Divorce has touched nearly all of us in some way, and it carries real pain, loss, and long-lasting wounds. Jesus does not speak here to shame or condemn, but to reorient our understanding of marriage around God’s good design—so that married people pursue faithfulness, unmarried people understand the weight and beauty of marriage, and all of us learn to honor what God has created.

The Pharisees approach Jesus with a question about divorce, but it is not an innocent one. They ask whether it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife, attempting to draw Jesus into a well-known debate and possibly even put Him in danger. Their thinking treated marriage as a contract that could be exited when it no longer served personal happiness. Jesus exposes the flaw in their logic by taking them back to Moses. Deuteronomy did not command divorce; it regulated  ...