Transcript for Jesus' Vision for Sex and Desire

Jesus is a part of a tradition that has such a high, exalted view of sexual desire and sex as sacred and as a window into something transcendent.

Do I view the opposite sex as an indispensable essential other to the flourishing of my own life and of my whole community?

Hi John, hello. We are in a series of conversations in a section of Jesus' teachings, in the sermon on the Mount. We've been calling them the case studies that are found in Matthew chapter 5, and it's where Jesus is unpacking in six ways. his claim that the long story of God's covenant with Israel is coming to fulfillment. That God's heavenly kingdom that's touched down here on earth through him and these communities that he's beginning, that this is what he calls the fulfillment of the Torah and prophets. And he calls this followers to what he calls a greater righteousness, a vision of doing right by God and neighbor. that it's not just that it's intense, but it's a version that's more faithful and more in sync with the wisdom and the heart of God than anything on offer. It's greater than even that of the Bible nerds, the scribes and the Pharisees. And so then unpack what he means. He gives six case studies, and we are now entering into the second.

Yeah, the command don't murder. That's a really good thing to do, or not do in this case. But simply not killing someone is just the surface manifestation of a much deeper set of issues in the heart, which is what he goes after, the issues of contempt and anger and how I can devalue the dignity and worth of another human through how I regard them and even how I speak about them. Jesus sees underneath the command of not murder, deeper wisdom from God about what really matters in human relationships. So he's going to flip it again and quote another of the famous 10 commandments, this time number seven, which is do not commit adultery and he's going to make the same move. and talk about how it's a good thing not to sleep with another person's spouse, like, way to go, if you don't ever do that. But the real issues of desire and deep character that that command is really pointing at, that's where Jesus wants to take his teaching. So we've been using the language he goes underneath the command and gets to a deeper wisdom that speaks to issues of character and the heart. And that's what he's doing in these six case studies. So as we talk about the second case study and address Jesus' wisdom here, it's also important to note that this is the first teaching of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew about sexual desire, sexuality, which is such a but sensitive and important topic in the teaching of Jesus and just in the life of a follower of Jesus. So we wanted to expand our conversation circle for this to include a friend and a theologian Lucy Peppiet to help us have even greater perspective on these conversations. Lucy, thank you for joining us.

WTC meaning Westminster is theological center.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, to a vision or an ideal for human life that he typically links to the Garden of Eden story elsewhere in his teachings. And so it makes, I think the most sense to try and understand the logic of what he says and to link it back to the Garden of Eden. But maybe before we did that, we should just read the, the rather shocking. Yeah, let's read it. Teaching that he, yeah. But he has, you have heard that it was said, you will not commit adultery, quoting from the seventh. command. And I say to you that everyone who goes on looking at a woman in order to cultivate lust for her, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes your downfall, tear it out and throw it from you. For it is better for you to lose one of your body parts than for your whole body to be thrown into Gahana. If your right hand causes your downfall, cut it off and throw it from you. For it is better for you to lose one of your body parts than for your whole body to go off in Dukhanna. It's a good example of how Jesus is preference for shocking hyperbole and exaggerative intensity in his sayings. Arrests are imaginations. This saying has been ceasing the imagination of his followers for a couple thousand years now. Whatever the shocking image is mean, at least most simply means that Jesus takes sexual desire and the way sexual desires manifest themselves in our behavior. He thinks it's a really, really, really important thing that it's disciples need to do a lot of difficult heart searching in evaluation. For many people, a Christian sexual ethic is seen maybe as having a low view sexuality that it's somehow to be avoided, dirty, it's beneath proper human behavior in some way. And so Jesus would be seen that's kind of trying to tamp down the desire, like it's a monster, deal with it, cut its head off. So to speak. But the question is, is it because of a low view or a view of sex that's something to be avoided? Or is it possible that it's exactly opposite? It's the Jesus as a part of a tradition that has such a high Exalted view of sexual desire and sex as sacred and as a window into something transcendent that could also be a motivation for why you would say something so extreme as this and so maybe the question is how do you know where would we go to find out which of those is more accurate sometimes I think in our Western culture we don't understand exactly what Jesus was meaning by lust

Like, what are we talking about here? Well, so the translation I read is one that I've provided for all the stuff we're making for serving on the Mount for the Bible Project. But there's a couple details in Greek that aren't always brought out in our English translations. So often the phrase is translated everyone who looks at a woman with lust or looks at a woman lustfully. So the word look just the one word look It's fairly open to lots of different meanings, so I don't usually use Greek grammar terms in the podcast. We're having conversations, but it is a present active participle, which means that he's referring to a present ongoing action. You could say, oh, I looked, I looked and I saw, but really what you do is noticing. He's not talking about that. It's the sustained look. Goes on looking. I think it's a great translation. I may be in interpretive paraphrase translation would be to stare. Because when you focus your gaze on something and you go on looking at it, one of the English words we have for that is to stare at. And I think that's what he's referring to.

Yes, for many seconds. I think.

Yeah, the language he uses, which is not just to notice, but to go on looking. And then also the purpose of nature of the look, Jesus makes clear with the phrase in order to. So often it gets translated to look at a woman lustfully or with lust. But that's not actually what it says. And Greek, it's an infinitive. Go on looking. Go on looking in order to. So it's exactly what you're saying, Lucy, because if you lived as an adult in the modern world, I'm certain in any culture. Like we know what he's referring to. Like the prolonged stare for the purpose of cultivating a mental fantasy. That's a power play. Yes. What does it do to a human imagination? to cultivate this habit.

Yeah, and it can't stay under the surface for too long. It will come out in other ways, which creates an interesting parallel back with the anger case study that just came above. You know, because the shocking nature of that was if you murder someone, you'll be guilty before the court. But then you go on to say if you are angry with your brother, your guilty before the court. And you're like, what? Like, because that's really internal. So for Jesus, character formation of an individual, how do you say it's personal, but never private? The cultivation of our character is a deeply personal activity. But it never is private because it never just affects us. It will spill over to how we regard other people and in this case how men regard women. And for Jesus that it's really important for him to focus on that he would devote a whole case study and just zing them the male disciples.

Yeah, the two shocking things he says next are not on the face value level, the solution. Clearly, because the last words were in the heart, the problem is in the heart. So whatever it means to address an issue of the heart, what you do with an eye or a hand, it's not actually going to solve the problem. So what that means is these two things about the hand and the eye, are metaphorical ways, exaggerated hyperbolic ways, to move towards one part of a response or a solution. And the takeaway, I guess, on the simplest level, is to say, take drastic measures. to respond to this in your own, the issue of your own body and of your own heart. And I suppose that I, in the hand, you know, you mentioned the Genesis 3 echoes, which are surely there. There's also It seems to me a layer of meaning because your eye and your hand are two of the most indispensable parts of a functioning human life, you know, to be able to see where you're going and to be able to grab and do things with your hands. So to sacrifice an eye or to sacrifice a hand, he's naming things that seem indispensable to us. I can't actually live the way I want to without this. And I wonder if there's something there that even if dealing with this habit of how I view those that I might be sexually attracted to, and the narratives I play out with them in my heart, that might be so ingrained by the time you hear Jesus say these words, and it seems so part of your life gratifying those fantasies and cultivating them. that it's like, how what is human life without us? And there's something about what Jesus is saying, that whatever it is that you need to sacrifice to deal with this, it's more than worth it. It's worth more than your eye, it's worth more than your hand. That's something that struck me the longer that I've thought with the saying. Yeah.

I think so. And in the Hebrew Bible and biblical tradition, this is probably cross-cultural. I think it has to do with a physiological fact. Right, dominant. That the majority of humans not all, significant minority or not, but a majority throughout history are right, I and right hand.

That's right. Yeah. So to left handers, Jesus cares about you too. He's, again, it's a, he's, it's hyperbally. He always get left out. Yeah. But not with writing Hebrew, Hebrew was written. Oh, yeah. Right to left, which is ideal for left handers.

What's the greater good that's actually more appealing than the mental fantasy?

Yeah, yeah, that's good. Underneath this extreme response that Jesus says, which is to deal with it. But just dealing with it, just like saying, don't be anxious. Don't have anxiety. Don't cultivate lust. You have to have some greater vision that is even more fulfilling than the thing that I'm after by cultivating those mental fantasies. So what is that? That's what you're trying to put your finger on.

Elsewhere in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus has asked a question about divorce and remarriage from one of the laws in the Torah. And what he says is Matthew chapter 19, what he says is that Moses allowed that because of the hardness of Israel's heart. But God's purpose from the beginning was, and then he goes back to Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. So that pattern of looking for the ideal good that God has in store for human life. I think is what's operating underneath here. We don't have a story of somebody asking Jesus about last and he says, you know, God's purpose from the beginning. But let's do an imaginative exercise. Let's follow Jesus back to Genesis 1-2 and see what the vision of sexual desire. And I think what we will discover there is the greater good that's driving this extreme statement here in the Sermon on the Mount. So in the seven-day creation narrative is actually the first time that anything to do with human biological sex difference or gender difference is brought up. It's on page one of the biblical story. So this is just Genesis 1. This is day six as a whole. So the crowning act of God's creative actions and speech happen on day six after God has separated the dry land from the waters and he summoned the fruit and the trees to come up out of the ground that was on day three. Now he summons life to come up out of the ground on day six and it begins with God saying let the land bring out living creatures and the cattle's and beasts and so on and they're according to their kinds. In other words, there are differences. It doesn't highlight the biological sex of the animals, but it just says there are different kinds of animals. So you have this idea of diversifying types that the living things on the ground consist of others that are others to each other. And then when God says, let us make human in our image, according to our likeness, and let them rule. So human, this is interesting. Let us make human. It's the Hebrew word Adam, and it's a singular noun. But it presumes that that one human consists of more than one, because the verbs let them rule are plural. Let them rule. And then the puzzle level, how is the one human more than one let them rule is addressed in the little poem that's at the center of the center of day six. And the poem is three lines and it reads like this. And Elohim created human in his image. In the image of Elohim, he created the human. The human, yep, but it's a pronoun. Him or it, referring back to human singular pronoun. Third line, male and female, he created them, plural pronoun. So this wonderfully suggestive in terms of the shape of the parallelism of the poetic lines. In the image of Elohim, he created him that is the species Adam. male and female he created them by putting those in parallel the narrators inviting us to see that there's something of the essence of what it means for humans to be representatives of Elohim in the fact that they are one Adam and that that one Adam consists of two others in terms of biological sex male and female he created them And then the relevance of that different is then highlighted. And what follows, Elohim blessed them, which means when God gives the gift of His own self-generating being and life, He gives that as a gift to these creatures, saying, be fruitful and multiply and fill the land, subdue it and rule over the creatures. So the ideal vision is about a creature that is one and more than one. And when those two others, and the difference between those two others that's highlighted here as biological sex, because what God wants to give as a gift, is the ability for them to image God through the multiplication of life. So reproduction is the union for reproduction. What's highlighted here? That's at least one aspect of the blessing. So it's a mutual vision. Let them rule and let them represent God and let their unity and diversity become a life-giving process that creates even more than there was before. And all of this is a It's an image of God. You can spend a long time just pondering that. Little palm in the implications right there. But it's a beautiful vision of human, male and female mutuality.

And Lemic in Genesis 4 is the first narrative example of God's lament in Genesis 3. When he said one of the results, sad results, of the man and the woman, now having different visions of what is good in their own eyes, because they've taken from the tree of knowing good and bad, that the man will rule over the woman. He will rule over you, which is a deliberate echo back to here, which is ideal, which is let them rule together. So the idea of men acting in ways that treat women Like less than human, by animals. What humans are here to the animals is what God names as will be the sad reality of male and female relationships outside of Eden.

Do I view the opposite sex as an indispensable essential other? to the flourishing of my own life and of my whole community so that cultivating the fantasy and doing the powerplay in my heart. It's harming them and it's harming ultimately everyone's well-being and even my own if you scale it out, in terms of people or you scale it out over the course of a lifetime.

Especially the way Paul words that in 1 Corinthians 7, isn't just you both have, he singles out each. He says the man doesn't have authority over his own body, but rather the wife. So also the wife doesn't have authority over her own body, but rather husband. And that second one would feel very normal for century context. But the first one about a man not having authority over his own body. Like, wow, I would write that. I would just really ruffle some feathers. Yes. Very radical stuff.

It's interesting to think about how if we're thinking of what is underneath Jesus' teaching in the case study to these statements, these beautiful transcendent statements about marriage and its status as a sign, a symbol of this greater reality of God joining God becoming one with his human family in and through the Messiah. You know, maybe a middle term between those two then is something that Jesus said on a couple of occasions when people asked him to summarize the meaning of all of God's commands, which he famously just expressed as to love God and to love your neighbor as you love yourself or the golden rule, whatever you desire others do to you, do also to them. So it's love. It's regarding another human's dignity and being as of much or greater value than my own. And that if I act on that vision, it will create the kind of conditions for human flourishing. And in a way, it seems like what Paul's doing, he's both combining the Genesis ideal and Jesus' ideal, that a marriage is simple. of what a church community of men and women can become as a group embodying this. So in a way, the case study also for Jesus addressing male disciples is also aimed at his female disciples in that it will create if men actually took Jesus by his word and did what he said, it will create a kind of community that is safe for women, but they're not so safe for men to deal with their issues. And to talk to each other about what's going on in their hearts and so on.

This is a wonderful example of how just a short teaching of Jesus can offer so much to ponder, just reading it by itself. But how it's full meaning is really impact within the whole gospel, like according to Matthew. But then that itself, it's meaning is supplied by the whole of the biblical story. And every one of those kind of expansions makes this saying of Jesus even more powerful, and beautiful, shocking and mysterious all in one. Lucy, thank you for exploring this with us. It's really wonderful to hear your questions. There we go. May God have mercy on us as we attempt to respond faithfully to this teaching.

These words of Jesus about marriage and divorce and remarriage, they have had a huge influence on the course of millions of people's lives over the last 2000 years. The bigger context is this is in the serenade on the Mount where he's defining this greater, higher calling of doing right by other people. Jesus is putting his finger on something where people are not doing right by each other, and he wants to address that.