At the very beginning of His earthly ministry, Jesus said that He had come to bring the Torah to fullness, not to destroy it. One aspect of this process was evidently the logical completion of the meanings placed in it when it first appeared. This is how Jesus also views marriage. The Torah, of course, knows the depth that unites spouses, binding them not only at the physiological or psychological level but also at the spiritual one. Yet, condescending to the weakness of fallen human nature, it permits divorce in certain cases. At first sight this is an absurd situation, for it concerns bonds that are not subject to human control at all, something with which one cannot play and which one cannot manipulate. But the fallen world is full of absurdity in general, and the Torah, making allowance for human nature, had to take this into account.

Jesus, however, does not wish to make allowance for fallen human nature: He has brought into the world the Kingdom where the complete transformation of this nature is possible, and His task is to prepare everyone who desires it to enter the Kingdom. That is why He speaks of the inadmissibility of divorce. With one exception: if one of the spouses is guilty of sexual immorality, something by definition incompatible both with marriage and with the Kingdom.

The spiritual standard is, of course, set extremely high here. The disciples understand this, which is why they say that it is then better not to marry. On the lips of a Jew, for whom family life was effectively a religious duty, such a statement sounded strange, to say the least. But Jesus, of course, understood everything perfectly and answered directly that in principle a situation is possible in which a person postpones family life until the triumph of the Kingdom, postponing it in order to build it no longer according to the laws of the untransformed world, but according to the laws of the Kingdom. Yet, in His own words, by no means everyone is capable of this: it must be given to a person, and it depends on that person no more than being born a eunuch or being made one by others.

Obviously, such a renunciation of family life cannot and should not be a universal principle. Jesus evidently looks at everything through the eyes of the Kingdom. At the same time, He looks at everything through the Torah, which Paul will later compare, not by chance, to a tutor who leads seekers to Christ.

Let us decide seriously for ourselves whether we trust Jesus and the words He speaks. For if we do, we must draw some quite definite conclusions from today's Gospel passage:

• first, one should enter marriage with the conviction that it is for life, not with the thought, “If I do not like it, I will get divorced”;
• second, marriage is God's work, and the strength of a marriage is determined by our trust in Him;
• third, adultery is the death of a marriage;
• fourth, a second marriage after divorce is impossible;
• fifth, monastic life (or, more precisely, celibacy) is possible only through a special calling from God, not as a means of solving one's personal problems in relationships with the opposite sex;
• sixth, all this, of course, applies to those who consider themselves Christians and must not be used by us to condemn the people around us!

At the heart of the Gospel is the message of love. At the heart of love is forgiveness. The parable told by the Lord places forgiveness at the very centre of human relationships. It is impossible to want to be forgiven and not desire to forgive. Forgiveness is a two-way bond between people, in which both sides are responsible for sustaining it. To forgive not when someone has atoned for their fault, nor even when they have asked for forgiveness, but beforehand, in advance, leaving no unforgiveness in one's heart—this is the essence of Jesus' words in verse 22.