Catholic Commentary
Third Antithesis — On Divorce
31“It was also said, ‘Whoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorce,’32but I tell you that whoever puts away his wife, except for the cause of sexual immorality, makes her an adulteress; and whoever marries her when she is put away commits adultery.
Matthew 5:31–32 presents Jesus' teaching that divorce is morally blameworthy except for sexual immorality, reframing the Mosaic permission for divorce as a temporary accommodation to human hardness of heart rather than God's original intention. Jesus emphasizes that a divorce certificate does not truly dissolve the marriage bond; the dismissed wife becomes an adulteress through forced remarriage, and anyone marrying her commits adultery.
Jesus doesn't tighten the divorce law—He abolishes it entirely, declaring that the marriage bond cannot be dissolved by human will, only broken by infidelity from the start.
Matthew 5:31 — "It was also said, 'Whoever puts away his wife, let him give her a bill of divorce'"
Jesus here cites, in compressed form, Deuteronomy 24:1, which permitted a husband to write a "certificate of divorce" (Hebrew: sefer keritut) if he found "something indecent" (erwat dabar) in his wife. This Mosaic provision was fiercely debated in first-century Judaism: the school of Shammai restricted grounds for divorce to sexual unchastity, while the school of Hillel permitted divorce for nearly any reason (even burning the food). Jesus enters this live controversy not to adjudicate between the rabbinical schools but to transcend the entire legislative framework.
The phrasing "it was also said" (Greek: ἐρρέθη δέ) is the same formula used in the preceding antitheses, marking a contrast with the divine "I say to you." Crucially, Jesus does not say "God said" but "it was said" — subtly distancing the Deuteronomic concession from the positive will of God. Matthew 19:8 makes the logic explicit: Moses permitted divorce "because of the hardness of your hearts," but "from the beginning it was not so."
Matthew 5:32 — "But I tell you that whoever puts away his wife, except for the cause of sexual immorality, makes her an adulteress..."
Jesus' counter-declaration is astonishing in its scope. To "put away" one's wife (Greek: ἀπολύω) was a unilateral legal act by the husband. Jesus identifies two moral consequences of this act:
The dismissed wife is "made an adulteress" (moicheuthēnai): not because she has sinned, but because she is socially and economically coerced into remarriage — and that remarriage, in Jesus' reckoning, is adulterous, because the first bond was never severed. The passive voice is important: Jesus places the moral weight on the husband who initiates the dismissal. He exposes the certificate of divorce as a legal fiction that does not dissolve the actual union.
"Whoever marries her when she is put away commits adultery": the second man, though acting within the law's letter, participates in the violation of the still-intact first bond.
The exceptive clause ("except for the cause of sexual immorality"): The Greek porneia (literally "fornication/unchastity") has generated immense scholarly and ecclesial debate. Catholic exegesis, following the patristic consensus (Augustine, Jerome, Origen), consistently interprets this clause not as a license for divorce and remarriage, but as referring to unions that were invalid from the start — either pre-marital unchastity discovered after the wedding, or marriages within forbidden degrees of consanguinity (cf. Acts 15:20, where porneia is used in this levitical sense). The clause is thus an "exception" to the grammar of the antithesis (i.e., not every separation is blameworthy), not an exception to the indissolubility of true marriage. This reading is confirmed by the parallel in Mark 10:11–12, which contains no exceptive clause at all.
Typological and spiritual senses: The marriage bond throughout Scripture images the covenant between God and Israel (Hosea 2), and between Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:25–32). Divorce therefore carries not merely legal but covenantal and sacramental weight. When Jesus restores the "from the beginning" standard (Genesis 2:24), He is not imposing a harder law but announcing a restored humanity — one in which the heart is no longer hard, because the Spirit of the New Covenant writes the law within (Jeremiah 31:33). The indissolubility of marriage is, at its depth, an icon of God's own faithful, unrelinquishing love.
The Catholic Church's teaching on the indissolubility of marriage rests directly on this passage, amplified by Matthew 19:3–9, Mark 10:2–12, Luke 16:18, and 1 Corinthians 7:10–11. The Council of Trent (Session XXIV, 1563) solemnly defined that the bond of matrimony cannot be dissolved by adultery, explicitly rejecting Protestant interpretations of the porneia clause that permitted divorce and remarriage. Canon 7 of Trent anathematizes the claim that the Church errs in teaching indissolubility.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§§1614–1615) grounds indissolubility in Christ's own person: "This unequivocal insistence on the indissolubility of the marriage bond may have left some perplexed and could seem to be a demand impossible to realize. However, Jesus has not placed on spouses a burden impossible to bear...by coming to restore the original order of creation disturbed by sin, he himself gives the strength and grace to live marriage in the new dimension of the Reign of God."
St. Augustine (De Coniugiis Adulterinis) was the most systematic patristic voice on this question, insisting that the marriage bond (vinculum coniugale) persists even after physical separation, making any subsequent union adulterous. St. John Chrysostom (Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 17) emphasizes that Christ's language exonerates the innocent wife and indicts the husband's hard-heartedness.
Pope St. John Paul II's Familiaris Consortio (1981) and his Theology of the Body retrieve this passage as the "hermeneutical key" to Christian sexuality: the body itself, in its spousal capacity for total self-gift, is ordered to a love that images the Trinity's own inner life of communion. Indissolubility is thus not a negative restriction but a positive revelation of what love truly is.
For Catholics today, Matthew 5:31–32 arrives in a culture that treats marriage as a revocable contract and divorce as a private matter of self-fulfillment. The Church's teaching can appear merely legalistic or cruel, especially to Catholics in irregular marriages who feel excluded from full sacramental life. This passage, rightly understood, is not a weapon but an invitation to take seriously what every wedding liturgy professes: that love pledged "until death" participates in something larger than individual happiness.
Concretely, Catholics can engage this passage by: (1) preparing for marriage with the seriousness it deserves, through genuine pre-Cana formation, not as a bureaucratic hurdle but as formation in self-gift; (2) supporting struggling marriages in their parish community — the Church's teaching on indissolubility only has credibility when parishes are communities of mercy and accompaniment; (3) understanding the annulment process not as "Catholic divorce" but as the Church's careful discernment of whether a true sacramental bond was formed in the first place; and (4) finding in the permanence of their own marriage a daily school of dying to self — which is precisely the ascesis Christ promises will be graced by the Spirit of the New Covenant.
Commentary