Mark 10:12 · World English Bible
Mark 10:12 Meaning If a Woman Herself Divorces Her Husband
If a woman herself divorces her husband, and marries another, she commits adultery.
What does Mark 10:12 mean?
The same standard falls on the wife as on the husband, a dignity the law around her did not grant. Marriage is not a contract one party holds and the other endures; it is one shared life, and neither person can end it by walking out.
From the Orthodox reading below.
Mark 10:12 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Orthodox
ORTHODOX
Orthodox
The same standard falls on the wife as on the husband, a dignity the law around her did not grant. Marriage is not a contract one party holds and the other endures; it is one shared life, and neither person can end it by walking out.
Naming the second union honestly is a protection of the first. If the bond outlasts the leaving, then a husband or wife is not disposable and cannot be traded for someone newer without something real being torn. Mercy afterward is real, and the tradition makes room for it, without pretending the tearing never happened.
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Orthodox lens
Live Mark 10:12 today
- Sit with one thing about your partner, or a close friend if you are not married, that you quietly resent, and stay with it for five minutes without reaching for your phone. Do not solve it. Just let it be a real thing about a real person you are not planning to replace.
- Pick one promise you made to someone and have been letting slide, the call back, the thing you said you would fix, the dinner you keep moving. Do that one today, even badly, even late.
- In the next argument, when the thought arrives that you would be happier with someone easier, let it pass without acting on it. Lower your voice instead of leaving the room, and finish the conversation.
What have I been treating as a trial run, when the other person thought it was permanent?
The same truth in other traditions
Analects · Confucius
A promise is not a mood. What you said you would be to someone holds after the feeling that made you say it has passed, and a person who drops it when it costs them was never really keeping it.
Stoicism · Epictetus
You chose a role, husband or wife, and the role carries duties you do not get to renegotiate when it stops being pleasant. Keeping it when it is hard is the whole of it.
Pirkei Avot
Love that depends on something ends when that thing ends. Love that does not depend on anything outside itself lasts, because there is nothing in it left to be withdrawn.
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