Mark 10:2 Commentary and Bible Study

‘The Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife?’ Matthew tells us just a little more. The question was, ‘Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?’ This is the trap. They learned where he was and they came to him from Jerusalem. They were, as we might say today, in for the kill. The plan was to somehow take him and have him executed; everything that they do is working toward that end. Here you see the tremendous cunning of the Pharisees in this question. It is a trap, of course, and it is a double-edged kind of trap. The Lord was currently in Herod’s jurisdiction. John the Baptist had rebuked and condemned Herod for his adultery and Herodias, his wife, and it had led to his arrest, his imprisonment and ultimately his death. It is likely that that the Pharisees hoped that the same thing could happen again, and they could get Christ to speak openly against adultery which might lead to his being taken and seized by Herod. But there was a second trap in this question. There was a kind of controversy at that time about divorce. There were two very famous rabbis, whose ministry preceded that of Jesus Christ. One of them was still alive. They were men who are very large in the hall of fame of the Jews, even to this day. One of these Jewish teachers interpreted these words in a logical and straightforward, literal and no doubt correct way, and understood the uncleanness in her to mean that she has committed adultery, she has been unfaithful and therefore he can put her away. It isn’t a necessity; he could forgive her, but if she finds no favour in his sight, presumably because her unfaithfulness is so serious and protracted and maybe unrepented of so that she cannot be trusted then he could divorce her. Divorce was permitted, because of the wickedness of men and women, so that the innocent could be free. The other rabbi interpreted this quite differently – and we may say scandalously – and emphasised the phrase ‘that she find no favour in his eyes’. He went into print on this, and argued that if she burned his dinner (presumably regularly) and if she wasn’t beautiful enough for him and he found somebody better, he could divorce her, and so he taught light divorce. The popular teaching was: yes, a man – or a woman; it works either way – can put away his wife or husband for any reason if she displeases him, or he displeases her, so he could for any reason divorce his wife. That was the common teaching. When the Lord refutes that in this passage and, as we shall see, his disciples are taken aback and shocked, because they, like the population generally, thought that you could obtain a divorce for pretty well any reason. That was the popular idea of at that time. Now the Lord had previously on more than one occasion rebuked the Jews for their traditions, for the many additions they had made to the Mosaic law and the regulations that they had added. Consequently they seek to trap him in this. Is he going to apply this same standard to divorce? Is he going to take away from people the right to divorce for any reason, if somebody is displeasing to them? The Pharisees believed that Christ would go for the strict interpretation. They hoped presumably, that this would cause him to be very unpopular which would make it that much easier to work towards his arrest and execution. So the history teaches us that there was great cunning behind this question. ‘The Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife?’ and we should understand this think in terms of ‘for every cause’, for any reason.