THE ONE WE CAN'T AVOID

 

Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in Noel Coward's "Brief Encounter" (1945)

`Ye heard that it was said: You shall not commit adultery;

²⁸ but I -- I say to you, that every one who is looking on a woman to long for her, did already commit adultery with her in his heart.

²⁹ `But, if your right eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it away, for it is good for you that one of your members may perish, and not your whole body be thrown into the trash-dump fire.

³⁰ `And, if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off, and throw it away, for it is good for you that one of your members may perish, and not your whole body be thrown into the trash-dump fire.

³¹ `And it was said, That whoever may put away his wife, let him give to her a writing of divorce;

³² but I -- I say to you, that whoever may put away his wife, save for the matter of prostitution, makes her commit adultery; and whoever may marry her who has been put away commits adultery. (Matthew 5)

Yes, well. From Yeshua on Anger, we go to Yeshua on Marriage. No, not (as you might have thought) on sex; on marriage. The first thing one has to know is that in Yeshua’s world adultery could only be committed by and with a married woman: sex between a married man and an unmarried woman was not technically adultery.

Two points, then, are being made in this passage. First a point about inwardness: the old Torah’s prohibition on adultery is completed by Yeshua in the key of inwardness: just as he goes from murder, an act, to anger, a state of mind, so here he goes from adultery, an act, to desire, a state of mind. Since he uses the word “adultery” we may assume that the desire he mentions is for a woman married to another. And he hammers his argument home with two outrageous bits of hyperbole: if you have looked on your neighbour’s wife with desire, dig your eye out and throw it away; if you have touched her, as we say nowadays, “inappropriately”, cut off your hand and throw it away.

I have read many supposed explanations of this passage, but there is no getting around it: Yeshua is perfectly clear. Desire, lust, what you will, in any case for a married woman, is as bad as Anger. Many of us today do have a real problem with that. Why? we say. Desire is not evil: we may see the wife or husband of someone we know or have met and have a coup de foudre; eyes may meet across a crowded room; whoever loved, that loved not at first sight? And Cupid (whose name means Desire) is known to be lawless, so what are you going to do?

Blind yourself, says Yeshua, implacably. Better do that than have your whole body (and remember that Christianity does not believe in the immortality of the soul, but of the whole person, body and soul!) thrown on the Great Trash-Dump Fire.

We still rebel. Why is Desire so bad? Now I have to imagine what Yeshua would reply, because He didn’t specify. So I imagine him saying, Well, look at Anger. You must have been surprised when I said that Anger was as bad as Murder. But the reason it is is because it opens Pandora’s Box. And Desire, my children, does the same. Just as Anger can lead to Cain killing Abel, so Desire can lead to incest and to rape. If Desire is of the kind, and the strength, that it can consider trashing the bonds of marriage, there is no telling how far it can take you; because you are no longer in charge. As anger can turn into rage, Desire can turn into Lust. And at that point, we are very far down the rabbit hole. As Shakespeare knew:

 

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame 

Is lust in action; and till action, lust 

Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame, 

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, 

Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight, 

Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had 

Past reason hated as a swallowed bait 

On purpose laid to make the taker mad; 

Mad in pursuit and in possession so, 

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; 

A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe; 

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. 

    All this the world well knows; yet none knows well 

    To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

And since all this is about adultery, and thus about marriage, He gives (as he did with Anger) a specific image. Because someone might have said: OK, get her to be given a divorce. (A woman could not apply for a divorce, but could in some cases demand that her husband divorce her.) At this point we get into the very complex Jewish laws on marriage and divorce, notably the ketubah or marriage-contract and the list of reasons why a man could divorce a woman (the school of Rabbi Hillel held that he could do so if she broke his dishes); but, true to the values of the 1^st-century Middle East, the keys were virginity and sex. 

            But be that as it may, Yeshua relativises it all by going (in His manner) to inwardness again, and saying: if you divorce your wife for any reason other than her sexual act(s) with someone else, you are making her an adulteress. Because if, after such a divorce, she sleeps with or marries another, she is committing adultery. What he is saying is that, in the new completed Torah, divorce can only be valid at all in case of sexual infidelity on the part of the wife. IN NO OTHER CASE. Period. 

            And no, we can’t get around it. We can embroider as much as we like, and historicise till the cows come home, but that’s what He said, and that’s what He meant.

 

So, where does this leave us? Up to and including the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century, churches tried to maintain this ruling while finding certain ways out, like annulment. And on the other hand, as attitudes on sexuality became stricter, they applied the prohibition to all sex outside marriage. Then, after two World Wars that relativised so much and the Fifties that managed temporarily to put some toothpaste back into the tube, came The Sixties or, as the French say, Soixante-huit. 

            Make Love, Not War. Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. Some of us were there; some us are the children of those who were there; and most of us have absorbed a whole new culture of sexuality and marriage. And a permanent trouble in our relation to those words young Matthew the excise-man noted down in shorthand. Let’s be honest. Most of us can no longer follow straight-up what Yeshua says. But let’s be honest about ourselves also, and not repress a few questions – even if we don’t have easy answers. It is worth watching Brief Encounter. How many of us are comfortable about our divorces, even if things turned out well afterwards? How many of us are comfortable about the proportion of what we must now call “single-parent families” in our societies? The general feeling is that that train has left the station. But in the register of a Torah completed in inwardness, we cannot deny that the Pandora’s Box argument exists, and that in that respect at least the parallel with Anger is not fanciful. 

            The final word should, as always, be humility and prayer. Let us not proudly affirm our prejudices; let us pray for discernment and courage; and let us remember that God is, and creates, and maintains, Love. Make Love, not Lust.