Modern Christians tend to misunderstand two of Jesus’ most radical teachings: his prohibition against divorce and remarriage, and his teaching about the Church. But what if this isn’t just a coincidence? After all, the biblical texts explaining marriage tend to do so by comparing it to Christ’s relationship with the Church, and vice versa. Does this explain why the Protestant Reformers broke with the earliest Christians (and the New Testament) on both of these doctrines? And also… does getting this wrong open the door to polygamy?

Transcript:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I want to explore a thesis that I have, which is that Jesus has these radical teachings about marriage and about the church that many modern Christians don’t understand, and that these are not unrelated issues; that Jesus’s marriage teaching explains his teaching about the church, and vice versa, and that when you get one wrong, you’re likely to end up getting the other one wrong as well.

Hear me out, love to hear what you think. Let’s start with a quick recap. Now, last week, I did an entire episode on Jesus’s radical marriage teaching, so I’m going to go very quickly through this part, but for those who maybe are just tuning in and don’t want to watch an entire hour to get caught up, Jesus presents a marriage teaching, where he goes back to Genesis and says the two shall be become one.

They’re no longer two, but one, and, “Therefore,” he says, in Mark 10 verse nine, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put us under.” Now, that looks like a blanket prohibition against trying to dissolve a Christian marriage. Sure enough, in the next two verses, he says that whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her. Now, to say it’s adultery is to say the marriage isn’t actually dissolved. He’s not just saying they’re committing fornication or sexual sin outside of, no, it’s actually the sin of adultery. That’s pretty significant.

You find very clear passages that look like a really radical view that divorce and remarriage is strictly prohibited. Now, those who defend an exception to this tend to cite to Matthew 19:9, which gives what appears to be an exception clause for a Greek word called porneia. This is often mistranslated to be adultery, but as we saw last week, the word porneia is not the Greek word for adultery, which appears twice in Matthew 19:9, but not in the exception clause.

Then in fact, porneia was the Jewish term for invalid marriages of the kind that the Gentiles had that were not permissible under Jewish law. The better understanding of Matthew is that Jesus is showing that this prohibition against divorce and remarriage applies to only valid marriage, those marriages which God has joined together, not those marriages which Caesar has tried to join together. Caesar can say two men can marry, three people can marry, whatever, but God has a particular vision of marriage.

If God has joined it together, then divorce and remarriage are impossible, and the porneia clause is just making the point that if not, this doesn’t apply. Hopefully that’s clear. As I said last week, this is a truly radical teaching, as you get from the very next verse, which the disciples respond by saying, “Well, if this is the case with marriage, it’s better not to get married.” Then Jesus presents an equally radical teaching on celibacy, which we’re not even going to touch.

Today, I want to turn now and say, “Okay, to make sense of this radical teaching, you need to go to one place, and scripture points you to that one place over and over and over again. It’s the church and its covenant faithfulness.” This is, again, it’s a two-way road. If you want to understand the nature of Christ’s relationship to the church, you need to understand marriage. If you want to understand marriage, you need to understand Christ’s relationship to the church.

We see this all over the place, beginning in the Old Testament. Malachi 2 is one of the primary texts that I quoted from last week, and the verse I quoted was verse 16 of Malachi 2, where God says, “I hate divorce.” All right, very clear, very straightforward. What I didn’t tell you then, and I’m happy to tell you now, is that this condemnation of divorce arises from a discussion of Levitical covenant unfaithfulness, that the priests and Levites hadn’t been faithful to the mosaic covenant.

In Malachi chapter 2, God says, “And now, you priests, this command is for you.” He accuses him of being unfaithful to, as he says, “My covenant with Levi.” Beginning in verse 13, he says, “You cover the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning,” because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor at your hand. You ask, “Why does he not?” Because the Lord was witness to the covenant between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless.

Though she is your companion and your wife by covenant, has not the one God made and sustained for us the spirit of life? What does he desire? Godly offspring. Take heed to yourself and let none be faithless to the wife of his youth. Now, what I hope is clear from this is in scolding the priests in this way, he’s not literally referring to them saying, “In your homes, apart from your priestly duties, you’re all cheating on your wives and you’re being unfaithful to them.”

No, the image of failing to reproduce, failing to beget children, and the image of being faithless to the covenant are talking about the Levitical covenant pretty explicitly. It is in this context that God says, “For I hate divorce, and covering is one garment of violence. Take heed to yourselves and do not be faithless.” That’s the first, just even before we get to Jesus in the New Testament. You’ve got God clearly saying in Israel, that what’s going on between God and the Levitical covenant is very much like a covenantal marriage.

Well, let’s jump forward to the New Testament. There’s several different places. Roman 7 is one place I think is really interesting, because in the context, Saint Paul is just talking about justification, but he says, “Do you not know, brethren, from seeking to those who know the law, that the law is binding on a person only during his life?” Thus, a married woman is bound by law to her husband as long as he lives, but if her husband dies, she’s discharged from the law concerning her husband.

Accordingly, she’ll be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive, but if her husband dies, she’s free from that law, and if she marries another man, she is not an adulteress. You just think like, why is he going on this excursus through marriage law? Well, he’s going to explain, verse 4, “Likewise, my brethren, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who’s been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God.”

Then in verse 6, he really clarifies, “We are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive.” In other words, there’s in this change with the covenantal system, Christ coming in and fulfilling the old law with his death, and creating a new law at the Last Supper, or new covenant, I should say, that this is very much like the ancient marital covenant that was described in Malachi’s 2 has been brought to an end. It’s been completed, in a way, because one of the parties in the marriage is now dead. That’s kind of the idea.

Now, oh, now you’re free to marry again. This creation of a new covenant, that’s all a covenantal kind of theme. That’s the imagery that St. Paul is using. That makes a lot more sense in Romans 7 if you understand Malachi 2. Well, likewise with Ephesians Chapter 5. In Ephesians 5, St. Paul famously gives descriptions about how we should interact with each other in marriage, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wife, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord.”

Notice how quickly in trying to explain family life and trying to explain marriage, Paul has to turn to the church. He says, “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself a savior.” Then he says, again, “As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands.”

Then he says, “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word baptism, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” If you want to understand how to treat your husband, if you want to understand how to treat your wife, you need to understand the covenantal relationship between Christ and the church.

Ephesians 5 verse 28. “Even so,” Paul says, “Husbands should love their wives as their own body.” This is a critical line. “He who loves his wife loves himself.” You’ll notice in Ephesians 5 here, St. Paul is describing marriage by looking to the church, and looking to the church in two aspects. One, that the church is, in one way, the bride of Christ, and two, the church is, in one way, the body of Christ. Here, in Ephesians 5:28, he’s brought these two images together, that the two becoming one is so radical that Christ loving the church is really Christ loving himself.

We don’t talk about the church this way. That is a really radical vision of the church. It’s also a really radical vision of marriage, that when a man loves his wife, he’s loving himself. If he does ill to her, he’s doing ill to himself. That this loving your neighbor as yourself part, that’s good for your neighbor, but you’re invited into something much more deeper and more profound, where it’s not just loving the other as yourself, but realizing that in a real way, you are loving yourself and loving the other party of this covenantal union.

Ephesians 5:29, Paul goes on to say, “No man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.” If you were to read Ephesians 5 and say, “Is Paul talking about marriage, or is Paul talking about the church?” You can’t answer yes. The answer is just yes, he’s talking about bot,h and he can’t get a sentence out about one without bringing up the other. That’s how intimately connected these two themes are in his theology.

That’s going to become really clear in the next verse, because just as Jesus, when he’s talking about marriage, when he shows that divorce is actually completely unacceptable, points us back to God’s original plan in Genesis, Genesis 2 verse 24, where it talks of the two becoming one flesh. Paul quotes that here in Ephesians 5:31, and you think he’s going to say, “This explains marriage,” but he actually says, “This explains the church,” and he puts it in these really sacramental terms.

He says, “This is a great mystery,” mysterion, the Greek word for sacrament. This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ in the church, but he can’t stop talking about marriage as well. He says, “However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.” More than any other passage, I would say Ephesians 5 shows that you can’t understand the church without understanding marriage, and you can’t understand marriage without understanding the church. Paul can’t separate the two because they’re that connected.

There’s plenty of other passages that point in the same direction that maybe we’ve overlooked. For instance, in John chapter 3, St. John the Baptist, he says, “You yourselves bear me witness that I said, I am not the Christ, but I’ve been sent before him.” How does he describe his relationship? He says, “He who has the bride is the bridegroom.” That’s Christ. “The friend of the bridegroom who stands and hears him rejoices greatly, the bridegroom’s voice.” That’s John the Baptist.

John’s whole understanding of who he is and who Christ is is expressed in this kind of marital imagery. Likewise, we can see in Revelation 19, in Revelation 19, towards the end of the Book of Revelation, there’s this heavenly chorus, “Hallelujah for the Lord, our God, the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult, and give him the glory for the marriage of the lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. It was granted her to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure.”

Then John adds here, “For the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.” The church is the bride in this heavenly mystery that John sees unfolding. This is a recurring biblical theme, and I’m actually just scratching the surface of all of the Old and New Testament references to first Israel and then the church being the bride.

Revelation 19, verse 9, though, has this incredible invitation, I want to make sure we get, where the angel says to John, write this, “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the lamb.” This marriage supper of the lamb, that wedding feast of the lamb, that’s what all this is pointing to, this incredible encounter between the bridegroom and the bride. If you understand how Jewish marriages work, they were in two stages. I’ve done other videos on this, where you’d get legally married, but then the bridegroom would go out and prepare a house for the bride, and then he would come and take the bride into his house.

Jesus at the Last Supper presents his goal as doing this, and he goes before us to prepare a place for us. This is very much bridegroom kind of language, and it culminates here in Revelation 19 in the wedding feast of the lamb. That’s the second stage of the Jewish wedding. Obviously, there’s a lot there. There’s a lot of liturgical stuff, there’s a lot of Eucharistic themes to that. What I want to get right now is just there’s some kind of very deep connection in Christ’s relationship to the church and in the bridal/bridegroom relation.

If we don’t get that, we’re missing something important about both. I keep saying that, but what is that connection? Well, I want to present it this way, that if you want to understand the connection very simply, it is an indestructible, divinely created covenantal union, an indestructible, divinely created covenantal union. You can capture all of those features together by saying that the two become one. If the two become one, they become only one.

Jesus ahead doesn’t have multiple bodies. Christ the bridegroom doesn’t have multiple brides. There is, if biblical understanding of the church is correct, it follows that there’s one church, that Christ isn’t a polygamist, he doesn’t have a ton of different brides. We’ll actually get into that at the very end of this episode, but that’s what I want you to see, that if you get marriage right, you can see why there’s one church. If you get the church right, you can see why divorce and remarriage are impossible. They are these indestructible, divinely created covenantal unions.

Now, what does that mean for the church in particular? I want to flag a couple of passages. In Matthew 16 verse 18, now, this is a hot-button topic for a lot of reasons for Catholics and Protestants with the papacy, and I’m going to allide most of them, and glide right past it, and point you to just one feature. In Matthew 16 verse 18, Jesus says to St. Peter, “I tell you, you are Peter, rock, and on this rock, I will build my church.”

Then he says that the gates of Hades or hell won’t overcome the church, but notice it’s divinely created, just as God joins together a true marriage. Well, here, a true church is made by God, not by man. That’s really important. If Jesus had never said those words, then his followers would have to go start their own denominations. His followers would have to say, “Hey, I want to follow Jesus, but he didn’t leave us a church. We’ve got to make a man-made organization and follow him that way.”

A lot of people act as if Jesus didn’t build a church, but Jesus tells us the opposite, that he did build a church, so we don’t have to go make some man-made denomination. We don’t have to build our own church because Jesus already did that work for us. That’s the first thing, divinely instituted. Second, that there’s a real participation. Now, here, those Eucharistic themes are going to come out again. In first Corinthians 10 verse 16, Saint Paul says, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?”

This idea of participating in the body and blood of Christ is a really great theme, and I’m not going to do it justice here, but I want to point to one thing. In verse 17, Paul says, “Because there is one bread,” or the word can also be translated, because there’s one loaf, “We who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” The Eucharist is what causes us, in a real way, to become one with Christ. Just as in marriage, the act of the marriage act, the two become one flesh. Here, in the life of the church, this encounter with the body of Christ and the Eucharist makes the two become one flesh.

That is an interesting way, these acts of physical union, if you will, there’s a parallel there that’s not a coincidence. It’s the most intimate expression of union from a human perspective. Look, you’re a human being, you have body and soul. When you want to express union, we often find ways of doing that at a bodily level. That can be anything from a handshake, to a hug, becoming blood brothers, where you cut your hand, and press your blood against theirs to show this union even in the blood, to the embrace of a husband and wife, and here, in this fullness in the Eucharist with Christ.

That’s the idea that two become one flesh. How does it happen? Well, what’s happening is St. Paul tells us, “In a Eucharistic way.” What does it mean to become one flesh with Christ? Well, Paul tells us that as well in Ephesians chapter 1, he tells us in verse 22, that, “God has put all things under Christ’s feet, and it’s made him the head over all things for the church,” which is his body, “The fullness of Him who fills all in all.” In other words, Paul is letting you know, when he says that the church is the body of Christ, he means that the church is the fullness of Christ, that you don’t have the full Christ if you have Jesus and not the church.

It’s like knowing somebody and not knowing their wife. You know them pretty incompletely, that to really understand who they are, you have to see the other half of them, because the two have actually become one flesh. Well here, Paul’s saying, “Yeah, the two actually are one.” You can see this in some other ways as well. For instance, in John 14 verse 6, Jesus famously says, “I’m the way, the truth, and the life.” What does the church say about herself in the Acts of the Apostles?

Well, she refers to herself as the way. We see that in places like Acts 24 verse 15. Even the description the church has for herself in the New Testament shows that she understands herself to simply be a continuation of Jesus on earth, that this is his body continuing to be incarnate in a mysterious way on earth, that yes, bodily, Jesus has gone to heaven, he ascended into heaven, and yet he hasn’t abandoned us. Why has he not abandoned us? There’s another sense in which his body is still on earth, because his bride is still on earth.

So radically, our bridegroom and bride to be identified one with another, that where you see the church, you see Jesus. That’s why without blasphemy, the church can refer to herself as the way. Again, remember, Paul’s words, “He who loves his wife loves himself,” and he applies this to Christ and the church, that when Christ loves the church, he’s really loving himself. Now, that’s big for something like the Protestant Reformation. Why? Well, because opposing the church is opposing Christ.

You don’t get to say, “I love Jesus, but I hate the church.” There’s not room for that in Christianity. Acts 5, verse 38 and 39, Gamaliel, who we looked at a few weeks ago, he talks about this, even though he’s not even a Christian. He’s a Jewish leader, he’s a Pharisee, and he says about the apostolic movement, that, “If this undertaking is of God, you’ll not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God.” Well, those words certainly appear to be prophetic, because a few chapters later, excuse me, in Acts chapter 9, a young man by the name of Saul of Tarsus is breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.

Now, catch that. He’s not going to try to go capture and kill Jesus. Jesus has lived, died, risen again, gone to heaven. That’s not Saul’s mission. He’s trying to persecute Christians. He’s trying to persecute the church. He goes to the high priest and asks for letters, so that if he finds any belonging to the way, men or women, he might bring them from Damascus to Jerusalem. As he’s on the way to Damascus, he’s knocked to the ground and he hears a voice saying to him, and the voice doesn’t say, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute my church?”

It doesn’t say, “Why do you persecute my followers?” It simply says, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” That is a baffling thing to hear from heaven, because how could you be persecuting someone in heaven? They’re in heaven. Saul’s confused and he says, “Who are you, Lord?” The answer comes back, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting,” that to persecute the church is to persecute Jesus, to oppose the church is to oppose Jesus. If the church had just said those things about herself, you could look at that and say, “That’s blasphemous,” but this is actually what scripture says, because this is what Jesus says.

Hopefully you can see the marriage teaching and Christianity is really radical. The teaching on the church in Christianity is also really radical. The two make sense in light of each other. The two become one flesh. You might ask, “What happened? How did we lose sight, so many of us, of these two radical teachings?” That is a more difficult question to answer adequately than I can do in one video. I want to propose a somewhat simplified answer. First, the Reformers redefine the church.

They keep on paper the teaching about the church, but they just changed the meaning of the word church. When you talk about the church in the biblical context, Jesus says things like, “You’re the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid, nor do men light up a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works, and give glory to your father who is in heaven.” There’s two features to notice.

Number one, the church is visible. It’s on a hill where you can see it. It’s a light that you can’t put under a bushel basket. It cannot be hidden. Number two, it’s organized, it’s structured, and we see this all over the place. People go to the church ... Read more on Catholic.com