NOTES for Luk 16:15-18
The Savior's words about the Torah and the prophets, and about the Kingdom whose “good news is being proclaimed,” present briefly yet fully the entire spiritual history of God's people in its relation to the Kingdom He has brought into the world. Judging by what He says, the earlier history—which, for God's people, included events as significant for them, and for the whole world, as the giving of the Torah and the preaching of the prophets—ends with the beginning of John the Baptist's preaching, which proclaimed the nearness of the Messiah and the Kingdom.
A new age then begins, the age of the coming Kingdom which, in Christ's words, “has drawn near” in order to enter the world and transfigure it. It is impossible not to notice this: only those who do not want to see fail to notice, those who for one reason or another do not accept the Kingdom and the Messiah coming into the world. It is no accident that Jesus tells the people listening to Him and rejecting His words that they follow not the commandments given by God, but their own ideas about God and the Torah.
As an example, He cites the permission to divorce which the Torah does indeed contain, but which, like the right to vengeance, is less a permission than a restriction. Both are highly undesirable, yet are granted, as Jesus says, “because of hardness of heart”—not cruelty, but rigidity and unyieldingness. Since it was perfectly clear that fallen human beings could not completely change their sinful nature, this sinfulness had at least to be brought within some limits: for example, by restricting the right to vengeance or divorce, so that vengeance would not turn into outright violence or unlawful killing, and divorce would not become a pretext for sexual immorality.
Such limits included, for example, restricting vengeance to harm equivalent to the harm suffered—the rule of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”—and restricting divorce by forbidding divorced spouses to remarry one another. To make such rules absolute is to distort the meaning of the Torah and pervert its spirit.
The Torah in the true sense of the word, understood as its real spiritual core and above all the commandments of the Decalogue, of course remains unshakable: becoming a person's inner, spiritual backbone, it goes with them into the Kingdom. Such a Torah will indeed endure even when the world changes and the present heaven and earth disappear, giving way to a new order of things. For, like the Kingdom itself, it belongs not to time but to eternity.