No remarriage following divorce Luke 16
In Luke’s gospel Jesus deals with the issue of the remarriage of the divorced husband and the divorced wife. The gospel is written for the Gentile world, which would have been largely ignorant of the Jewish laws regarding divorce. Jesus states the simple truth:
Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery (Luke 16:18).
Here Jesus warns that both a divorced man and a single man commit adultery by being involved in a remarriage. The first point is that for a divorced man to remarry another (single) woman is adultery. It follows that for the remarriage of the divorced man to be adulterous his first marriage must still be intact in Jesus’ eyes, and that is why his sexual relationship with a single woman is adultery. Jesus then speaks about the single man who marries a divorced woman. He is guilty of adultery against the divorced woman’s husband, because in Jesus’ eyes the first marriage of the woman is still intact. According to Andrew Cornes, this text is concerned principally with remarriage. The first part of the verse teaches that ‘legal divorce cannot break the marriage bond because (and this is Christ’s point) remarriage after divorce is in fact adultery. The second part of the verse makes the point that it is also adultery for a single man to marry a divorced woman.’10
The teaching of Luke is straightforward and clear. It states an absolute position that all remarriage is wrong. Now there can be no doubt that Luke was familiar with Christ’s teaching on divorce, and it seems remarkable that he would have written in the way that he did if, in fact, Christ had allowed an exception. Indeed, if that were the case Luke could be accused of causing confusion and misleading the Church. For if Christ had taught that there were grounds for divorce, it would be unforgivable for Luke to have simply ignored the exception which fundamentally alters the teaching. It would be highly misleading for Luke to write in a way that could be construed to support the idea that marriage was indissoluble, when, in fact, Christ was teaching the opposite. But we know that Luke, a physician, was meticulously accurate in the way he recorded the gospel of Christ. It is unthinkable that he would not have qualified his writing to make it clear that there was an exception if that were the case. But he did not do so. There is no doubt that Luke believed that Jesus taught that the marriage bond was indissoluble.
Later in his ministry a group of Pharisees tested Jesus by asking him about the causes of divorce. The encounter with the Pharisees is recorded in Matthew 19:3–12 and Mark 10:2–12. While the two gospels report the same event, there are some differences between the accounts of Matthew and Mark. The record of Matthew, which was written for a mainly Jewish audience, mentions the so-called exception clause ‘except for marital unfaithfulness’, while Mark omits any reference to an exception. At the time there was a debate among the Pharisees about the legitimate grounds for divorce, which was required by Jewish law when a wife was guilty of adultery. This is important because the exception clause has become the foundation of the Protestant doctrine of divorce, and is used by modern Christians to justify their practice of remarriage following divorce. While many books have been written on the interpretation of this clause, the matter remains controversial among theologians.