NOTES for Mar 10:15
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, He was not speaking of the Torah as a text or as a legal or moral code. He was speaking of what in those days was called the inner Torah and of the ideal of the living Torah.
Every believing Jew then dreamed of becoming a living Torah, if he took his faith and spiritual life seriously. The point was not to memorize the text of the Pentateuch, though this was not so rare, but to become a living embodiment of the Torah, revealing the fullness of righteousness to the world. This is exactly what the Savior is speaking about. But the Torah is not uniform: it contains commandments, and it contains laws given as a means for keeping those commandments.
The core of the Torah, the Law given by God, is the Decalogue, the ten commandments that are so well known to us today and were just as well known to every believing Jew in gospel times. They are unchangeable. But with the laws the matter was not so simple: some were given with regard to the sinful nature of human beings. Such was the norm connected with the right to divorce. Indeed, if there is no way to live together, it is better to divorce and marry a second time than to take lovers on the side and thereby violate the seventh commandment. But this is the logic of the fallen world, unacceptable to the Savior. For Him, the norms of the Torah that exist as concessions to human sinfulness are generally unacceptable.
For Him, marriage is the union of two people in the fullness and depth that existed in the world before the fall and allowed no possibility of rupture, collapse, or destruction. He says directly that divorce becomes the consequence of hardness of heart, not in the sense of cruelty of heart, but in the sense of rigidity, stubbornness, unwillingness to yield, unwillingness to change or accept a person as he is. Such an approach can seem burdensome to the point of impossibility, unless the issue is the Kingdom and life in the Kingdom.
Jesus looks at the Torah as the spiritual instrument that makes a person a resident of the Kingdom. He will accept nothing less. And here there can be no concessions or relaxations, for there is no place for any sin in the Kingdom. And accordingly, no place for hardness of heart. The Savior calls us already here to rid ourselves of everything incompatible with life in the Kingdom. For the good of those who seek. The sooner one gets rid of all this, the nearer the goal becomes. Already here and now.