Jesus, Women, and Divorce

What do you think of the following quote?

“Obstacles do not exist to be surrendered to, but only to be broken.”

Sounds good, right? Like something you would expect to see on a motivational poster in a community center. Who doesn’t benefit from the reminder to persevere in the face of challenges? Onward and upward!

Now what if I told you that I wasn’t quoting someone like John Wooden? That instead, the author of this quote was Adolf Hitler, who wrote it in Mein Kampf as part of a political treatise laying out his plans for the extermination of the Jews? It reads a little differently now, doesn’t it?

This, friends, is the importance of understanding context. You can take isolated words and sentences at face value and end up with a dramatically different meaning than the one intended by the one who spoke them. This is especially important understanding when it comes to the way we approach the Bible.

If there’s one truth that’s been especially poignant to me in my own spiritual walk these past five years, it’s the sobering realization of just how deficient I am in this department. I’m pretty familiar with the words on the Bible’s pages. I’ve read them quite a few times, but do I really understand them? Have I done the work to truly comprehend the culture and context into which they were written? More often than not, the answer is no. I have so much work to do in this space.

This past Sunday’s sermon served as a welcome reminder of this reality. And I’ll be honest: I really didn’t want to go to church this weekend. I wanted to get lost in my thoughts in the wilderness, away from people and flanked by local wildlife. But I’ve navigated my anti-social tendencies long enough now to recognize when my urge to isolate is self-destructive and when I need to get my butt in church, surrounded by God’s people. So I went, and I’m so glad I did.

Much of the rest of what I’m about to say was loosely inspired or informed by Sunday’s sermon, as delivered by a brilliant woman named Ania, and I would be remiss not to give credit where it’s due, so here’s a link to her message for those interested.

Ania tackled the context of John 4, the story about the Samaritan woman Jesus met at the well. She helped me see the story in a whole new light. I’ve probably read it a hundred times but always through the same lens and without true understanding of its backdrop.

For those unfamiliar with the passage, Jesus is traveling to Samaria, and he’s thirsty, so he stops at a local well and asks a Samaritan woman there for a drink of water. In their conversation, he reveals to her that he sees her clearly. He tells her information about herself that no stranger could possibly know— that she’s been married five times and that the man she’s currently with is not her husband. The woman is stunned by his knowledge of the intimate details of her personal life and realizes that this is no ordinary man. Jesus reveals himself to her as the Messiah and tells her of the living water he has to offer. It’s the first time in Jesus’ ministry where he reveals his true identity. Up until this point, you’ll hear Him saying, “The time has not yet come,” but here he chooses a Samaritan woman to be the first to hear and preach His lordship.

It’s a remarkable story at face value, but it’s infinitely more remarkable when you know more about the context leading up to it. To fully understand this story, you have to know that the Jews and the Samaritans of this time absolutely hated one another. (Think modern day Israel and Palestine.) The Jews would go to dramatic lengths to avoid contact with Samaritans, so Jesus’ choice to even talk to a Samaritan, who would have been viewed as a complete lowlife, is very intentional. Beyond that, not only is this person a Samaritan, but she’s also a woman, which placed her even lower on the proverbial totem pole. And she’s a woman who’s been passed around and ultimately discarded by a litany of men. She’s just a complete nobody in the eyes of (especially) Jewish men.

But this particular interaction is Jesus’ longest recorded conversation in the New Testament. It’s longer than any conversation He has with his disciples, with his family, or even with his accusers. This is super significant. Jesus is intentionally bridging massive cultural divides and assigning value and worth to the marginalized. He’s revealing more that his identity as Messiah; He’s revealing his identity as friend.

Now most of this I already knew from growing up in church school. But what I didn’t know was that my long-held belief that the woman in this story was actually a reckless adulterating temptress is just not rooted in the actual words on the page. I know I’m not alone in this interpretation. If you asked the average Christian to name an adulteress woman in the Bible, I have to believe a decent number of them will reference the woman at the well. I’ve always read this passage and actually kind of identified with it: “See? Jesus loves even promiscuous woman like the one I used to be!” It’s been sort of comforting to view her in this light. And who knows? Maybe her multiple husbands are, in fact, proof of her rebellious, free wheeling ways. It’s within the realm of possibilities, and yes, Jesus’ love and grace extends even that far. But there’s no legitimate reason to draw this hard conclusion based on the text itself.

And this is why context matters. We don’t know what happened to this woman’s multiple husbands. Perhaps a few of them died. But more likely than not, a few of them divorced her. And back then, men held 100% of the power to initiate divorce, and there was great dispute about what the law allowed where divorce was concerned. What I did not know before Sunday was that there were two primary schools of thought among the Jewish scholars of Jesus’ time, and they were constantly battling one another on matters of ethics, ritual practice, and theology of the Oral Law. The two schools of thought were known as Hillel and Shammai, named after two prominent scholars.

Generally speaking, Hillel’s interpretation of the law was more lenient, where Shammai’s was more legalistic. Hillel maintained that divorce needed to be reserved for serious transgressions. Shammai taught that men could basically abandon their wives whenever they felt like it. Displeased him in the bedroom? Divorce! Said something he didn’t like? Divorce! Burned the dinner? Divorce! Women in this economy were without recourse, often left penniless and at the mercy of those around her to help provide for them. So when it comes to the woman at the well, it’s more than possible that, rather than just being an adulteress, she was actually the victim of some pretty vicious guys who passed her around and discarded her like trash the minute she stepped out of line.

So in Matthew 19, when the pharisees approach Jesus for his opinion on the subject of divorce, they’re asking him to pick a side: Hillel or Shammai? Protect women from abandonment and financial ruin, or protect men’s freedom to treat women like objects to use and discard?

Jesus sided with the women. He told men to stop abandoning their wives for stupid, selfish reasons. The context of His words about divorce was a defense of women who were being treated badly, not a legalistic life sentence to trap them with abusers. But in my work advocating for the fair and safe treatment of women caught in abusive marriages, I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard pharisaical men weaponize Jesus’ words from Matthew 19 against these women, either ignorant or dismissive of the actual reasons He said the things He did.

Again, this is why context is so important! I’ve seen similar mistreatment of 1 Timothy 2:12, which, on a surface reading, commands women to be silent in church and serves as the basis for countless churches’ decision to put something of a gag order on women in the congregation. One church in my own town won’t even allow a woman to address the church body without a male chaperone on stage alongside her. Why? Because of a genuine but misguided desire to be obedient to the marching orders of this badly decontextualized passage of Scripture.

If you don’t understand why 1 Timothy was written, to whom it was written, or the context in which it was written, you’re probably going to get it wrong. It matters that the entire point of the letter was to address false teaching in Ephesus, which was, at that time, basically the (largely female) pagan epicenter of the known world. It matters that it’s highly likely that high status pagan prophetesses had infiltrated the church and were usurping authority they hadn’t earned and loudly mixing Jesus’ truth with their own errant philosophies. It matters that Paul’s instructions were likely meant to address this specific problem, not to silence all of womankind for the remainder of time.

It matters that the rest of Scripture is full of examples of God choosing women as His mouthpiece. We have to be willing to do the work to understand the context of the guidebook to which we subscribe. I know I’m just beginning to understand how little I truly know in this regard and just how much work there is left for me to do. I know I’m going to get it wrong sometimes, and I have to be willing to be corrected when I mess it up. It’s messy work, and we need to prayerfully invite the Holy Spirit to guide it as we go. I recommend Ben Witherington, Craig Keener, N.T. Wright, Marg Mowczko, and a few other brilliant, faithful believers’ writings on these issues. They know so much more than I do.

If you do the deep dive and ultimately reach a different conclusion than I do about some of this, I can respect that. What I don’t respect is the assertion that the Bible is crystal clear in its instructions to keep women silent. It’s just not.

Sometimes the choice to discipline yourself to get yourself to church on Sunday can be just what the doctor ordered to get you unstuck from a thinking pattern or perspective that doesn’t serve to advance truth. “Rightly dividing the Word of truth” can only happen when you’re willing to roll your sleeves up and question your own perspective once in awhile. It can only happen when you have at least enough humility to acknowledge that there’s a whole lot of truth you just don’t know yet.

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