The book of Ezra closes with a difficult story. In his distress over his discovery that the people of Israel were marrying foreign women (Ezra 9:3), Ezra offered one of the most moving lamentations in the Bible (9:5-15). “We have forsaken your commandments” (9:10); “you, our God, have punished us less than our iniquities deserved” (9:13); “here we are before you in our guilt, though no one can face you because of this” (9:15).

It is an intense prayer of confession – yet it became the motivation for divorce. In the end, the people agreed that they must repudiate all these foreign wives: these women, along with the children they had borne, must be sent away. A few people – Jonathan son of Asahel and Jahzeiah son of Tikvah, supported by two Levites, Meshullam and Shabbethai – seem to have argued that while it might have been better to have married within the covenant people of Israel, nevertheless divorce would now make things much worse for the affected families (10:15). But their voice did not prevail.

Instead, the people of God insisted that that these marriages had to be dissolved (10:3, 44). In the end, we can read a listing of 112 men, each individually identified: in the name of religious purity, they all divorced their wives and banished them and their children (10:18-44).

As the people of God we need to be in favor of prayers of confession, and in favor of purity. Yet is it so obvious that breaking apart marriages in the name of religion is the way to go? Most people suppose that the Bible teaches that the marriage bond must never be broken: but in this case – based on what we might call “religious incompatibility” – scripture records for us a narrative which insisted on the opposite.

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Help us, Lord! Help us to be faithful: faithful to you, and faithful to one another. May we be steadfast in loyalty, commitment, and covenant, day by day and always.