Matthew 19

The divorce debate is not primarily about divorce law; it is about the authority to interpret Torah and the framework within which interpretation is done. Jesus' move is to go behind the Mosaic permission to the creation text — the two become one flesh — and to locate there the normative will of God. Moses' permission is real but concessive, granted because of the hardness of heart that characterizes the fallen human condition; the creation text gives the original design. The move has the same structure as the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount: the Mosaic commandment is real, but there is a more original and deeper standard behind it that the commandment was pointing toward.

The rich young man episode is constructed as a journey toward and away from the kingdom. The man's initial question about eternal life, his claim to have kept all the commandments from youth, and the detail that Jesus looked at him and loved him (in Mark's version, not Matthew's) make him a sympathetic figure. The specific demand — sell everything, give to the poor, follow me — is not given to every inquirer in the gospel; it is calibrated to this man's particular attachment. The camel and needle saying is hyperbolic in the mode of the Sermon on the Mount — designed to shock — and the disciples' astonishment is the gospel's signal that the saying is to be taken seriously. The correction — with man it is impossible, but with God all things are possible — does not soften the saying; it shifts the agency from the man's ability to renounce to the divine ability to work in the one who is willing.