NOTES for Mar 10:15

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. The issue was what in those days was called the inner Torah and the ideal of the living Torah.

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.