Regarding One Another (Week 24, Feb 5)
Reading
Matthew 5:27–32
Silent Reflection
Remarks
But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Matthew 5:28 (ESV)
As we read the Sermon on the Mount, which is a sort of manifesto for the Kingdom of Heaven, asking things like: “What are the conditions for entry? What are its values? What are its rules for relationships?”—and particularly as we read through this series of teachings on anger, lust, divorce, oaths, charity, prayer, and fasting—we have to keep coming back to the warning Jesus gave at the outset if we’re going to understand them fully: “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
That’s the motivating question behind these teachings: what does true righteousness look like? First we should ask: what does righteousness even mean? Doing the right thing? Being right? Getting it right?
Have you ever been to an elementary school play? Perhaps more than anything, school plays can show you how it’s possible to get everything spot on and yet still somehow be so off. Here are these beautiful children (God love them) who work so hard on their lines for so long (really, God love them), and when performance time comes they nail every word perfectly. And yet still you’re left with the feeling that you might have just been watching a wooden 2x4 up there (please, God love them). They say all the words correctly, but there’s no feeling in it.
We can think of righteousness in that way—the kind of righteousness that means memorizing and delivering all your lines accurately. But then there’s another sense of righteousness that goes deeper. (And it’s not totally divorced from the first!) Beyond getting your lines right, it’s when your heart somehow comes out through them and you bring the audience to tears.
Concerning righteousness (tzedakah) in Jesus’s Jewish world, keeping Torah was the actor’s-lines kind of righteousness. Memorizing, reciting, and delivering the script perfectly was the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. But the heart, the underlying essential component of tzedakah as God sees it, is not merely doing things by the book, but ensuring you are good and merciful and equitable toward others as you do. That is the righteousness Jesus seeks. That is “relating rightly.” It’s not easy. As we said before, it is entirely possible to do everything right and still ruin relationships. Sometimes even our insistence on doing everything by the book becomes the very thing that ruins them.
This is the heart behind Jesus’s teachings on lust and divorce. Yes, sexual morality is important, but Jesus is not solely interested in the concept of sexual purity in a vacuum. He’s concerned about how lust and divorce are connected to how we relate rightly with others.
Regarding lustfully looking at another person: it seems to us at first blush like an entirely private affair. In our culture, the golden standard of right and wrong is often something like, “So long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, do what you want.” So Jesus’s teaching about looking at others strikes many of us as prudishly puritanical. How is it hurting anyone else, Jesus?
And yet Jesus likens it and its relationship-destroying potential to actual adultery. What is it about a lustful gaze that does such damage to true righteousness, to true right relationships between people? Obviously my lustful desire can hurt the person I’m with in deep ways, but is there something more to consider, especially for those of us who aren’t currently with another person?
Consider the person you are looking lustfully at—who are they to you as you gaze at them? Likely you are not considering the things that make their life their life: the complaints about their boss at work, the exhaustion they feel when they put their kids to bed, the vacation they’re saving for next year. You imagine their shape, their strength, their radiance. You long for the pleasure they could give you. In other words, you consider them as the object their body is, not as the life their body constitutes. You objectify them. How can we possibly relate rightly to a person who is just an object to us?
It doesn’t stop with the one we’re gazing at. For those of us with partners, lust also makes an object of them, too—the one we’re not gazing at. To accept all they will give us of their lives even as we fence off our desire from them makes them less than an equal partner. Lust makes pleasure the chief end of all our dealings, and so we pick and choose what we will give and take from others in whatever way best moves us down that road.
And yet there’s no prohibition against a look in Torah, nor is there in our society. We try to convince ourselves that it doesn’t really matter, as long as we don’t touch, but we fail to see how lust becomes like cancer, metastasizing beyond our control, turning everyone into an object. Whether they give it as the paramour does or are sacrificed for it like the spouse is, it doesn’t matter. When we indulge lust long enough, there aren’t any true persons left in our mind to relate to.
The surpassing righteousness that Jesus seeks is the righteousness of genuine love, but if our internal world is like this, where lust has made an object of every person around us, we can only ever treat them rightly on the surface while inwardly destroying their dignity as a full person. The best righteousness we could hope for is memorizing all our lines, looking but never touching—but there will never be any heart in our dealings with people we see as objects. In the end, lust is as destructive to true righteousness—to truly right relationships—as an affair. Jesus invites us to a better way in the Kingdom of Heaven, where righteousness is a matter not just of how we treat people, but of how we truly regard them.
Silent Reflection
Response
What is the culture of your community surrounding lust and sexual behavior?
How does this clash with Jesus’s teaching on lust?
Can you see a flow between anger, resentment, lust, and divorce? What do you think Jesus is getting at overall in Matthew 5:21–32?