Today's passage is Matthew 19:1-12.
After telling the parable of the unforgiving steward in chapter 18, Jesus goes to the east side of the Jordan, with huge crowds following him. He heals all their sick.
He responds to a specious question about divorce by saying there should be no divorce, and Moses allowed it because of our heart hearts but only on the grounds of adultery. When the disciples say it's better not to marry at all if that's the case, Jesus tells them that God helps those who are born eunuchs, those who are made eunuchs, and those who choose celibacy for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven.
When I read this passage this morning, I told my wife that my application was never to divorce her. She said that was too easy an application.
Because of Wooridle Church training and the marriage my wife and I have, she may be right to say that my application was too easy. But it wasn't always so.
Six months before my first wife died, we talked angrily and seriously about divorce. Death intervened and my wife died, so the idea of divorce remained as talk only.
In my next relationship, begun in adultery, there was no marriage so, technically, there was no divorce. The woman insisted this was the case.
Technically, she was right, but I felt differently. To me, it was a divorce.
The issue in these relationships is sex.
Jesus is very clear about that.
He quotes Genesis to make his point.
Adam and Eve weren't married in a technical, formal sense.
They went through no legal ceremony.
But Jesus implies their relationship was the first marriage and it was a marriage because of sex. "The two became one flesh."
This why chastity is so important.
I had sex with other women before and after my first marriage.
Since my present marriage I haven't had sex with another woman besides my wife.
I pray that God will keep me faithful.
What troubles me, though, is the sexual unions I had outside of marriage.
They were sins of sexual immorality.
In each of them I was united with a woman and then "divorced" her or was "divorced" by her.
Ezra talks of the essential separation from the world in order to stay focused on God. In today's passage Jesus is talking about a sexual union that cannot or should not be separated. No divorce.
To remain married and sexually faithful helps me stay focused on God and separate from the ubiquitous sexual temptations that assail me daily in the world around me and in the lust inside me.
Sexual union creates a third thing to echo the trinity.
Man plus woman makes a unity that did not exist before.
There is a spirit of union that a man or a woman cannot make on their own.
They only make it together.
That's why Jesus is so serious about it and why I seriously violated it with my multiple affairs.
It shows me a hardness of heart that I did not consider before, a new level of sin coming into my awareness.
After my death and in the resurrection of my body I can look forward to becoming at last a eunuch of God in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Lord, forgive me my sins of sexual immorality, my hardness of heart. Grant me your grace to remain a faithful husband to the end of my days, for your sake and your glory.
