Missing the Obvious

The tendency to read familiar Bible passages the way we have always read them is almost overwhelming, and sometimes we miss the obvious. Our assumptions about the meaning of any word or phrase invariably default to the way we first heard them or had them explained to us. Viewing them more accurately is the task of a lifetime of attentive reading and study.

The dissenting views of other Christians and the proliferation of translations helps. Hearing a text the way someone else hears it forces us to ask which interpretation — if any — is the correct one.

Sustain Me With Raisins

I have always felt a tension between the ripe imagery of the Song of Solomon and the admonitions about lust in the Sermon on the Mount that I was unable to resolve to my own satisfaction. There’s not much Victorian about the Song. On the surface level at least, it’s a celebration of simmering, delayed sexual consummation and fantasy. Sexual desire is presented there as a treasured part of our God-given design, not as a wicked impulse to be repressed or denigrated. Its inclusion in scripture puts paid to the notion that all desire is intrinsically evil, as was erroneously believed at various times and places throughout church history.

However, in our culture as in many others, marriage comes about through mutual attraction, and a non-trivial component of that attraction is physical. So if it’s really a sin to desire a woman to whom one is yet unmarried — and a sin so perilous that one would be better to gouge out one’s eyes than indulge it — how does a young Christian man deal with the very natural urge that afflicts him in the presence of attractive women to at very least consider the possibilities? Getting married is not usually a split-second impulsive decision, but an extended process. Prudence tells us a young man needs to observe a prospective bride quite carefully over a reasonable period to determine whether she might make a Proverbs 31 wife. Observation naturally leads to attraction, and attraction to desire. In fact, this is the object of the exercise.

Frankly, if the Sermon’s teaching about lust is understood as I’ve often heard it interpreted, it’s hard to imagine how a young Christian man might be able to court or even meet young women without being perpetually in danger of serious sin, mental if not physical.

A Closer Examination

Let’s just say I may have been making this particular scripture say just a little bit more than the Lord did. Let’s look at it more closely, shall we?

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

There are two components here to which I had not given sufficient attention, causing my default assumptions to interpret the passage for me the same way every time I came to it:

1/ The Context is Adultery, Not Fornication

The sin in question is adultery of the heart. Adultery is not a broad category of sin. The Greek bears this out. The word the Lord uses is not the general Greek word for inchastity frequently translated “fornication” [πορνεία], but rather a term specific to a violation of the marriage contract [μοιχάω]. The word “woman” is γυνή, which only a few verses later is translated “wife” rather than “woman” as it is here. In fact, the word can bear both meanings, and the Lord probably used it because it covers all adulterous possibilities: a married man lusting for a single woman, a single man lusting for a married woman, or a married man lusting after a married woman. Most Jews in the first century would have heard it as “a wife”. In short, we need to read the words “a woman” here as “an off-limits woman”.

A single man lusting after a single woman may still pose a moral problem in the wrong context, but it’s not the moral problem the Lord was talking about here, and his fantasies at least do not involve invading an existing relationship, inviting a third party into his own covertly, or prying apart two people God has joined together. It’s not adultery that he is committing with her in his heart.

2/ With Lustful Intent

The three Greek words that my ESV translates “with lustful intent” are rendered many different ways in other versions of the New Testament. Some of the more florid ones are “cherishes lustful thoughts”, “wants to possess her”, “gazes to lust” and “stares with lust”. The common thread is that the vast majority of Greek experts seem to recognize the act in question is a calculated indulgence. It is an intentional, persistent fixation on another man’s life partner or on a woman not one’s own wife, not a mere glance or an idle passing thought quickly thrust aside as inappropriate. It’s not “Boy, she’s really cute” but something more like “How could I make this happen?” or, at very least, “What would it be like if I did?” These are fantasies you can’t engage in by accident.

Steering clear of that sort of lust with intent is a little easier to accomplish than steadfastly averting one’s eyeballs from every female who passes by, I’ve got to tell you. I know all kinds of attractive women who are biblically off limits for one reason or another, and keeping that status front and center in one’s thoughts helps head off patterns of inappropriate thinking. Christian love for the husband certainly doesn’t hurt either.

Difficult, But Achievable

It is well established that males are visual by nature. Young or old, none of this semantic clarification makes managing a Christian man’s thought life a piece of cake. Neither is the lust of the eye an exclusively male problem. Failures of the heart with respect to chastity are bound to happen from time to time, but the Lord’s primary concern, at least in the Sermon on the Mount, is that those failures not be of the sort that, when taken to their conclusion, end in broken marriages, ruined homes and destroyed testimonies.