this passage is not Jesus standing over you with a stone in his hand. It may be Jesus sitting beside you and telling the truth about what was done to you. It may be Jesus naming the carelessness of someone who left. It may be Jesus grieving the betrayal with you. It may be Jesus refusing to let religious people reduce your story to a category.

And yes, for some of us, this passage may also invite repentance. Maybe we were careless. Maybe we did treat someone as disposable. Maybe we hid behind technicalities. Maybe we moved too quickly to justify ourselves. Grace does not mean we avoid that truth. Grace means we can finally tell the truth in the presence of God and not be destroyed by it.

That is what Jesus does in the Sermon on the Mount. He does not make sin smaller, but he also does not make mercy weaker. He tells the truth all the way down, because only the truth can heal all the way down.

So Matthew 5:31-32 is not a weapon to swing at wounded people. It is a word of judgment against a shallow righteousness that uses the law while missing love. It is a word of protection for those who were vulnerable in Jesus’ world. It is a word of warning to anyone who wants the benefits of covenant without the responsibilities of covenant. And it is a word that invites the people of God to become the kind of community where marriage is honored, harm is not hidden, divorce is grieved without shame, and wounded people are held with tenderness.

Because Jesus is not merely trying to regulate our relationships. He is trying to heal our hearts.

And that is where we have to leave this: not with fear, but with reverence. Reverence for marriage. Reverence for the pain people carry. Reverence for the words of Jesus. Reverence for the mercy of God, who tells the truth because he loves us, and who loves us too much to let religious loopholes become hiding places for hardened hearts.

There’s a word in this passage that can feel really heavy, and if we’re honest, it can feel unclear at the same time. Jesus says that whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. And that’s where a lot of people stop and feel the weight of it without really understanding what Jesus is doing with that word.

Because when we hear “adultery,” we usually think of a very specific act. We think of someone stepping outside of marriage, betraying their spouse, crossing a line that’s clear and visible. But in this moment, Jesus is stretching that word beyond just the act itself, and he’s using it to describe something deeper about covenant.

Adultery, in the biblical sense, is not just about physical betrayal. It’s about the breaking of a covenant bond in a way that violates trust, intimacy, and faithfulness. It’s relational before it is just behavioral.

So when Jesus says that remarriage in this kind of situation results in adultery, he’s not simply trying to label people with a word and move on. He’s exposing the reality that if a divorce has happened unjustly—if someone has been cast aside without true covenant failure—then entering into a new union doesn’t magically erase what happened. There is still a relational fracture that hasn’t been honestly dealt with.

And in the world Jesus is speaking into, that matters even more than it does in ours. Because again, men had the ability to initiate divorce in ways that left women vulnerable. So if a man dismisses his wife casually, and she has to remarry for survival, the system then turns around and calls her an adulterer. Jesus refuses to let that stand without naming the deeper truth. The issue is not that she is morally corrupt. The issue is that a covenant was broken unjustly, and now everyone is pretending it wasn’t.

So the word “adultery” here is not just about condemning the next relationship. It’s about refusing to call something clean when it was built on a fracture that was never acknowledged.

And this is where we need to be really careful, because this is the point where people have often taken Jesus’ words and turned them into something he was not doing.

Jesus is not handing out permanent identity labels to wounded people. He’s not saying, “From this moment on, this is all you are.” He’s not speaking into a vacuum where every divorce is the same and every remarriage carries the same story.

He’s speaking into a very specific situation where covenant is being treated lightly, where people are being discarded, and where religious justification is being used to avoid responsibility.

When we zoom out and listen to the whole of Scripture, we see that God consistently calls people back into faithfulness, but he also consistently meets people in the middle of broken situations and leads them forward, not backward into shame.

Think about how Scripture speaks about restoration, about new beginnings, about the reality that God does not freeze people in the worst moment of their story. Even in the Old Testament, where covenant language is strong and serious, we see God working within broken relational histories to bring life forward.

So when we talk about remarriage, we have to hold two things together at the same time, and this is where it gets a little uncomfortable because we don’t always like tension.

On one hand, Jesus is absolutely serious about covenant. He is not casual about marriage. He is not endorsing the idea that relationships are disposable or interchangeable. What we do in covenant matters deeply.

But on the other hand, Jesus is also not in the business of trapping people in cycles of shame or telling them that redemption has no future expression in their relational lives.

If adultery names a fracture of covenant, then the invitation of Jesus is not just to sit under that word, but to move toward truth, repentance where needed, healing, and ultimately restoration into a life that reflects God’s heart more fully.

And for some people, that may include remarriage that is honest, whole, and grounded in a different kind of faithfulness than what existed before.

Not as a way of pretending the past didn’t happen, but as a way of living forward in the grace of God.

And I think this is where the pastoral and the mystical come together in a really important way.

Because pastorally, we have to care for real people with real stories. We have to be honest about harm, about betrayal, about survival, about complexity.

But mystically, we also recognize that God is always drawing people into deeper union, deeper truth, deeper love. God is not finished with people because their story took a painful turn.

So the question is not just, “What category does this situation fall into?”

The deeper question is, “Where is truth? Where is repentance? Where is healing? And where is God leading this person now?”

Because Jesus is not just trying to define past actions. He is always inviting people into a redeemed future.

And that means we have to read words like “adultery” not just as a label, but as a doorway into understanding how seriously God takes love, trust, and covenant—and how committed he is to restoring those things when they’ve been broken.