Matthew 5: Marriage, a Reflection of the Faithful Bridegroom

Introduction

“This sermon, believe it or not, was hard for me to prepare.” This is how Hugh Wessel opens his message at the Église Réformée Évangélique de Marseille Sud. The text of Matthew 5:31-32 stirred up all kinds of objections in his mind, to the point that he is keeping in reserve a series of questions and answers for another time of discussion with the church.

The message is part of an ongoing study of the Sermon on the Mount. Its title: “The Sanctuary of the Covenant: Marriage, a Reflection of the Faithful Bridegroom.” After anger and the gaze, Jesus moves from lust to divorce. The preacher knows it: for many people, this text is painful.

He proposes to walk “the path of the three yeses”: the yes of the covenant that God calls us to honor, our fragile yeses, and then the perfect yes of Jesus Christ, in whom all of God's promises find their fulfillment. The thread running through it fits in one sentence: “Faithfulness is not a performance meant to earn God's love. It is the response of a heart that has discovered that God keeps his word to us.”

Outline of the Message

1. Jesus Looks Beneath the Surface

• The Sermon on the Mount begins with the Beatitudes, the character of the Christian. Then Jesus warns: if your righteousness does not surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom (Matthew 5:20).
• He has already shown that God sees the whispered “raca” and the hidden contempt, then the “sanctuary of the gaze”: the other person is not an object meant to fill our emptiness, but a person created in the image of God, worthy of being honored.
• Here, Jesus does not really change the subject. He moves from secret desire to public contract. “Lust said: I want you for my happiness. Divorce says: I no longer need you.” In both cases, the same danger: reducing the other person to what they can bring me.
• You can follow the divorce procedure perfectly, with the letter written and everything in order, and still have deeply betrayed the kingdom of God. The scribes and Pharisees check whether the letter is in order. Jesus looks at what my heart and my actions have done to the other person.
• Jesus is not speaking to a moral elite, but to the poor in spirit. Some carry the scars of a broken home: some were left, some left, and others still wonder, years later, what they could have done differently. Jesus does not speak these words to drive them out of the kingdom.
• If he takes our faithfulness so seriously, it is because our human covenants are called to reflect something of God's faithfulness.

2. The First Yes: A Covenant, Not a Procedure

• “It was said: Let whoever divorces his wife give her a certificate of divorce.” In Jesus' day, people debated the grounds that could justify divorce, with strict interpretations and much broader ones. The question became: how far can I go while staying within the permitted limits?
• Jesus refuses to reduce the covenant to a procedure. He does not ask in which cases a person may divorce, but what becomes of the heart when the covenant becomes disposable. Later, he will say that Moses permitted divorce because of the hardness of heart (Matthew 19:8). “That is the real problem.”
• This is the reflex of formalism: we stop asking what is good and start asking how far we can go without being technically at fault. “Formalism looks for the minimum conditions. Love looks for faithfulness.” Formalism asks: do I have the right to leave? The covenant asks: how can I love faithfully?
• The illustration of the house: in a rental, you are there for a time, and if it no longer suits you, you leave. You never promised to build your life there. A family home carries a history: when something deteriorates, the first reflex is not to look for another one, but to repair it.
• Our culture teaches us to treat relationships like a rental: I stay as long as it works for me. The yes of marriage does not mean “I promise to love you as long as you perfectly meet my expectations.” It means “I give myself to you.”
• This covenant does not cancel justice or the need to protect someone who is in danger. But it destroys the idea that the other person is a product I dispose of according to my level of satisfaction. “A contract sets conditions. In a covenant, I have given my word.”

3. The Thousand Small Yeses of Marriage

• For those who are married, one very simple question this week: when did you last think about your yes? Not only the romantic yes of the wedding day, but today's yes.
• Marital faithfulness is rarely built through great heroic gestures. It is built through a thousand small yeses: “Yes, I will listen when I would rather talk. Yes, I will ask forgiveness. Yes, I will give up having the last word. Yes, I will protect time for us. Yes, I will speak of you with honor when you are not there.”
• And again: “Yes, today again, I choose to be faithful to the word I gave you.”
• “Marriage does not live only on the yes of a single day. It lives on that yes embodied day after day.”

4. Our Fragile Yeses: The Window and the Broken Mirror

• Jesus continues: whoever divorces his wife, except for unfaithfulness, exposes her to becoming an adulteress, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Why such severity? Because marriage unites a man and a woman as one flesh (Genesis 2:24).
• Marriage is not a simple partnership between two compatible individuals. It is a word given, one life bound to another life, a yes that commits the future.
• Marriage is like a window: the window is not the landscape, but it lets us gaze at it. Marriage is not the center of God's purpose, and not everyone is called to marriage. But as long as it exists, it points beyond itself, to God's faithfulness toward his people.
• Every faithful marriage says something about the love of Christ. Every promise kept when feelings fluctuate says something about our God, whose love does not depend on our performance.
• The broken mirror: a mirror reflects the light of the sun. When it breaks, the sun does not stop shining, but the image becomes fragmented and the shards can wound. So it is with broken covenants: God's faithfulness has not changed, but the spouses, the children, and the families can be deeply wounded by the shards.

5. The One Who Breaks the Covenant Exposes the Other

• “This is where we need to listen to Jesus very carefully.” There are three people: the husband who divorces his wife, the wife who has to live after being rejected, and the man who marries her afterward.
• Jesus does not remove anyone's responsibility. The woman remains responsible for her choices, and so does the second man: Jesus says clearly that he commits adultery.
• But Jesus puts his finger on the first man: he “exposes her to becoming an adulteress.” He is the one who broke the covenant. He does not bear all the responsibility for what the other two do, each remains responsible before God. But he bears the terrible responsibility of having created a situation in which others will have to live, choose, and carry their own responsibility.
• He cannot say: I gave her a letter, what she does now is no longer my concern. Jesus answers him: look at what you have done, you have exposed her.
• Here, the words of Jesus go beyond the question of divorce alone. Sin does not only make us guilty, it creates a damaged world in which others then have to live.
• During the Second World War, Corrie ten Boom hid Jews who were being hunted by the Nazis. If someone comes and asks her whether they are there, what should she do? She is faced with a choice she should never have had to make. In a world without Nazism, she would never have been placed before such a choice.
• In the same way, David, hunted and hungry, enters the house of God and eats the consecrated bread reserved for the priests. When Jesus recalls this episode, he does not treat him as a man who simply despised the law (Matthew 12:3-4). In a world that was not already damaged, David would not have been placed before this choice. And neither would the woman Jesus speaks of, if her husband had not broken the covenant.
• The preacher takes up an expression from his pastor at the time of his conversion: “You cannot walk through this muddy world without getting mud on your feet.”

6. Looking at the Whole Story, and Receiving Grace

• As a pastor, Hugh Wessel has met many people in these situations. Abandoned women, left alone for years, who still wonder: was it my fault?
• Others lived with a husband who never left. He was always there, but in a serious, persistent and unrepentant way, he had stopped assuming his basic responsibilities as a husband and father. In the end, it was she who left. Others may say: she is the one who left him. Yes, perhaps geographically. But before judging, another question has to be asked: who had already abandoned whom?
• You can abandon your covenant without leaving your home, and the one who finally leaves is not always the one who abandoned the other. Still others have had to flee violence to protect themselves or their children.
• The stories are not identical, and neither are the responsibilities. We do not need to enter into the secret things of God that have not been revealed to us. But we must look at the whole story. That is precisely what Jesus does: he does not look only at the last visible act, he goes back upstream.
• Jesus does not say “blessed are those who managed to walk through this world without mud on their feet.” He says: blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness (Matthew 5:3-6). The poor in spirit do not come before God with a spotless record. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness long precisely for the day when the world will no longer be like this.
• If you carry the scar of a broken covenant, the scar is real. But it does not tell who you are before God. He knows your whole story: what you did, your choices, the choices of others who created the world in which you had to live, the wounds, the responsibilities. He knows the heart.
• “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). This is what the wounded conscience needs: not a grace that calls evil good, but a grace that says “your scar is real, but your condemnation has been borne by another.”
• “Grace does not erase the scar. It removes the condemnation.” The mirror may be broken, but the light does not go out.

7. The Perfect Yes of Christ, the Faithful Bridegroom

• Marriage reflects God's faithfulness, but it is not that faithfulness. Our human covenants can be wounded, violated, and even broken. His never will be. “Marriage is not the Christian's hope.” It is a sign that leads to the faithful Bridegroom, the only one whose yes will never fail.
• Throughout Scripture, God presents himself as the husband of his people, and his people often show themselves to be an unfaithful bride. We look elsewhere for what we should receive from him: love, comfort, success, control, money, our own glory. But God remains faithful, and his faithfulness reaches its peak at the cross.
• The one who never broke the covenant bore the judgment of the unfaithful. The one who had always said yes to the Father bore the weight of all our noes.
• Genesis 15: when God makes his covenant with Abraham, the animals are cut in two, according to the way a covenant was sealed at that time. The one who breaks it bears the curse. Yet it is the sign of God's presence that passes between the pieces, while Abraham sleeps. God takes upon himself the commitment to remain faithful, and also the curse that should fall on the unfaithful.
• “We broke the covenant. God bore the curse of it.” We were unfaithful, but the body of Christ was given up and his blood became the blood of the new covenant. That is how far the Bridegroom's faithfulness goes.
• If you are married, Jesus calls you to faithfulness, not to earn his love, but because you already live in his faithfulness. If your marriage is going through a difficult season, do not ask: “Does this relationship still make me happy?” Ask instead: “Lord, how can I reflect your faithfulness in this situation?”
• If you have experienced unfaithfulness, your past is not stronger than God's grace. If you have been abandoned, your wound is not your identity: your identity is found in Christ. If you have failed badly, your failure is not your name. Grace does not say that sin is unimportant, it says that Christ is greater than our sin.
• If you are single, this text concerns you too: marriage is not the ultimate destination of the Christian life, Christ is. Married, single, widowed, divorced, our shared hope is the same faithful Bridegroom. His forgiveness teaches us to forgive, his faithfulness teaches us to keep our word. “We learn faithfulness because we are already loved with a love that will never fail.”

Key Takeaways

• Jesus refuses to reduce marriage to a procedure: he looks at what our heart and our actions do to the other person.
• A contract sets conditions, a covenant gives its word. Faithfulness is built through a thousand small yeses, day after day.
• Marriage is a window onto God's faithfulness. When the covenant breaks, the light remains, but the shards wound.
• The one who breaks the covenant bears the responsibility of having exposed the other, without removing from anyone their own responsibility before God.
• Grace does not erase the scar, it removes the condemnation. Our hope rests on the faithfulness of Christ, not on the perfection of our promises.

Personal Application

1. In your relationships, do you think in terms of a contract (“I stay as long as it works for me”) or a covenant (“I gave my word”)?
2. If you are married, when did you last think about your yes? What small yes can you say this week: listening, asking forgiveness, giving up the last word, protecting time for the two of you?
3. Faced with the story of a broken couple, do you take the time to look at the whole story before judging?
4. Are you carrying a scar or a failure that you still let define your identity? What does Romans 8:1 change for you today?
5. Married, single, widowed or divorced: how does the faithfulness of Christ, the Bridegroom who never fails, nourish your own faithfulness?

Verses Cited

• Matthew 5:31-32
• Matthew 5:20
• Matthew 5:3-6
• Matthew 19:8
• Matthew 12:3-4
• Genesis 2:24
• Genesis 15
• 2 Corinthians 1:20
• Romans 8:1

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Jesus say about divorce in Matthew 5:31-32?

For Hugh Wessel, Jesus refuses to reduce the covenant to a procedure. In his day, people debated the grounds on which a certificate of divorce could be handed over. Jesus looks behind the document: he does not ask in which cases a person may divorce, but what becomes of the heart when the covenant becomes disposable.

Why does Jesus say that the man who divorces his wife “exposes her to becoming an adulteress”?

Jesus does not remove anyone's responsibility: the woman and the second husband remain responsible for their own choices. But he puts his finger on the one who broke the covenant first. That man bears the responsibility of having created a situation in which others will have to live and choose. Sin does not only make us guilty, it damages the world in which others have to live.

What does grace say to those who carry the wound of a broken covenant?

According to Hugh Wessel, grace does not erase the scar, it removes the condemnation. It does not call evil good, but it says: your scar is real, but your condemnation has been borne by another. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1).