Lust Versus Pure in Heart

 Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Matthew 5:27-30:

After receiving the law from God on Mount Sinai, Moses came down from the mountain and said to the people, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I talked God down and there are now only 10 commandments. The bad news is that adultery is still one of them.” I’ve heard that joke from several clergy over the years, but the one that most surprised me was when conservative theologian and Anglican Bishop NT Wright told it. But I thought it perhaps maybe appropriate for today’s message when we talk about the sin of lust, which is one of the seven deadly sins, and compare it against Jesus telling us that those who are pure in heart are blessed.

Now if you were to just listen to what seems to be emphasized in church, or talked to secular society about what the church emphasizes as the primary sin, it would probably revolve around sexual morality. And yet, Jesus has very little to say about it, especially when compared to other things, like money. Indeed, Jesu eats with prostitutes and says that they will enter the Kingdom of God before the more religious folks. Now it’s not because there aren’t sinful attributes, but because of their desire for salvation not being self-righteous. They know that they have fallen short of the glory of God, and know they need God’s grace in their lives, and so are seeking it out, and Jesus too is seeking them out as lost sheep. But, what we also have to know about sexual morality in the church is that our understanding of, and conversation about, sexuality is extremely narrow. We rarely, if ever, talk about celibacy, for example, even though that was the preferred arrangement in the early church, or at least according to Paul. But it’s completely ignored today.

The other thing to keep in mind is that much of the church’s position about sexuality is not really scriptural, but instead comes to us from St. Augustine, who, to put it politely, had trouble controlling his own urges, his own lust, and so therefore felt that everyone needed to be controlled. Indeed, he even once prayed to God, “Grant me chastity and continence, just not yet.” And the final piece to keep in mind is that nearly all of the moralists over time have been men, and so their views about sex and sexuality have been limited, but have been applied to both men and women, and they harbor many of their fears about women, and we can even see that in the rules surrounding adultery that Jesus addresses in today’s gospel passage. But before we dig a little deeper into that, we need to step back a little bit to look at lust itself.

Now although we normally think about lust being related to sex, it can encapsulate many things. We can lust after money or power or achievement or greatness or fame or possessions, and there is an overlap between lust, greed and gluttony, and of course we can lust after people. But what is it about lust that is deadly? Well to answer that question we have to understand what it is exactly that we are talking about or what we are desiring. There is actually no word in Greek for lust, so even in that passage we heard today it doesn’t exactly say lust. Instead the Greek word has a meaning of craving of the heart, and we find it not just in this passage, but in Luke’s account of Jesus final night, Jesus says “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” (Lk 22:15) The translation for eagerly desired, is that same Greek word, so it’s as if Jesus is saying I have lusted for this moment. And so just saying lust doesn’t always have a negative connotation, after all we can also have a lust for life, but it’s a matter of what we are lusting after and why? And in that, like with the other deadly sins it’s a matter of the heart. What is our heart desiring?

Lust, like the other deadly sins, is also the extreme of a natural desire or tendency, the distortion of something healthy and normal. Indeed, we need some level of sexual attraction to others in order for the species to be able to carry on, and to say that there is an abnormal or distorted sexuality thus implies that there is a normal and healthy sexuality for us. Those in the church who would condemn sexual pleasure or sexual desires as evil or distorted in and of itself, are wrong, and don’t really understand scripture. As philosopher Rebecca DeYoung says, “God designed human beings with sexual bodies capable of attraction and arousal. Our sexuality counts as a good gift from God.” and we have to remember that the Bible even has an entire book, the Song of Songs, which is dedicated “to celebrating sexual intimacy between a man and a woman in its various erotic expressions.” Which, as an aside, leads to one of my favorite quotes of all time, and that is Bishop Will Willimon who commenting on a common refrain that Song of Songs is about Christ’s love for the church, said that it has as much to do with Christ’s love for the church as the restaurant Hooters does for the appreciation of owls.

So, regardless of what we might hear from some in the church, sex is a gift given to us by God and should be enjoyed as part of a healthy, wholesome, monogamous relationship, as long as it is seen as a shared mutuality and a sharing of each other and that intimacy. Because what scripture says is that in sex we become one body, and so that sharing must be as equals and mutually self –giving. And that’s where lust perverts, because lust is all about the person who does the lusting, and it involves taking and getting from another person, and it also tends to be all about pleasure, but only one person’s pleasure, again the person who is lusting. The other person is not seen as an equal, or even necessarily as another person. Instead they are simply a thing to possess or to use to satisfy our own desires, and that is inherently destructive to everyone, including society

And so what Jesus does here is to take a law, you shall not commit adultery, and he greatly expands it beyond just the physical act. But, what we also have to know is that adultery at this time is not what we consider adultery today. At the time, men, married men, could have sexual relations with any other woman who was not his wife, and it would not be considered adultery, unless she was married or engaged to someone else. And so the law of adultery is there for two reasons: The first is to make sure that men could be assured that any children their spouse had were theirs, and second would be to protect men’s property, and I do mean that literally. Women were the property of their husbands, or other men in their lives. Think again of the Ten Commandments. First we are told not to covet our neighbor’s houses, then don’t covet our neighbor’s wives, and notice it doesn’t say husband, and then don’t covet any other of our neighbor’s stuff. Women are included as part of the property there. But Jesus totally changes it with his reinterpretation.

Because now Jesus says that it’s not just the act of adultery, now it’s merely the thought of lusting after a woman, and for modernity’s sake we can expand that out and say that lusting after anyone, male or female, that is a violation. And while we could say that Jesus is still then saying that in lusting after any woman, or coveting them, that it is a violation of someone else’s property, I don’t think that’s what’s happening at all. Instead, I believe that Jesus is broadening this law out so that women shouldn’t be seen as just property; that women in this case, and again for modernity, also men, that they are not means to use for our own purposes. Merely pieces of property to be taken and used and then thrown away once our purpose and pleasure have been fulfilled.  

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that we are to always see others as ends in themselves. Because when we see everyone else as an end, then we cannot treat them as objects to be used for our own purposes. And when we do that, it will fundamentally change all of our relationships. Another way to look at this is by using what has become known as Kant’s categorical imperative, which says that we should live our lives as if every act were a universal law. That is if we do this what would happen if everyone else did it to? Would it be for the good, or would it be bad, or perhaps even evil? If it’s a good if we do it, but bad when everyone else does, then we shouldn’t do it. Or, back to scripture, we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, or to do unto others as we want done to us, and so we should treat the bodies of others as we would want our own bodies to be treated. And, I believe, if we began to think that way, especially men, rape culture would disappear, and that is the other radical thing that this statement does.

When it comes to lust, and the actions that come from them, Jesus changes the onus away from women and towards the men. In the ancient world, just as today, women are the ones who often get the blame and the shame that goes along with lust leading to sexual or physical violence. It’s the old, “well did you see what she was wearing? She was asking for it.” That’s why it should not be shocking that when the Pharisees bring a woman who is caught in adultery to Jesus that that the man is also not brought, because women were seen to have greater culpability for causing the act. But to quote New Testament scholar Amy Jill Levine, who is also an orthodox Jew, “By collapsing the distinction between thought and action, this extension of the law of adultery to include lust suggests that no one should be regarded as a sex object. The burden here is placed on the man: Women are not seen as responsible for enticing men into sexual misadventures.”  The act is blamed on the original thought, which was to look at another person with lust, to look at them as an object and therefore not only to break relationship, but to also reveal what is in their heart. It has already demeaned someone else making them less than a child of God, but instead an object to be used, and potentially abused, for our pleasure.

That’s why the thoughts are important, because it is just the first step in a thousand little yeses that lead to violation, or to sexual acts. And, more importantly, the thoughts are the first step in truly revealing our inner desires, of what is in our hearts. Jesus is saying you can’t say “It was just words, it was just locker room talk, I didn’t do anything so therefore it’s all okay, or I’m not as bad as people who actually did a physical act.” Jesus says that’s not the way it works, because the thought, the words lead to the actions and reveal the character of the person.  Later in Matthew Jesus will tell the disciples that they eat, does not defile them, but that it is what comes out of them that defiles. Because “what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart... For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person.” What we think is important, because what we think leads to what we do, and reveals our heart

Now, when Jesus talks about the heart, he is not talking about the red organ in our chest that looks nothing like what we draw for Valentine’s Day.  The hearts being referred to here is our self, or in the best sense our truest self. It is who we are. And notice that Jesus does not say “blessed are the pure of mind,” which maybe how we would say it today, and certainly what we think it means, after all we say things like “he has a dirty mind,” or “get your mind out of the gutter,” because we see the mind, the brain, as controlling who we are. But there is something much more that is being talked about here when we think about the heart and who we are. 

In his book on the Beatitudes, Rev. James Howell, a United Methodist Pastor from North Carolina, talks about his niece who has Downs Syndrome. He says that in a family full of people with Ph.D.’s that her mind is not as brilliant as theirs, but that when it comes to her heart she has them all beat because her heart is brilliant. Her heart, the way she approaches the world and the way she approaches people, is brilliant because it is pure, he says. She does not seem encumbered by all the things that we have that get in our way. She approaches the world as a child does, with a child’s innocence. Perhaps it is because of that purity that Jesus tells us that unless we change and become like children then we will never enter the Kingdom of God.

To help give you a better sense of what this purity looks like, the Greek word is katharoi and it means clean or unpolluted. It is from this word that we get the word cathartic. If we have a cathartic experience, it means that we have been purged of something, it’s been removed from us, it leaves us clean or different, the same way if you take a cathartic drug, it purges your system, you are left clean. The other way that purity can be approached is thinking of it as being focused or single-mindedness. Think of a racehorse, or a working animal, that has blinders put on so they can’t lose focus or direction as all they can see is what is in front of them. One focus, one purpose, one goal. Lust is something that distracts us from true relationships and what’s important. The theologian Soren Kierkegaard wrote a text entitled Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing.  Or as we heard from James, “purify your hearts, you double-minded.” Purity of heart is to will one thing, and that is relationship with God.

But it’s more than just a relationship with God, because we are told that the pure in heart are not only blessed, but that they will see God. They will see God because that is all they are focused on, they are not distracted by the many things, and they more they focus on God the more they come to love God with all their heart, with all that they are. But they more they come to love God this way, what else happens? The more they also come to love their neighbor because as they seek to bring wholeness and healing and reconciliation into their own lives, they will also seek to bring that into their relationship with others, and lust does not bring healing or wholeness.

Do we see others as beloved in and of themselves, or do we see them as just another object for our consumption, for our use? Jesus wants to deal with the causes of our actions, not the symptoms. In lusting after another person we are creating a relationship in our head, again a very self-serving relationship, but relationships don’t exist in our heads, they only truly exist in reality with real people. And if we have self-serving relationships in our heads, then we are more likely to have self-serving relationships in reality. Thus lusting not only distracts us from the one true thing, but leads to our destruction and the breaking of relationships.

When we look at others with lust, we are creating fantasies in our minds, in our hearts, and we are not dealing with reality nor are we seeing the other as a person with their own feelings, ideas, agency or their own opinions about a relationship with us. We seem them simply as an object to be used by us. But, Jesus says that we are to see everyone else as a beloved child of God, and to treat them as we ourselves would want to be treated and to love them as we love ourselves. Our thoughts matter and our words matter, because those things reveal what’s in our heart, they reveal who we are and they will eventually lead to actions which can break relationship with others and with God. Blessed are the pure in heart, Jesus says, because they know what the one true thing is, to love God and to love their neighbor, and they live that out, and so they will see God. I know that it is so my brothers and sisters. Amen.