The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

Heart Transformation for Purity - Explaining Jesus' High Standards:  Mt.5:27 – 32

^5:27 You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; ²⁸ but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. ²⁹ If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. ³⁰ If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into hell. ³¹ It was said, ‘Whoever sends his wife away, let him give her a certificate of divorce’; ³² but I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of unchastity, makes her commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

          I had seen movies portraying male soldiers in the U.S. military as horny womanizers who sailed into port looking for girls.  So I was surprised when I learned that the U.S. military, among its own ranks, forbids adultery.  It’s punishable by expulsion.  Wow:  a law against something that happens in a soldier’s private life?  Absolutely.  Adultery often involves time and energy spent on maintaining a deceptive double life, impeding clear-headedness.  It disrupts trust between soldiers, allows higher ranking officers to use power plays of all kinds with lower ranking servicemen and women, and builds loyalties between people that are completely inappropriate.  It is also a cause for bitterness, jealousy, and insecurity.  It drains away a sense of corporate solidarity and honor.  Because adultery utterly distracts people from the mission, it is strictly forbidden.

          Jesus takes a similar stance, but tougher.  Jesus commands his followers to have even higher standards about marital and sexual conduct than the U.S. military.  He absolutely forbids his people from sexual misconduct, both among his troops (fellow Christians) and among non-troops (non-Christians).  Yet precisely for this reason, we must first acknowledge that it’s hard for us to hear Jesus or take him seriously.  In our culture of casual sex, Jesus seems hopelessly out of date.  What’s the big deal about a little exchanging of fluids? 

By extension, our culture might suggest, how much more harmless are a few private, self-indulgent thoughts?  Casually passing by any magazine rack fills our mind with images.  Women are made to look as if they’re saying, ‘Take me to bed with you, now.’  Men are made to look confident, strong, and deeply interested in you.  They stare at us suggestively from the cover of the harlequin novel, the printed page, the billboard, the television, and the computer screen.  And then, when we turn off the lights, we’re left with a deep longing to meet this mysterious person who will fulfill our deepest fantasies.  When are we not aroused?

Jesus knows that human sexuality is a powerful force that needs, not just reigning in, but God’s reign in order to be healthy.  Why is Jesus concerned about what happens in our hearts and minds?  I can think of a few reasons.  First: so that we would live with Jesus in reality.  Lust deceives you into thinking that there exists a ‘woman’ or ‘man’ out there that exists solely to satisfy your needs.  But that ‘person’ is purely a figment of your imagination.  In reality, you will get totally smacked upside the head with how difficult marriage, dating, and even friendship actually are.  After all, if people are as needy, hungry, and self-centered as you are, why would you think even for a moment that healthy, long-term relationships of any sort are going to be easy? 

Second, Jesus is concerned about how lust affects how we actually interact with members of the opposite sex (or, if you have same-sex attraction, members of the same sex).  If we indulge in lust, chances are we are not seeing other people clearly:  their gifts, potential, character, flaws, or areas of development and growth.  We don’t see them the way Jesus sees them, because we’re too busy imagining them naked.  Or imagining what they’d be like to date.  That might result in some bad relational or organizational mistakes even if it never becomes overtly sexual. 

Third, Jesus is concerned with the quality of relationships in his church.  In the military, adultery is forbidden because it affects the ability of men (and increasingly, women) to fight side by side and trust each other.  Jesus is building a community of trust with an even larger mission together.  Lust erodes that community and commitment to the mission.  What would it be like to not have that trust?  Among men?  Among women?

Fourth, Jesus wants to honor God’s original design for marriage.  Notice that Jesus’ teaching on divorce in 5:31 – 32 raises the bar on what marriage is in God’s sight.  Moses had given the procedure for divorce (Dt.24), which is what Jesus quotes.  And we have evidence that rabbinical opinion in the 5^th century BC was balanced with regards to gender equity; they held that wives could also divorce their husbands, showing that even though Moses’ language was androcentric (male), it was understood to apply to women as well.  However, by the first century, the impact of Greek, militarist, male-centric culture caused Jewish rabbinical thought to deteriorate.  For one, wives were denied the right of divorce.  Second, rabbinical opinion was split on the circumstances in which husbands could divorce their wives.  Rabbi Hillel was more liberal, that men could divorce their wives for cooking a bad meal or some trivial thing.  Rabbi Shammai was stricter, teaching that divorce was only permitted on grounds of adultery.  Jesus sided against the lenient view that gave men disproportionate power.  Elsewhere, he also offhandedly affirmed that Dt.24 should have been interpreted to mean that a wife could also divorce her husband, not that husbands alone had this right (Mk.10:12).  For Jesus, God’s original vision for human marriage – monogamous, male and female, and lifelong – is the one proper place for sexual expression.  That is the firm reality that lies behind what Jesus is talking about.  He will later clarify that in Matthew 19.

So fifth, to Jesus, any flippant attitude towards marriage denigrates God’s original vision.  Casual divorce and remarriage are, in his mind, the same as serial polygamy.  That’s probably why Jesus says, ‘everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of unchastity, makes her commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.’  Marriage is so binding that, even for couples in conflict who need to separate for a time, reconciliation is always the hope.  Sexual unfaithfulness by your spouse may be legitimate grounds for divorce, but even there, there is still space to try to reconcile.  One’s first marriage somehow always exists as a residual reality, so casually divorcing and marrying another divorced person, therefore, is always a form of adultery.

In the end, can we make a 100% compelling explanation to the secular world why Jesus' sexual ethics are so high?  Probably not without getting into a lot of other subjects.  This is because Jesus is not just protecting our feelings from getting hurt, as if we were the center of the universe; he is also protecting God's interest in imaging Himself into the most fundamental, and potentially glorious, of human relationships:  marriage.