Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

So Jesus uses a legal degree as provocation. But does he really intend to establish a law? Certainly not. He is not making law here any more than he is when he says “If you are angry with a brother or sister you are liable to judgment.” The intention of his words is to shake people up, to uncover the truth, to show up the falsity of the divorce practice of his time. It is true that he plays on the form of legal decrees, but not in order to give a new law; rather, he means to carry his contemporaries’ practice ad absurdum.

And what is Jesus’ attitude to the Torah in this instance? Is he destroying it? Is he declaring it invalid, at least on the question of divorce? Is there a concrete point at which he shows how questionable it is for him? None of these questions does justice to Jesus’ true intent. First of all, we must point out that the Torah contains no specific law that permits divorce. Deuteronomy 24:1-4 forbids any man to remarry a woman previously his wife whom he has divorced and who has then married another man. The procedure for divorce through the giving of a writ appears rather incidentally, namely, as background to the whole legal problem. The process is thus assumed as the normal course of things. So Jesus does not speak against an ordinance, certainly not a commandment in Torah, but instead against the old common law to which the Torah does not object.

Moreover, Jesus appeals, against this common law, to the true will of God—in fact, and this is crucial, to the will of God as expressed at the very beginning of the Torah. This we see in Mark 10:2-12, where Jesus refers to Genesis 1:27 and 2:24:

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. (Mark 10:6-9)

According to Mark 10, then, Jesus appeals to the Torah itself against a common law the Torah presupposes. He appeals to the creation story, which is part of the Torah. He appeals to the deep, inseparable unity there promised to the two marriage partners.

This should make it clear that Jesus’ prohibition of divorce is not directed against the Torah as such but instead clarifies a particular point of Torah. With his provocative statement, clothed in legal language, he extends protection to the wife who is handed over to the man’s whim and degraded to the status of a thing, and he also protects the true will of God, whose original purpose, obscured by common law, is no longer perceptible.

Jesus against the Fourth Commandment?

The next sample belongs to a completely different part of the Jesus tradition. Matthew and Luke (Matt 8:21-22 // Luke 9:59-60) both offer a saying of Jesus that calls for discipleship with the utmost harshness. In Luke’s version it reads, “To another he said, ‘Follow me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the [reign] of God.’” Today we can only be shocked by the irresponsibility of the saying, but at that time it must have had a far more dreadful and disgusting impact on the hearers, for throughout antiquity, and especially in Judaism, it was an obvious and positively sacred obligation of a son to bury his parents with honor. Still more, in Judaism it was not merely a pious duty; it was ordered by the fourth commandment of the Decalogue.

That commandment is addressed to adults. It commanded adult sons, in particular, to attend to their elderly parents, to treat them with respect, to see that they are properly cared for and socially secure, and in the end to bury them respectfully and honorably. Tobit 4:3-5 illuminates this very concrete content of the commandment quite well:

[Tobit says to his son Tobias] “My son, when I die, give me a proper burial. Honor your mother and do not abandon her all the days of her life. Do whatever pleases her, and do not grieve her in anything. Remember her, my son, because she faced many dangers for you while you were in her womb. And when she dies, bury her beside me in the same grave. Revere the LORD all your days, my son, and refuse to sin or to transgress his commandments.”