Luke 16:14-18
The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this, and they ridiculed him. So he said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others; but God knows your hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God. The law and the prophets were in effect until John came; since then the good news of the kingdom of God is proclaimed, and everyone tries to enter it by force. But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one stroke of a letter in the law to be dropped. Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and whoever marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery.”
One thing seems sure: the intensity of the argument between Jesus and the Pharisees is increasing by leaps and bounds. And this is an important point not only for understanding the story of Jesus as he approaches Jerusalem and the cross, but also in understanding Luke the evangelist, his community, and the purpose of his writing.
Most biblical scholars believe that the four gospels were written between forty and sixty years after the accounts of Jesus’ life they narrate. During the intervening time, several things of import happened, including a) the death of many eye-witnesses (hence the desire to order their accounts, as Luke reports in 1:1-4), b) the indefinite delay of Jesus’ return and the need to think about the ongoing life and ministry of the Church (which Luke takes up in his second volume, Acts), and c) the increased struggle between Jews who now identify as Christians and those who don’t.
It’s this last development that concerns us here. It’s easy to forget that all of the earliest Christians were first Jewish. And while they seem to have prospered early on as part of the larger and diverse Jewish culture of the early first century, after the destruction of the Temple matters come to more of a head as a) Jews define themselves more clearly and strictly in order to preserve their identity after the loss of the Temple and b) Christians begin to spread beyond the synagogue into the Gentile world. Both create difficulties for the growing church (see, for instance, Paul’s letter to the Romans).
In this passage, and others like it, we sense the tension in the way the evangelists depict the Pharisees. That makes some sense, as with the loss of the Temple the Sadducees, keepers of the Temple, all but disappear and the Pharisee, who lead the local synagogues (all that is now left), are the likely opponents of early Christian leaders as they debate the meaning and significance of the Jewish rabbi, Jesus.
Hence, in this passage Luke describes the Pharisees as “lovers of money” and suggests that they are abandoning the law, picking up several strands of the tradition about money and marriage in order to indict them. For this reason it’s difficult to tease out precisely what Jesus may mean by these various comments strung together in a larger diatribe against his (and Luke’s) opponents, and we should therefore be careful to avoid stigmatizing either the Pharisees or the Jewish religion they represent. Christians have done great harm through the centuries to our Jewish cousins, often justifying their actions with passages like this one.
When it comes to marriage and divorce, however, one brief word is in order: first-century marriage and divorce bear little resemblance to what we know in the twenty-first century. It was not a relationship typically entered into (or exited) with freedom. Women in particular suffered the burden of being treated as property that could be bought, traded, and sold in marriage. Hence, Jesus’ words, which may seem rather harsh to us, likely express his intention to protect women from the whim of their husbands to divorce them at will.
Prayer: Dear God, guide our reading of Scripture that we may discern your will to care for all people, and especially those who are most vulnerable. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
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