Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-february-27
Matthew 5:27-37
Adultery
27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.
Divorce
31 “It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’ 32 But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
Oaths
33 “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but fulfill the oaths you have made to the Lord.’ 34 But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; 35 or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. 36 And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. 37 Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.
Today’s listed reading from the Sermon on the Mount includes three short units dealing respectively with sexual desire, divorce and oaths.
First, the part headed ‘Adultery.’ This teaching, of course, is a close parallel of the one a few verses earlier on the subject of anger and its relationship to murder. In both cases, Jesus seems to be warning that in God’s eyes, allowing sinful things to go on in your head is the moral and spiritual equivalent of doing them physically.
The church has always had a complicated relationship with human sexuality. In its earliest days, the church was influenced by the world view of the Greco-Roman culture into which it was expanding. And the leading schools of Greek philosophy taught that a human being is made up of a pure and spiritual soul inside a dirty and degraded body. The apostle Paul used language of Greek philosophy in comparing the urges of our sinful nature to the way of life guided by the spirit. The result was that the church adopted an attitude of suspicion toward the physical side of human life, and especially toward sexuality.
The suspicion of human sexuality remains in traditional interpretations of some passages of scripture like the one we’re thinking about today. Many parts of the church have traditionally taught that any feeling of sexual attraction to a person other than one’s spouse is the equivalent of adultery. That’s a common interpretation in the more theologically conservative parts of the church, where this passage is used as a weapon to make people (especially men) feel as guilty as possible as a way of enforcing church authority.
But that traditional interpretation is not really a faithful use of what Jesus is saying in this passage. The original Greek of this passage says that the sin is not experiencing attraction, but rather looking at a person for the purpose of lusting after them. The sin is intentionally indulging in attraction for a person other than your spouse. Feasting your eyes on – and fantasizing about – the hot person in the office, or across the street.
Now, in this passage, Jesus uses metaphors dealing with ‘gouging out your eye’ and ‘cutting off your hand’ so you won’t be kept out of heaven. It seems to me his point is that we can’t get away with blaming the physical urges of our bodies to escape responsibility for our sexual behavior. We do have the power to resist those urges, he seems to be saying.
And what about the second part of today’s reading – the question of divorce and remarriage? Should the church allow divorced people to be remarried?
Here’s where I get to on this issue: It seems to me that every divorce happens because of human sinfulness. Somewhere in the course of an unsuccessful marriage, probably because of sins like anger, cruelty, failure to forgive and selfishness, people just give up on trying to keep vows they’ve made before God. Sometimes the sins of one partner alone kill the marriage, but my suspicion is that most of the time, both partners share the blame.
I’m pretty forthright about sharing that belief with all couples I marry in which either or both are divorced. And I’ve never had a single person disagree with the idea that all divorce has human sinfulness as its root cause. So I’ve invited those people to take some time to pray, confessing before God whatever sins they might have committed that led to their previous divorces and resolving to do better this time.
But my understanding is that the God we serve stands ready to forgive all sins – including the sin of breaking a vow made before him. (According to Jesus there’s only one unforgivable sin – “blaspheming against the Holy Spirit” – and not even the leading Bible scholars can agree on exactly what that means.) So for me to refuse to extend the grace of Jesus to people who have confessed their sins and repented of them seems inconsistent with what we believe about forgiveness.
I’m sure there are people who approach second marriages casually, figuring if things get hard they’ll just walk away again. But I’m also pretty sure that lots of people come to their second marriages with greater seriousness than they brought to first marriages – because now they have a greater understanding of what it takes to make a marriage work, and of the suffering that goes with failure.
The third section of today’s reading, the part about oaths, is one that some of the leading Bible scholars struggle with. Which is why, I guess, I’ve tended to avoid it as a basis for sermons and Reflections.
Jesus tells us not to take oaths, but the scholars point out that the early church never seems to have had any hesitation to require people to take oaths as a part of church life. So it seems that the earliest generation of church leaders thought Jesus had something in mind beyond just prohibiting oaths.
Here’s what I’m thinking: Let’s start with the commandment against “taking God’s name in vain.” Today, this is usually understood to be a commandment against swearing, as we use the term – letting loose when we lose our temper or hit our thumb with a hammer.
But some scholars say what God really had in mind was to prohibit swearing a dishonest oath by his name – essentially invoking God’s name as a way to get people to believe a lie. That would turn the name of God from something sacred into a tool for criminal behavior.
And it seems to me that might be related to what Jesus is talking about in this teaching. If you’re taking an oath, why would you want to ‘swear by’ something? I guess the only reason would be to persuade people that you were telling the truth. And the only reason you would need to do that is that people would have doubts about whether you were telling the truth.
So it seems to me that Jesus’ point here might be that his followers are to be people of such honesty and integrity that our simple word is trustworthy without the need to resort of oaths that try to give it greater authority. My sense is that Jesus wants us to be so trusted by those around us that when we say ‘Yes,’ those who hear us have perfect confidence that ‘Yes’ is the truth.
That seems to me to be the one theme that unites these three short passages – the desire on Jesus’ part that his followers will demonstrate a greater and greater integrity in everything. That includes our sex lives, our business dealings, the way we speak to one another, the way we conduct our marriages, and the way we act when we have disagreements. If the Holy Spirit is at work in us, transforming us in the process we call “sanctification,” then our lives will be more and more like the model Jesus is sketching out in this part of the Sermon on the Mount.
Let’s pray. Lord, we pray that your Holy Spirit will be at work in us, transforming us to show greater love for all those we interact with in every aspect of our lives, so that with the passage of time people come to encounter Jesus more and more in us, and we bring greater and greater glory to you. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
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