Main news for 14 March 2025

King James Version (en)

Mark, Chapter 10, verse 15

¹³ blesseth children that are brought unto him

¹⁵Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.

NOTES

Today's reading is devoted to two themes: the theme of divorce and the theme of children taking part in Jesus' conversations. In the first case it is interesting to note how Jesus interprets the norms of Old Testament law. He evidently separates in them what...

Christ's words about marriage and marital unity can be understood only in the context of the relationships of the Kingdom. The foundation here is God's design for the union of man and woman, reflected in the Book of Genesis in the account of the creation of the human being. There the union of man and woman, the marital union, is considered not simply one element of human life, but a new quality of that life. It is irreversible in the same sense that every qualitative spiritual change in a person's life is irreversible: it cannot simply be "rolled back" by returning to what existed "before."

Of course, one can reject this new quality, one can ignore it, one can do everything possible to reduce its consequences to zero, but one cannot again become the same person one was before the change. In relations between a man and a woman, on the physiological level this corresponds to the impossibility of returning to a virginal state once virginity has been lost.

A divorced man is not the same as an unmarried man, just as a divorced woman is not the same as an unmarried woman. The issue here is not only the experience of family life, but also the fact that human nature has changed, and changed irreversibly. At the same time, it does not matter at all what the two people living together think about their shared life. They may think that everything between them is temporary, that they have decided only to "try it out," that they need nothing except sex. In the same way, spouses who are divorcing after living a long life together may think that "everything is over" between them. In reality, however, once relations between a man and a woman have begun, they can never end.

They are for all eternity, whatever he and she may have thought when they came together, grew close, and began a life together, whether forever or for one night. The only question is what the quality of these relations will be, how they will eventually be transformed, and what they will finally become. Once established, they will remain forever, and only the two who established them can decide before God and together with Him what to do with them in the fullness and eternity of the Kingdom.

Already at the very beginning of His earthly ministry, Jesus said that He had come into the world not to destroy the Torah, but to reveal it to the world in all its fullness. What did He mean? Of course, the issue was not the Torah as a text, nor the Torah as a legal or moral code...

Every believing Jew then dreamed of becoming a living Torah, if, of course, he took his faith and spiritual life seriously. The point was not to memorize the text of the Pentateuch, though that too was not so rare, but to become a living embodiment of the Torah, revealing to the world the fullness of righteousness. This is exactly what the Savior is speaking about. But the Torah is not uniform: it contains commandments, and it contains laws given as means for observing those commandments.

The core of the Torah, the Law given by God, is the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments so well known to us today and just as well known to every believing Jew in Gospel times. They are unchanging. But with the laws everything was not so simple: some of them were given with regard to the sinful nature of man. Such was the norm connected with the right to divorce. Indeed, if there is no possibility of living together, it is better to divorce and marry or be married a second time than to take lovers on the side, thereby violating the seventh commandment. But this is the logic of the fallen world, unacceptable to the Savior. For Him, in general, those norms of the Torah that exist as a concession to human sinfulness are unacceptable.

For Him, marriage is the union of two in the fullness and depth that existed in the world before the fall and did not suppose any possibility of rupture, disintegration, or destruction. He says directly that divorce becomes a consequence of hardness of heart, not in the sense of cruelty of heart, but in the sense of its rigidity, stubbornness, unyieldingness, unwillingness to change or to accept a person as he is. Such an approach might seem burdensome to the point of impossibility, if the matter were not the Kingdom and life in the Kingdom.

Jesus looks at the Torah as the spiritual instrument that makes a person an inhabitant of the Kingdom. He agrees to nothing less. And here there can be no concessions or relaxations, since in the Kingdom there is no place for any sin. And therefore no place for any hardness of heart. And the Savior calls people already here to be rid of everything incompatible with the life of the Kingdom. For the benefit of those who seek. For the earlier one is rid of all such things, the closer the goal becomes. Already here and now.

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