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Japanese Jesus taught that marriage is God’s work from the beginning. “He which made them at the beginning made them male and female,” he said, and “they twain shall be one flesh… What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:4–6). He warned against divorce, blessed a wedding at Cana and called himself the bridegroom.
Whenever Jesus is asked about marriage, he answers from further back than the question. The Pharisees asked him about the law of Moses, and he took them to the garden: “from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). The Sadducees asked about the life to come, and he told them they knew neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. Our marriages are lived between that beginning and that end, and Jesus speaks to them from both.
What did Jesus say about marriage in Matthew 19?
His fullest teaching comes in Matthew 19 and Mark 10. Some Pharisees came “tempting him”, Matthew says, with a question: “Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?” (Matthew 19:3). Jesus answered with two verses from Genesis laid side by side. The first is “male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). The second is “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). Then he added a sentence of his own: “Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6).
Look at who does the joining. A man leaves his parents and holds fast to his wife, and the two make their promises, but Jesus says it is God who joins them. What God has joined, people are not to pull apart. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that here “Jesus unequivocally taught the original meaning of the union of man and woman as the Creator willed it from the beginning” (paragraph 1614).
Why were the Pharisees asking Jesus about divorce?
Their question touched a live argument. The law let a man divorce his wife “because he hath found some uncleanness in her” (Deuteronomy 24:1), and teachers disagreed over what that meant. The Mishnah, the collection of rabbinic law, records the dispute. The school of Shammai said a man could divorce his wife only for sexual unfaithfulness. The school of Hillel allowed it even “because she burned or over-salted his dish.” Rabbi Akiva went further still, allowing divorce if a man “found another woman who is better looking than her.”
Jesus would not join either school. When they pressed him, “Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away?”, he answered, “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:7–8). They said Moses commanded it. Jesus said Moses suffered it, which is to say he allowed it. The law made room for hard hearts, and Jesus called his hearers back past it, to what God made in the garden.
His own disciples were shaken. “If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry,” they said (Matthew 19:10). Their alarm tells us how far his words went beyond what they had grown up with.
Did Jesus say divorce and remarriage is adultery?
Yes. He taught that leaving a marriage and marrying again is adultery. “Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery,” he says in Matthew 19:9, and in the Sermon on the Mount, “whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery” (Matthew 5:32). Mark and Luke give the saying without the exception (Mark 10:11; Luke 16:18). Mark adds a line that holds the wife to the same rule as the husband: “if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery” (Mark 10:12).
The churches apply these words in different ways. The Catholic Church holds that a valid marriage lasts until death, so “a new union cannot be recognized as valid, if the first marriage was” (Catechism 1650). A Church tribunal can, after examining a case, declare “that the marriage never existed” (1629), and then both are free to marry. Orthodox churches allow a second marriage, and the Orthodox bishops in America teach that divorced people who remarry “do so not as their right but as recipients of a special gift of God’s mercy.” Many Protestant churches allow divorce for adultery or desertion. The Westminster Confession, a Reformed statement of faith followed by Presbyterian churches, allows it for adultery or for “such willful desertion as can no way be remedied by the church, or civil magistrate.” The exception in Matthew is read verse by verse in what Jesus said about divorce in Matthew 5:31–32.
Jesus said these things without contempt for anyone whose marriages had failed. By a well in Samaria he told a woman plainly, “thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband” (John 4:18). He had already offered her “living water” (John 4:10), and he did not take the offer back. If your own marriage has ended, his words about permanence tell you what God meant marriage to be. They come from the one who stayed at the well.
Why did Jesus go to the wedding at Cana?
He went because he was invited: “both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage” (John 2:2). When the wine ran out, his mother told the servants, “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it” (John 2:5). Six stone waterpots, kept for the washings of the Jews, were filled to the brim, and the water became wine so good that the governor of the feast called the bridegroom over: “thou hast kept the good wine until now” (John 2:10). John calls it the “beginning of miracles” (John 2:11).
So the first sign of his glory was given at a wedding, to spare a household an embarrassment. The Catechism says the Church “sees in it the confirmation of the goodness of marriage” (paragraph 1613), and the Orthodox bishops write that by his presence at Cana he blessed marriage. A shortage of wine is a small trouble. Jesus met it with more than anyone needed. The sign itself is the subject of why Jesus turned water into wine.
Will we be married in heaven?
Jesus says no. The Sadducees, who denied the resurrection, told him of a woman married in turn to seven brothers and asked whose wife she would be. “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God,” he answered. “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matthew 22:29–30). Luke adds the reason: “Neither can they die any more” (Luke 20:36).
Marriage belongs to this age, where people die and children are born to take their place. Jesus does not say that the love of a husband and wife is lost in the next. He says that marriage as we know it will have done its work, because the wedding it pointed to will have come.
Was Jesus married, and how did he speak of the unmarried?
He was not, and he honoured those who stay single for God. When the disciples said it might be better not to marry, Jesus answered, “All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given,” and spoke of three kinds of eunuchs: those born so, those made so by others, and those “which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it” (Matthew 19:11–12). The Catechism quotes this verse when it speaks of men and women who “have renounced the great good of marriage to follow the Lamb wherever he goes” (paragraph 1618).
The Gospels name his mother, and those the Gospel calls his brethren and sisters (Mark 6:3), and never a wife. Peter was married: Jesus healed “his wife’s mother” (Matthew 8:14), and Paul writes that Cephas, Peter’s other name, travelled with a wife (1 Corinthians 9:5). The Lord was single and his chief apostle was married, and both served God. Paul put it in one line: “every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that” (1 Corinthians 7:7). There is more on that gift in whether singleness is better than marriage.
Why does Jesus call himself the bridegroom?
He took up a picture the prophets had used for God and his people: “as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee” (Isaiah 62:5). When John’s disciples asked why his followers did not fast, Jesus said, “Can the children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them?” and then, “the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them” (Mark 2:19–20). John the Baptist had already spoken of him so: “He that hath the bride is the bridegroom” (John 3:29). Jesus told of a king who “made a marriage for his son” (Matthew 22:2), and of ten virgins waiting with their lamps for a bridegroom who came at midnight (Matthew 25:1–13).
Paul carried the picture into the home. “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it,” he wrote, and after quoting Genesis 2:24 once more he added, “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:25, 32). A Christian marriage, with all its ordinary days, is meant to show in small how Christ loves his people.
How do Jesus’ words help a hard marriage?
He gave no rules for the kitchen table, but much of what he said is tested there first. He told Peter to forgive “Until seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22). He asked why we behold “the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye” (Matthew 7:3). He told his disciples that whoever would be great among them “shall be your minister”, because “the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister” (Mark 10:43, 45). And he gave the commandment every Christian home lives by: “That ye love one another, as I have loved you” (John 15:12).
He spoke these words to all his disciples, and that is why they fit a marriage, where two disciples share one roof. When the wine runs out, as it did at Cana, his mother’s word to the servants still holds: whatever he tells you, do it. Forgiveness never means staying in danger, though. Where there is violence or fear in a home, a pastor, a counsellor or the police can help, and calling them is no failure of faith.
Jesus gave his first sign at a wedding, and the Bible closes at one. “Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb,” John is told (Revelation 19:9). Every faithful marriage is a foretaste of that supper, where the good wine has been kept until now.
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