FIVE HUSBANDS AND TWO MEN: Christian Divorce and Re-Marriage? (Part 17 of 18)

34.  The Pre-Eminence of Grace over Law

 A woman was brought to the public court of Jesus one early morning.  She had allegedly been caught in the act of adultery.  By the extant law of Moses, she deserved to die by stoning.  What was Jesus going to say or do?  Respect for the law or deviation from it?  Mercy, or justice and judgment?  We know the story.  He sided with mercy, to the disappointment of the murderous morning crowd.  The woman was let go with another chance to live better (John 8:1-11).

That someone is guilty does not always mean that they must be condemned.  We may condemn an act while sparing the actor.  Rightness is not usually righteousness.  Even to an adulteress allegedly caught in the act, with a crowd of first-hand witnesses against her, God gave another chance.  Such enlightenment as this study offers is not a license to kill.  Paul warns that “Knowledge puffs up, but love edifies” (1 Corinthians 8:1, NKJV).  Love is what it takes to build.  Not everyone who jumped off with a licensed parachute landed safely.  No matter how right one might be, no matter how wrong the other, mercy still has a long rope, so long as it has not been dropped at the other end.  But mercy must also go with wisdom, or mercy can be fooled.

I know a sister who had a very impossible husband.  If she had deployed the clauses of Paul, she would have been justified.  Her husband was very unfaithful to the point of getting an alternative apartment for his mistress, in the same city.  The Christian wife grieved and fasted and prayed many days.  He loved his ways, but he loved his wife too.  He was willing to stay with her.  That was significant.  I prayed with her on some occasions.  She hated his ways, but she was also unwilling to let go.  Their both wills aligned there, despite the terrible pains caused.  Eventually, God answered her.  The husband got born again.

When she became a pastor, he followed her wherever she got posted to.  Paul was right: “For what knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save thy husband? or how knowest thou, O man, whether thou shalt save thy wife?” (1 Corinthians 7:16).  It is not easy, but it is possible.  Had that woman acted on her right, the story might have been sadly different.  It was bad, but they were both willing to stay, and neither threatened the life of the other.

The first thing to do is not run to the divorce court because one has caught the other in adultery or in some other misdemeanour.   Sometimes the guilty are the first to cast a stone.  If you have ever looked and lusted after another, for example, you are by the same law as guilty of the same sin as the one accused of the physical act, according to Jesus (Matthew 5:28).  That is why it is unwise to cast stones too quickly, because those stones could be tragically irretrievable.  Even an adulterer or adulteress can be forgiven and trusted to amend, especially when they are sincerely struggling to change.  Rightness is not always fairness.  If everyone pursued every right, there would be no light.  Strength is not in the power that one possesses but the discretion and wisdom to know how to or not to deploy it (Proverbs 16:32).

Dr Steve told the story of a wife in Eastern Nigeria who got back from the market and found her husband with another woman in their bed.  She quickly and respectfully shut the door.  She did not raise an alarm for the world to come and see what she had been saying, like somebody else was sure to have done.  She went to her kitchen, cooked a meal, and served him and his mistress, saying nothing.  That profoundly shocked the visitor who had been ready for a fight, if it came to defending ‘her’ territory.   Overwhelmingly surprised, the mistress turned against the man.   She told him that he was a very foolish and ungrateful man to have such a good wife and still be running loose.  She left him.  That made the man feel worse.  He had been ready for a fight, but got none.  It takes two to tangle, after all.

That night, he couldn’t sleep.  He waited for the confrontation.  He dared the wife to raise a voice on the matter, and he would throw her out of the house for challenging his right in his house, but she said nothing. They slept on the same bed.  She carried on as if nothing had happened. The next morning, she served him his breakfast, as usual, and still did not bring up the matter, even though the man was still ready for her.  She was wise and patient.

After a week, he could bear it no longer. He went to her pastor and said, “I am the man whose wife reported me to you.”  In his mind, it must have been his wife’s pastor who had advised her on that strategy.  The pastor knew nothing about the case.  The man had ended up reporting himself.  Long story short, he got saved and became a different husband.  Again, Paul was right, that being right does not always mean being wise.  We might have been telling a different story today, or have had no story to tell at all, if she had acted otherwise.  Interestingly, despite the pains, both parties were willing to stay.   The situation did not get to the point of inconsolable and irreconcilable conflicts.

Often, love wins, but tragic tales have also been told, like the unforgettable case of a sister whose husband often treated her very violently.  She complained to her conservative leaders, who urged her to keep enduring the brutalities, in the name of not bringing shame to the church or to herself.  One last day, her violent husband beat and bruised her so terribly, she fled in her bloodied feebleness to the house of her spiritual matron, who had always counselled her to stay and endure.  At the door, she collapsed and died, a mass of bruised flesh.  It was as if she came to say, “You may eat my flesh now offered upon the altar of your dogmas.”  The trauma has never left that woman.  She told us the story herself.  If that counsellor had had a study like this, she might have saved a life.  Or if that woman had been better instructed, she might have ignored their ‘shame’ and saved her life as well as spared her family the grief of how gruesomely their daughter and sister was extinguished by a beast.  I lost a good son through circumstances remotely linked to such complications.

If we turned the camera the other way, we might discover that more men are abused by wives than women have been molested by men.  However, because men talk less (as it is considered weakness on the part of the man to cry, especially from a woman’s inflictions), we hear more of the woman’s torments than what she inflicts on the man.  Many a clergy has been told to mute his pains ‘because of the ministry.’  In the end, the tigress extinguishes him, and there is neither man nor ministry anymore.  It is idolatry to elevate traditions so much as not to do right or save lives (Mark 3:4); to elevate the care for reputation above the fear of God.  Sadly, that altar still drinks innocent blood today.

Some years ago, we had a very fine brother who was unfortunate to have been married to a very terrible Christian woman.  After two years of marriage (or less, if I can still recall), the brother got home from work one day to find his house emptied.  The woman had come with a lorry and cleared the house of his possessions and run off to live the rest of her life.  Five years later, he was still the way she had left him, restrained by a perspective to the Bible that insisted that he was more righteous being unmarried, since the wicked woman was still alive.  His trauma from a wife’s abuse was inflamed by the unwholesome creed.  He might have had a prettier Esther for the arrogant Vashti (Esther 1-2).

This is bound to trouble some, but it will surely liberate a few, and be sadly weaponised by some.  However, as the fear of abuse never keeps anyone from a proper use, loving truth should not be denied because it might distress the unwilling.  Learning, relearning, and unlearning.  We don’t cease to use knives because that tool sometimes gets abused by murderers.  Truth heals.  It is not measured by how much it pleases everyone.

Back to the Samaritan puzzle: if Jesus is understood to have said in Judea that remarriage after a divorce was an absolute anathema, especially while the previous partner still lived, yet technically consider five consecutive remarriages as legitimate in a different context, we may have missed something in our comprehension of Him.  As every prophet brings merely his part to the whole of any prophecy, the perspectives of St John and Apostle Paul will appear to have provided the missing piece in the puzzle, that there are other salient grounds for which a remarriage might still be holy even after a divorce in which the other partner is still alive.  But God has called us to peace.

From The Preacher’s diary, 

July 20, 2021. 

A link to the e-version of this book will be provided in the last Part of the series: the next post.