Divorce; an attempt to shift the goal post- Friday, 19^th week in ordinary time – Mt 19:3-12

With His teaching on community ethics now done and dusted in chapter 18, Jesus leaves His ‘headquarters’ in Galilee and heads south to Judea. This incident in today’s Gospel takes place several months prior to His final trip to Jerusalem, where He will be crucified.

Having already set in motion the plan to kill Jesus, the Pharisees are now stacking up evidence to use against Him. They have come to ‘test’ Him. Make no mistake, they are not testing His ‘knowledge’ but trying to drive a wedge into the growing number of His disciples with the content of His answer.

So what’s so deadly about this contentious question? The question thrown at Jesus is about legality; can one legally divorce one’s wife for any cause? This was a catch twenty two; damned if you do answer and damned if you don’t, for this question already had a Jewish community divided down the middle. At the heart of this issue were two rabbinic schools of thought. The school of Hillel held that divorce could be granted over bad cooking or because of the wife leaving her head uncovered and to say nothing of the ‘must happen’, inevitable; a fight with the in-laws.

The school of Shammai, however, held that divorce could be granted only in the case of moral impurity such as adultery. We have no idea which school of thought was behind the question posed to Jesus but we can be sure of this: He understood the implications of even appearing to take any particular side.