Chapter 6
Matthew 5:27–30
LISTEN to the Story
27“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29If your right eye causes you to stumble,1 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. 30And 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.
Listening to the text in the Story: Genesis 1–2; Exodus 20:14; Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 5:18; 22:22; Song of Songs; Jeremiah 3:8–9 (metaphorical); Hosea 1–3; Mark 12:18–27. Gospel parallels: Matthew 18:8–9; Mark 9:42–47.
On the mountain Jesus sits in the posture of Moses, quotes Moses, and then deepens Moses. There is a breathtaking audacity about Jesus in this setting: he is giving a new Torah for the new people of God, the community of Jesus. In our text he utters a new depth for understanding the will of God when it comes to sexual purity.
Within the Story of the Bible there are two primary reasons for sexual relations. From the opening page in the Bible (from Gen 1 until the final resurrection, as stated by Jesus in Mark 12:18–27), sexual relations are designed to produce offspring, and the relations to this end are good and blessed by God. This procreative purpose is complemented by the pleasures and delights of physical love, and surely Song of Songs 7:1–8:7 is one of its most glorious descriptions. The indirection of the poetry in Song of Songs, which stands in bold contrast to the vulgarity of contemporary erotic literature, ennobles sexual relations.
But the divinely intended goods of procreation and pleasure seem incapable of harnessing erotic desires in Israel’s Story, so there are tales of misdirection and folly, not the least of which tales is Solomon’s. In spite of his early yearning for wisdom (2 Chr 1) and his privilege to build the temple (chs. 3–7), Solomon falls into the traps of erotic desire without boundaries (1 Kgs 11:1–13).2 Solomon was not alone; that is why there needs to be a chapter like Proverbs 5 or 7. Unboundaried desire, male and female, seizes opportunities for scheming and rationalization:
The eye of the adulterer watches for dusk;
he thinks, “No eye will see me,”
and he keeps his face concealed. (Job 24:15)
This is the way of an adulterous woman:
She eats and wipes her mouth
and says, “I’ve done nothing wrong.” (Prov 30:20)
Adultery became the codeword for religious infidelity because of the depth of the pain in the experience of infidelity (Jer 3:8–9; 9:2; Hos 1–3). Set in contrast to the adulterer is the purity of the faithful, seen in the heartfelt relief in the last chapter of the Song of Songs and in the purity of Christ’s purifying love for the church (Eph 5:25b–27; Rev 21:8–27).
EXPLAIN the Story
Our passage quotes the Old Testament (Exod 20:14; Deut 5:18) and abruptly counters with an antithesis, “But I tell you … ,” which redefines adultery at a deeper level. As murder begins with anger, so adultery begins with lust. Following this redefinition, Jesus demands transformation by urging his followers metaphorically to remove the source of desire. Jesus does not side with the all-too-common patriarchal, chauvinistic approach to adultery in the ancient world, where adultery was excusable for the husband but not the wife. David Garland cites Aulus Gellius, a second-century AD writer, whose words quote Cato’s On the Dowry: “If you should take your wife in adultery, you may with impunity put her to death without a trial; but if you should commit adultery or indecency, she must not presume to lay a finger on you, nor does the law allow it.”3
Redefining Adultery
Adultery in Jesus’ world was sexual relations with someone other than one’s spouse and, in particular, with someone else’s spouse. Thus, one could claim fidelity to one’s spouse if one has had sexual relations only with one’s spouse.4 Also, Jesus opposes adultery and supports Moses’ laws about adultery (cf. 5:32; 15:19; 19:9).5
But Jesus evidently believes Moses’ law is not enough because he thinks sexual relations and purity begin in the heart—or in one’s desires. Here’s his counter: “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (5:28).6 Adultery is deepened or redefined to the level of desire, a desire fertilized by the gaze or, in the words of Chrysostom, “kindling the furnace within you.”7 Some blamed women for sexual temptations, so the authorities suppressed their freedom of dress and segregated them from men.8 As Allison observes, “Jesus supplements the law because, while he approves the old law, which condemns the external act as evil, he declares that no less evil is the intention that brings it forth.”9
But Jesus is not alone in tracing adultery to desire. The Jewish noncanonical text Testament of Issachar reads: “I have not had intercourse with any woman other than my wife, nor was I promiscuous by lustful look” (7:2). Even more, the “you shall not covet … your neighbor’s wife” (Exod 20:17) command already connects sexual sins to desire in speaking of coveting. So Jesus stands both on the Torah itself and alongside others in Judaism. It might be asked in passing what is wrong with the lustful look: “Because discipleship is self-denial and a complete bond with Jesus, at no point may the disciple’s desire-driven will take over.” Why? “Our bond to Jesus Christ permits no desire without love.”10
There are some details in our passage that deserve closer inspection. First, Jesus says “anyone who looks”; this expression translates pas ho blepōn,11 which is a way of describing the leering (in this case) male. But the Greek present tense does not suggest the person stares for a long time and that therefore the parting glance is justifiable. That is not the point: it doesn’t matter how long the person looks. What matters, second, is the directed intention of his or her staring: “lustfully.”12 Sexual relations begin in the eye.13 The look-to-desire is about intentionally fostering sexual temptation and arousal through the imagination. Jesus is against sexual fantasizing with an inappropriate person. He knows where it eventually leads, and his brother (Jas 1:15) expounded the process to its destined end: “Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”
The stunning element of Jesus’ new ethic is that this sort of lust is equivalent to adultery itself. Since Jesus’ intent is rhetorical—that is, he is urging his followers to turn away from lustful stares at the wife of another man—we need to avoid asking whether lust leads to capital punishment in Jesus’ kingdom world, for adultery was a capital offense. No, that’s taking his words too legalistically. Jesus ramps up his rhetoric in order to force his followers to see the gravity and potential long-term danger of sexually intended staring. This is a Messianic Ethic that reveals an Ethic from Beyond: kingdom realities, in this case sexual purity, begin now.
Whereas the expectation of women wearing head coverings and dressing modestly was male-shaped mores designed to prevent men from leering and being tempted or, which is more likely, to keep women’s beauty in line, Jesus sees it otherwise. He lays full responsibility in this text on the male and expects males to be able to control their desires.14 In other words, a text like the noncanonical Testament of Reuben (5:3) finds problems in the wrong place: women “contrive in their hearts against men, then by decking themselves out they lead men’s minds astray, by a look they implant their poison, and finally in the act itself they take them captive.” Jesus prevents a blame-her-looks or but-she-enticed-me approach. The problem in our text is male desire.
Sexuality has an aesthetic. Gazing and staring at one’s spouse is delightful in the Jewish world of Jesus, and nothing proves this more than the Song of Songs. How else could someone describe his wife or her husband in such graphic poetry if one were not in the habit of being ravished by his or her beauty? This text leaves open whether it is possible to be overcome by the beauty of another person without it turning into inappropriate desire, and the history of art agrees. What Jesus sabotages here is not desire but rightful desire spent wrongfully.
Demanding Transformation
How, then, does Jesus sabotage inappropriate desires? Eliminate what tempts the gaze that prompts lust. Jesus once again uses exaggeration, as he did with dropping one’s sacrifice at the altar and making peace while on the road to the judge (5:21–26). This time Jesus’ words are even more graphic: gouge out your right eye and chop off your right hand. Why so drastic a measure? “It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell [‘Gehenna,’ as in KNT]” (5:29; cf. v. 30).
One can understand why Jesus says your “right” hand, but the “right” eye surprises. Perhaps this is only for balance: as with the right hand, so with the right eye. But I suspect there’s more involved here. No one disputes that the right hand is the dominant hand for the majority, so that “right” expresses both power and value. Ancients connected the right eye to status. Notice 1 Samuel 11:2: “But Nahash the Ammonite replied, ‘I will make a treaty with you only on the condition that I gouge out the right eye of every one of you and so bring disgrace on all Israel.’ ” Note, too, Zechariah 11:17:
“Woe to the worthless shepherd,
who deserts the flock!
May the sword strike his arm and his right eye!
May his arm be completely withered,
his right eye totally blinded!”
A tentative suggestion, then, is that “right eye” means the dominating and empowering eye, which if removed would humiliate and disempower. It is possible that by “right hand” Jesus is referring more particularly to the hand used to masturbate. This text then, with masterful indirection, refers to chopping off the “right hand” because of what it accomplishes.
The word “stumble” brings to expression the nature of the sin: the gazing, fantasizing lust causes the person to fall into sin. There is, of course, a spectrum here: to stumble might mean to trip over a sin, even a peccadillo or a brief spell of sexual fantasy, or the term can refer to the more blatant forms of apostasy and moral corruption, as in sexual addictions and even abandonment of the faith because of sexual desires. Jesus’ words belong at the latter end of the spectrum, and one thinks of Matthew 11:6 (cf. 13:21, 57; 18:6; 24:10; 26:33; John 6:61; 16:1), where stumbling refers to rejecting Jesus as Messiah. We are led by this evidence to think that Jesus doesn’t have in mind a singular trip-up, where one lusts and thinks hell is the only option, but of someone whose life is wrecked by lust and sexual temptation—though this is not to excuse even a momentary indiscretion.
Once again, Jesus’ teachings here matter, and they matter eternally. Recall again his words: “It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.” As in the first antithesis (on murder as anger), so here: ignoring what Jesus says leads to the pit of destruction (see comments on 5:22). Again, this is rhetorical: Jesus goes to the ultimate potential in order to press on his followers the seriousness of the sin. The Ethic from Beyond makes living this possible, while an Ethic from Above creates gravity.
LIVE the Story
Jesus expected his followers to be marked by greater righteousness, that is, by holiness and love. This passage illustrates what Jesus means by “surpassing righteousness” in 5:20 and “perfection” in 5:48. In this passage he expects his followers will exhibit redemption powers in their sexuality. Kingdom realities have already invaded this world, and that means kingdom people begin to exhibit those kingdom realities. In the words of G. E. Ladd, there is still the “not yet,” but there is already a “now” of kingdom participation.15 We stand with Calvin when it comes to the moral compass: Jesus “means that however difficult, arduous, troublesome or painful God’s rule may be, we must make no excuse for that, as the righteousness of God should be worth more to us, than all the other things which are chiefly dear and precious.”16 It is true that many have softened the potency of Jesus’ words (cf. 5:19), but Jesus’ words are meant to be taken seriously for his followers, and we are reminded by 7:21–27 that his followers are expected to follow his teachings.
How to Live the Story of Sexual Redemption
It is wisest for those who find lust difficult to enlist an accountability partner with whom one can be honest and safe to confess. In some church traditions there is such a thing as a confessional booth, while in those without such an arrangement a spiritual advisor, a pastor, or a friend could become the one to whom a person goes for confession and pastoral care. James 5:16 teaches us to confess our sins to one another.17 Bonhoeffer taught in the context of his underground seminary the importance of confession,18 and explained that in confession one is approaching not just a fellow Christian but the grace of God mediated through the other Christian. As he put it, “When I go to another believer to confess, I am going to God.” He mentioned several breakthroughs that occur when we confess to one another: to community, to the cross, to new life, and to assurance. He urged the believers to pronounce the forgiveness as the word of God’s grace to the one who confesses. Bethge records in his biography of Bonhoeffer the surprise when Bonhoeffer himself asked a brother to hear his confession.19
Another example of confession can be found in the (almost funny) reports of Lauren Winner, in her Girl Meets God, where she details her confessions to a spiritual director who mentored her into a healthier sexual life.20 If this approach is ineffective, seek professional therapy, knowing that God’s Spirit and the kingdom have been unleashed for transformation.
Alongside the discipline of confession are the other spiritual disciplines that are means of transformative grace: Bible reading, listening, prayer, solitude, contemplation, and fasting. This is not to neglect the more ordinary forms of spiritual graces in church worship, singing, sermons, listening to tapes, and attending conferences. A steady diet of “inflow” of God’s grace can be transformative for “plucking out the eye” and “cutting off the hand” of inappropriate desire and lust.
This text does not endorse or encourage celibacy, and a topic like celibacy is complicated by both a Christianity committed rigorously to sexual purity as well as a history of convoluted theories of the body, sex, and chastity. Bonhoeffer, we should perhaps note, once asked if this text was to be taken literally or figuratively. We can’t answer that question, he replied; “it is precisely the fact that, for us, this basic question is not answered that binds us completely to Jesus’ command. Neither option offers us an escape. We are trapped and must obey.”21 He illustrates his typical Ethic from Above in this response.
When it comes to the messed-up view of sexuality in the church, fingers are often pointed at Augustine, but the problems arose a century or two before. Augustine’s thinking was buoyed by the struggle to comprehend why God made the body and how to control desire.22 Still, celibacy is not the issue in this text. In the history of interpretation “woman” sometimes became “every woman,” “adultery” becomes any kind of unchastity, and “desire” (“lustfully”) becomes any inappropriate desire—so that the text in the hand of someone like Tertullian was already beginning to sound like the prohibition of marriage itself.23
Luther, who knew the world (and realities) of celibacy, found the ticket to the proper interpretation of this text: “You have no call to pick up your feet and run away, but to stay put, to stand and battle against every kind of temptation like a knight, and with patience to see it through and to triumph.”24 One might be excused for thinking it would simply be easier not to marry (as the disciples noted in 19:10–12), or that it would be more manageable (and devoted) to abandon the society of women and protect oneself in a monastery, and no doubt many did that very thing. But that’s not what this text teaches. There is no way for humans to avoid sexual temptation. Jesus teaches control of desire, not suppression of sexuality.
This leads us to the obvious: We are personally responsible for protecting our eyes to be sexually redeemed.25 We will be tempted, but there is no reason to nurture a temptation or to dally around an image that incites sexual arousal. Years of pastoring and counseling, years of corresponding with his readers, and years of living a life of celibacy led John Stott to make this observation: “Our vivid imagination … is a precious gift from God…. Imagination enriches the quality of life. But all God’s gifts need to be used responsibly; they can readily be degraded or abused.”26
Sexual arousal can be explained as the neurochemical anticipation of sexual pleasures, and that explanation can help train us to become more pure.27 The brain is wired for both sexual pleasure as well as for sexual fidelity and rugged faithful commitment. As a result of various forms of contact, from skin-to-skin contact to sexual intercourse, the brain releases dopamine, which is the neurochemical that says, “Wow, this is pleasurable.” Dopamine creates brain pathways, tunnels of sexual pleasure if you will, that tell a person to do this again, and those neurochemical passages make it easier to do again; thus, any kind of sexual contact begins to create the desire for more sexual connection with that same person.
In addition to dopamine, the brain releases oxytocin and vasopressin, which tell a woman that the man is hers and the man that the woman is his. This kind of bonding is created every time a human has any kind of sexual experience. The feeling of “guilt” or “dirtiness” that arises in a human who experiences sex outside the bounds of biblical morals or fidelity is the brain’s way of saying, “I’m confused.” All of this is to say this: Jesus prohibits illicit sexual encounters, whether physical or fantasy, because God has wired us for sexual fidelity and lifelong rugged commitments of love to one person. Hearts are wired to brains, and brains are wired to commitment.
The focus of the text here is on male responses to females. It is worth reminding ourselves in this media-drenched age where images of women abound that Jesus apparently was pointing his finger at the appropriate gender: males objectify women into sexualized objects. And it is not that the Bible is against the beauty of a woman, and once again one can’t read the Song of Songs and not be overcome by the poetic beauty. The problem is not beauty but objectification of a woman and the female body so that it becomes an object of self-satisfying pleasure for the male. We also live in one of the most egalitarian societies in history where women too express their own sexual needs and wants, so it needs to be said that women also objectify males and the male body. Jesus’ words in this text prohibit objectification of any sort because he sees the female form and the male form to be fitted for one another only within the bounds of a married relationship.
We conclude with Simon Blackburn’s exceptional staccato of comparisons between love and lust:
Love receives the world’s applause. Lust is furtive, ashamed, and embarrassed.
Love pursues the good of the other, with self-control, concern, reason, and patience. Lust pursues its own gratification, headlong, impatient of any control, immune to reason.
Love thrives on candlelight and conversation. Lust is equally happy in a doorway or a taxi, and its conversation is made of animal grunts and cries.
Love is individual: there is only the unique Other, the one doted upon, the single star around whom the lover revolves. Lust takes what comes.
Lovers gaze into each others’ eyes. Lust looks sideways, inventing deceits and stratagems and seductions, sizing up opportunities.
Love grows with knowledge and time, courtship, truth, and trust. Lust is a trail of clothing in the hallway, the collision of two football packs.
Love lasts, lust cloys.28
1. KNT: “trips you up” (and in v. 30).
2. Famously omitted by the Chronicler (cf. 2 Chr 9:13–28).
3. See Gellius, Attic Nights 10.23.5. Text can be found online at: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Gellius/10*.html. I found this reference in Garland, Reading Matthew, 66.
4. This text is not, then, referring to the tenth commandment’s prohibition of coveting a neighbor’s wife (Exod 20:17), even though the same word for desire (here “lustfully”) is used.
5. The Mosaic Torah stipulated death for adultery (Deut 22:22), but the only surviving evidence about Jesus on that element of the law comes from the disputed text in John 7:53–8:11. If authentic, that law shows that Jesus suspended the death penalty. It is the absence of the punishment in Jesus’ words in Matthew 5 (and 19:18) that indicates that kingdom ethics trade in forgiveness and the transforming power of grace and mercy instead of capital punishment.
6. There is a slight grammatical debate here: does the accusative (autēn) mean that the woman is lusted after or the one who lusts? The former is almost certain because it is the man who commits adultery in his heart in the last clause of v. 28; see Quarles, Sermon on the Mount, 117–18.
7. In ACCS: Matthew, 108.
8. A good example is Tertullian, who wrote an essay on how women should dress: On the Apparel of Women. See Garland, Reading Matthew, 66–67.
9. Allison, Sermon on the Mount, 72.
10. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 125.
11. A present active participle. Some today see “present tense” and think “ongoing action,” but the Greek present participle is designed to speak not of time but of how the author wants to depict the action. This is an action that is depicted as vivid, dramatic, and characteristic: “the one who stares” is more accurate than “the one who keeps on staring.”
12. For a sketch of how “lust/desire” was understood in the ancient world, see Keener, Matthew, 186.
13. See also Job 31:1; 2 Pet 2:14; 1 John 2:16. Eve’s sin in Gen 3:6 is not sexual, though it too began with the eyes.
14. See C. S. Keener, Paul, Women and Wives: Marriage and Women’s Ministry in the Letters of Paul (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1992), 27–31.
15. This “now-but-not-yet kingdom” is the theme of Ladd’s The Presence of the Future. Ladd has been influential with his theory that the kingdom is “present without consummation.”
16. J. Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke (trans. D. W. Torrance; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), 1:118–19.
17. R. J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline (rev. ed.; San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 143–57.
18. D. Bonhoeffer, Life Together (trans. J. W. Doberstein; New York: Harper, 1954), 108–18; quotation from 109.
19. Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 465. The person to whom Bonhoeffer confessed was Bethge. See John W. De Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit: Bonhoeffer’s Friend Eberhard Bethge (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 27, 43, 62–63, 208. My thanks to Katya Covrett for bringing this to my attention.
20. Winner, Girl Meets God, 206–15.
21. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 126.
22. A wide-ranging sketch, and not always favorable to the Christian ethic, can be found in Simon Blackburn, Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). The Roman Catholic view can be seen in John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006); a recent evangelical approach is Lauren Winner, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005).
23. On the history of interpretation, see Luz, Matthew 1–7, 243–44.
24. Luther, Sermon on the Mount, 86.
25. See D. Fitch, The End of Evangelicalism: Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), 88–97.
26. Stott, Message, 88.
27. I borrow here from my book One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 128–30.
28. Blackburn, Lust, 2. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=N0y60xZcSsgC&print sec=frontcover&source=gbs_ViewAPI#v=onepage&q&f=false.