“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,
When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes... he writes her a certificate of divorce. This is not a comfortable verse, and it isn't meant to be read as an endorsement. It's a regulation for a broken situation already happening — an attempt to put some structure and protection around something that was already falling apart.
Jesus later addresses this exact law directly, saying it existed because of the hardness of people's hearts, not because it reflected God's original intention for marriage. That's worth sitting with: this isn't God's ideal being spelled out. It's God working within human brokenness to limit the damage, giving a vulnerable person at least a legal document instead of nothing.
If you've been hurt by broken commitments, or you're skeptical that religion has anything honest to say about relationships falling apart, this passage doesn't pretend otherwise. It admits the brokenness plainly, and still tries to protect the person most at risk inside it.
If a faith this old is willing to admit brokenness this plainly, might it also have something honest to say to yours?
A short video on this is coming soon — for now, read on.