2. Avoiding lust (27–30)
A Christian’s righteousness: avoiding anger and lust
(Matthew 5:21–30)
The first two illustrations which Jesus gave of his theme (namely that he was deepening, not destroying the demands of the law) relate to the sixth and seventh of the ten commandments, the prohibitions against murder and adultery.
1. Avoiding anger (21–26)
The commandment You shall not kill would be better expressed ‘Do not commit murder’ (NEB), for it is not a prohibition against taking all human life in any and every circumstance, but in particular against homicide or murder. This is clear from the fact that the same Mosaic law, which forbids killing in the decalogue, elsewhere enjoins it both in the form of capital punishment and in the wars designed to exterminate the corrupt pagan tribes which inhabited the promised land. Both war and the death penalty are vexed questions which have always perplexed sensitive Christian consciences. And there have always been Christians on both sides of both fences. What needs always to be asserted by Christians in these debates is that, if the concept of the ‘just war’ is tenable and if the retention of the death penalty is justifiable, the reason is not because human life is ever cheap and readily disposable but the very opposite, namely that it is precious as the life of creatures made in God’s image. Those who campaign for the abolition of the death penalty on the ground that human life (the murderer’s) should not be taken tend to forget the value of the life of the murderer’s victim: ‘Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image.’ And those who campaign for unconditional pacifism tend to forget that, though the indiscriminate maiming and killing of civilians is utterly indefensible, God has given to society (whether the state or—by extension—some international body) the right and the responsibility to punish evildoers. I mention these things now, not because the complex issues involved in war and the death penalty can be treated here, but to argue that they cannot be solved by a simplistic appeal to the commandment You shall not kill.
The scribes and Pharisees were evidently seeking to restrict the application of the sixth commandment to the deed of murder alone, to the act of spilling human blood in homicide. If they refrained from this, they considered that they had kept the commandment. And this apparently is what the rabbis taught the people. But Jesus disagreed with them. The true application of the prohibition was much wider, he maintained. It included thoughts and words as well as deeds, anger and insult as well as murder.
Anger is mentioned at the beginning of verse 22: every one who is angry with his brother. The additional words without a cause (AV) occur in most Greek MSS but not in the best. They are probably a later gloss and are therefore omitted in modern revisions and translations. Nevertheless, there is every reason to believe that the gloss correctly interprets what Jesus must have meant. Not all anger is evil, as is evident from the wrath of God, which is always holy and pure. And even fallen human beings may sometimes feel righteous anger, although, being fallen, we should ensure that even this is slow to rise and quick to die down. Luther certainly knew in his own experience the meaning of righteous anger. He called it ‘an anger of love, one that wishes no one any evil, one that is friendly to the person but hostile to the sin’. The reference of Jesus, then, is to unrighteous anger, the anger of pride, vanity, hatred, malice and revenge.
Insults are mentioned at the end of verse 22. Jesus warns us against calling our brother either Raca (probably equivalent to an Aramaic word meaning ‘empty’) or mōre (the Greek word for a ‘fool’). It appears that ‘Raca’ is an insult to a person’s intelligence, calling him ‘empty-headed’, and commentators vie with one another in proposing English parallels like ‘nitwit’, ‘blockhead’, ‘numskull’ or ‘bonehead’! A moron also is a fool, but it can hardly be used here in its ordinary sense, for Jesus himself called the Pharisees and his disciples ‘fools’ and the apostles on occasions blamed their readers for their folly. So we need to remember that the word had acquired both religious and moral overtones, being applied in the Old Testament to those who denied God’s existence and as a result plunged into reckless evil doing. Alternatively, as some scholars suggest, mōre may transliterate a Hebrew word which means a ‘rebel’, an ‘apostate’ or an ‘outcast’. In this case, Tasker proposes the sentiment: ‘The man who tells his brother that he is doomed to hell is in danger of hell himself’.
Some uncertainty remains about the precise meaning of these two terms of abuse. They were clearly derisive, insulting epithets, and NEB is content to replace them with a more general ‘If he abuses his brother … if he sneers at him.’ At the same time, A. B. Bruce probably preserves the major difference between the words when he writes: ‘Raca expresses contempt for a man’s head = you stupid!; mōre expresses contempt for his heart and character = you scoundrel!’
Now these things—angry thoughts and insulting words—may never lead to the ultimate act of murder. Yet they are tantamount to murder in God’s sight. As John was later to write: ‘Any one who hates his brother is a murderer.’ Anger and insult are ugly symptoms of a desire to get rid of somebody who stands in our way. Our thoughts, looks and words all indicate that, as we sometimes dare to say, we ‘wish he were dead’. Such an evil wish is a breach of the sixth commandment. And it renders the guilty person liable to the very penalties to which the murderer exposes himself, not in each case literally in a human law court (for no court can charge a man with anger) but before the bar of God.
The exact meaning of the different judgments has been much discussed, but at least it is clear that Jesus was issuing a solemn warning of divine judgment. The rabbis may have been teaching not just that the only breach of the sixth commandment was murder, but also that the only penalty for murder was a human sentence: Whoever kills shall be liable to judgment (21). So Jesus added that any one who is angry without cause will equally be liable to judgment. Although the same Greek words are used for ‘the judgment’ in verse 22 as in verse 21, now the reference must be to the judgment of God, since no human court is competent to try a case of inward anger. Similarly, Jesus continued, insult will expose us not only to the council but even to the hell of fire (23). In both cases Jesus was extending the nature of the penalty as well as of the crime. Not only are anger and insult equivalent to murder, he said, but the punishment to which they render us liable is nothing less than the divine judgment of hell.
‘So if …’, Jesus continued (23), and proceeded to give a practical application of the principles he had just enunciated. His theme was that if anger and insult are so serious and so dangerous, then we must avoid them like the plague and take action as speedily as possible. He offered two illustrations, the first taken from going to the temple to offer sacrifice to God (23, 24), and the second from going to court to answer the charges of an accuser (25, 26). Jesus expressed them in the cultural terms of his own day, in which the temple still stood and its sacrifices were still being offered. Perhaps it would be legitimate to translate his illustrations into slightly more modern dress.
‘If you are in church, in the middle of a service of worship, and you suddenly remember that your brother has a grievance against you, leave church at once and put it right. Do not wait till the service has ended. Seek out your brother and ask his forgiveness. First go, then come. First go and be reconciled to your brother, then come and offer your worship to God.’
Again, ‘If you have an unpaid debt, and your creditor takes you to court to get his money back, come to terms with him quickly. Make a settlement out of court. Even while you are on your way to court, pay your debt. Otherwise, once you reach the court, it will be too late. Your accuser will sue you before the judge and the judge will hand you over to the police, and you will find yourself in gaol. You will never get out till you’ve paid the last penny. So payment before prison would be much more sensible.’
The pictures are different: one is taken from church, the other from the law court. One concerns a ‘brother’ (23) and the other an enemy (25). But in both cases the basic situation is the same (somebody has a grievance against us) and the basic lesson is the same (the necessity of immediate, urgent action). In the very act of worship, if we remember the grievance, we are to break off our worship and go and put it right. In the very act of going to court, on our way there, we are to settle our debt.
Yet how seldom do we heed Christ’s call for immediacy of action! If murder is a horrible crime, malicious anger and insult are horrible too. And so is every deed, word, look or thought by which we hurt or offend a fellow human being. We need to be more sensitive about these evils. We must never allow an estrangement to remain, still less to grow. We must not delay to put it right. We must not even allow the sun to set on our anger. But immediately, as soon as we are conscious of a broken relationship, we must take the initiative to mend it, to apologize for the grievance we have caused, to pay the debt we have left unpaid, to make amends. And these extremely practical instructions Jesus drew out from the sixth commandment as its logical implications! If we want to avoid committing murder in God’s sight, we must take every possible positive step to live in peace and love with all men.
2. Avoiding lust (27–30)
Jesus now turns from the sixth commandment to the seventh, from the prohibition against murder to the prohibition against adultery.
You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.
Once again the rabbis were attempting to limit the scope of the commandment you shall not commit adultery. Although the sin of desiring another man’s wife is included in the tenth commandment against covetousness, they evidently found it more comfortable to ignore this. In their view they and their pupils kept the seventh commandment, provided that they avoided the act of adultery itself. They thus gave a conveniently narrow definition of sexual sin and a conveniently broad definition of sexual purity.
But Jesus taught differently. He extended the implications of the divine prohibition. Rather, he affirmed that the true meaning of God’s command was much wider than a mere prohibition of acts of sexual immorality. As the prohibition of murder included the angry thought and the insulting word, so the prohibition of adultery included the lustful look and imagination. We can commit murder with our words; we can commit adultery in our hearts or minds. Indeed (28), every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Perhaps two points should be made before we go any further. There is not the slightest suggestion here that natural sexual relations within the commitment of marriage are anything but God-given and beautiful. We may thank God that the Song of Solomon is contained in the canon of Scripture, for there is no Victorian prudery there but rather the uninhibited delight of lovers, of bride and bridegroom in each other. No. The teaching of Jesus here refers to unlawful sex outside marriage, whether practised by married or unmarried people. He is not even forbidding us to look at a woman, but to look lustfully. We all know the difference between looking and lusting.
This leads to the second point, that Jesus’ allusion is to all forms of immorality. To argue that the reference is only to a man lusting after a woman and not vice versa, or only to a married man and not an unmarried, since the offender is said to commit ‘adultery’ not ‘fornication’, is to be guilty of the very casuistry which Jesus was condemning in the Pharisees. His emphasis is that any and every sexual practice which is immoral in deed is immoral also in look and in thought.
What is particularly important to grasp is his equation of looking lustfully at a woman and committing adultery with her in the heart. It is the relation between the eyes and the heart which leads Jesus in the next two verses to give some very practical instruction about how to maintain sexual purity. The argument is this: If to look lustfully is to commit adultery in the heart, in other words, if heart-adultery is the result of eye-adultery (the eyes of the heart being stimulated by the eyes of the flesh), then the only way to deal with the problem is at its beginning, which is our eyes. Righteous Job claimed that he had learned this. ‘I have made a covenant with my eyes,’ he said; ‘how then could I look upon a virgin?’ Then he went on to speak of his heart: ‘If … my heart has gone after my eyes, … if my heart has been enticed to a woman …,’ he would acknowledge that he had sinned and that he deserved the judgment of God. But Job had not done these things. The control of his heart was due to the control of his eyes.
This teaching of Jesus, confirmed in the experience of Job, is still true today. Deeds of shame are preceded by fantasies of shame, and the inflaming of the imagination by the indiscipline of the eyes. Our vivid imagination (one of many faculties which distinguish humans from animals) is a precious gift of God. None of the world’s art and little of man’s noblest achievement would have been possible without it. Imagination enriches the quality of life. But all God’s gifts need to be used responsibly; they can readily be degraded and abused. This is certainly true of our imagination. I doubt if ever human beings have fallen victim to immorality, who have not first opened the sluicegates of passion through their eyes. Similarly, whenever men and women have learned sexual self-control in deed, it is because they have first learned it in the eyes of both flesh and fantasy. This may be an appropriate moment to refer in passing to the way girls dress. It would be silly to legislate about fashions, but wise (I think) to ask them to make this distinction: it is one thing to make yourself attractive; it is another to make yourself deliberately seductive. You girls know the difference; so do we men.
This brings us to verses 29 and 30: If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away … And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away … This was evidently a favourite saying of Jesus, for he quoted it more than once. It recurs later in this same Gospel, where the foot is added to the eye and the hand, and the reference is a general one to ‘temptations to sin’, not explicitly to sexual temptation. So the principle has a wider application. Nevertheless, it is to this particular realm that Jesus applied it in the Sermon on the Mount. What did he mean by it?
On the surface it is a startling command to pluck out an offending eye, to cut off an offending hand or foot. A few Christians, whose zeal greatly exceeded their wisdom, have taken Jesus au pied de la lettre and mutilated themselves. Perhaps the best-known example is the third-century scholar, Origen of Alexandria. He went to extremes of asceticism, renouncing possessions, food and even sleep, and in an over-literal interpretation of this passage and of Matthew 19:12 actually made himself a eunuch. Not long after, in AD 325, the Council of Nicea was right to forbid this barbarous practice.
The command to get rid of troublesome eyes, hands and feet is an example of our Lord’s use of dramatic figures of speech. What he was advocating was not a literal physical self-maiming, but a ruthless moral self-denial. Not mutilation but mortification is the path of holiness he taught, and ‘mortification’ or ‘taking up the cross’ to follow Christ means to reject sinful practices so resolutely that we die to them or put them to death.
What does this involve in practice? Let me elaborate and so interpret Jesus’ teaching: ‘If your eye causes you to sin because temptation comes to you through your eyes (objects you see), then pluck out your eyes. That is, don’t look! Behave as if you had actually plucked out your eyes and flung them away, and were now blind and so could not see the objects which previously caused you to sin. Again, if your hand or foot causes you to sin, because temptation comes to you through your hands (things you do) or your feet (places you visit), then cut them off. That is: don’t do it! Don’t go! Behave as if you had actually cut off your hands and feet, and had flung them away, and were now crippled and so could not do the things or visit the places which previously caused you to sin.’ That is the meaning of ‘mortification’.
One wonders if there has ever been a generation in which this teaching of Jesus were more needed or more obviously applicable than our own, in which the river of filth (of pornographic literature and sex films) is in spate. Pornography is offensive to Christians (and indeed to all healthy-minded people) first and foremost because it degrades women from human beings into sex objects, but also because it presents the eye of the beholder with unnatural sexual stimulation. If we have a problem of sexual self-mastery, and if nonetheless our feet take us to these films, our hands handle this literature, and our eyes feast on the pictures they offer to us, we are not only sinning but actually inviting disaster.
In saying this I am very far from wishing to lay down any law or make any man-made rules about which books and magazines a Christian may read, which plays and films he may see (live or on television), and which art exhibitions he may visit. For we have to recognize that all men and women are made differently. Sexual desire is more easily aroused in some than in others, and different things arouse it. Sexual self-discipline and self-control come more naturally to some than to others. Some can see explicitly sexual pictures (on paper or film) and remain entirely unscathed, while others would find them terribly corrupting. Our temperaments and therefore our temptations vary. So we have no right to stand in judgment on others regarding what they feel able to permit themselves.
What we do have liberty to say is only this (for this is what Jesus said): if your eye causes you to sin, don’t look; if your foot causes you to sin, don’t go; and if your hand causes you to sin, don’t do it. The rule Jesus laid down was hypothetical, not universal. He did not require all his disciples (metaphorically speaking) to blind or maim themselves, but only those whose eyes, hands and feet were a cause of sinning. It is they who have to take action; others may be able to retain both eyes, both hands and both feet with impunity. Of course even they may need to refrain from certain liberties out of loving concern for those with weaker consciences or weaker wills, but that is another principle which is not enunciated here.
What is necessary for all those with strong sexual temptations, and indeed for all of us in principle, is discipline in guarding the approaches of sin. The posting of sentries is a commonplace of military tactics; moral sentry-duty is equally indispensable. Are we so foolish as to allow the enemy to overwhelm us, simply because we have posted no sentries to warn us of his approach?
To obey this command of Jesus will involve for many of us a certain ‘maiming’. We shall have to eliminate from our lives certain things which (though some may be innocent in themselves) either are, or could easily become, sources of temptation. In his own metaphorical language we may find ourselves without eyes, hands or feet. That is, we shall deliberately decline to read certain literature, see certain films, visit certain exhibitions. If we do this, we shall be regarded by some of our contemporaries as narrow-minded, untaught Philistines. ‘What?’ they will say to us incredulously, ‘you’ve not read such and such a book? You’ve not seen such and such a film? Why, you’re not educated, man!’ They may be right. We may have had to become culturally ‘maimed’ in order to preserve our purity of mind. The only question is whether, for the sake of this gain, we are willing to bear that loss and endure that ridicule.
Jesus was quite clear about it. It is better to lose one member and enter life maimed, he said, than to retain our whole body and go to hell. That is to say, it is better to forgo some experiences this life offers in order to enter the life which is life indeed; it is better to accept some cultural amputation in this world than risk final destruction in the next. Of course this teaching runs clean counter to modern standards of permissiveness. It is based on the principle that eternity is more important than time and purity than culture, and that any sacrifice is worth while in this life if it is necessary to ensure our entry into the next. We have to decide, quite simply, whether to live for this world or the next, whether to follow the crowd or Jesus Christ.