Christian Art | Adultery, Fornication And Divorce | Jesus’ Sermon On The Mount
Matthew 5: 27-32 – Week 10 Ordinary Time, Friday (King James Audio Bible KJV, Spoken Word)
27 ¶ Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:
28 But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
29 And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
30 And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
31 It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement:
32 But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.
Through these verses of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus directs us to consider and take to heart not the outward show of the Law, the behaviour which other people can see, but rather the inward spirit – our thoughts, our mind, the invisible part of ourselves, which is visible to ourselves and to God.
This is deep spiritual cleansing. It is also a blessed relief. Where the Law of Moses as expressed in the Pentateuch laid down many regulations of behaviour, which were then subsequently elaborated upon, through to Jesus’ time when the Pharisees are condemned by Jesus for their overly precise and hypocritical, hollow, sense of the letter of the Law, Jesus gives us instead guiding principles, which centre on our interiority, on our souls, on our inward sense of truth, of what is just, and of how we may best be with God.
In these Gospel verses of the Sermon on the Mount, the act of adultery remains prohibited, and now we uncover a deeper rationale to the prohibition. Perhaps this is at risk of stating the obvious. If so, then it is a mark of how our sense of what is natural and just has accepted Jesus’ teaching. We learn in this reading that it is the lustful aspect of our seeing another person which can cripple us – damning us should we not recognize this trap and avoid it.
We should distinguish between lusting after and desiring to share love with another person. Love is a gift shared between two people. Sexual pleasure is one aspect of this gift. This entails respect and mutuality. It goes hand in hand with commitment. Such relationship is a joyful celebration of our life, our humanity, and our overarching relationship with God. It is not disposable.
Lust, though, is not to do with mutuality. It does not respect the individual and his or her dignity. It wants to turn a human being from being properly human and to make him or her a means of gratification. Sexual pleasure now becomes not about love but rather a kind of pornography. When we look at another person and think like this, seeing that person such wise and ourselves using that person, then we lose ourselves.
Jesus’ message, then, is easy and simple. It is only a lesson in respect of our fellow human beings. We are called by Jesus to live in relationship with each other, to respect and value each other, and ultimately to love each other as God loves each one of us. This is far from being a sexually repressed teaching, as if we should fear our God-given sexuality. Far better than that, it is a lesson in how to value each other fully and use and enjoy and be careful with God’s gifts.
‘There is a need for a crusade of manliness and purity to counteract and undo the savage work of those who think that man is a beast. And that crusade is your work.’ St Josemaria Escriva.
Concluding Prayer | Christian Prayer With Jesus
Lord God,
the Cross reveals the mystery of your love:
a stumbling block indeed for unbelief,
but the sign of your power and wisdom to us who believe.
Teach us so to contemplate your Son’s glorious Passion
that we may always believe and glory in his Cross.
We make our prayer through our Lord.
Amen
King James Audio Bible | Love Revealed By Jesus Christ | Endnotes
Adultery And Divorce
In The Sermon On The Mount, Jesus addresses the issue of adultery and divorce, and how the Law relates now to the commandment: ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’.
Jesus says: ‘Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.’ (Matthew 5: 27-28)
Here, Jesus is telling us that adultery is not just a physical act, but also an attitude of the heart. Even if a person does not commit the act of adultery, if they look upon another person with lust, they have already committed adultery in their heart. This means that adultery is not just about external actions, but also about internal desires.
Furthermore, Jesus says: ‘And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.’ (Matthew 5:29)
Here, Jesus uses hyperbole to emphasize the seriousness of the sin of adultery. Is Jesus literally telling us to pluck out our eyes? Is Jesus is telling us to take drastic measures to avoid sin? Certainly, Jesus’ teaching is as to the primacy of heaven. We must be willing to sacrifice anything that leads us to sin, no matter how important it may seem to us.
Now let us turn to what Jesus says about divorce. Jesus says: ‘It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement: But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.’ (Matthew 5:31-32)
Jesus is telling us that divorce is not in accordance with God’s plan for marriage. Divorce is only allowed in the case of infidelity (fornication). In any other case, divorce would lead to adultery. If a man divorces his wife for any reason other than infidelity and marries another woman, he commits adultery. Likewise, if a man marries a divorced woman, he commits adultery.
This teaching of Jesus has been interpreted variously by Christians. The Catholic Church, for example, considers marriage to be a sacrament, and therefore, divorce is not allowed except in very limited circumstances, such as adultery or abuse. The Church also does not recognize civil divorces as valid, and therefore, Catholics who divorce and remarry without an annulment are considered to be living in adultery.
Some Protestant denominations have a more lenient view of divorce, allowing it in cases of abuse, abandonment, or irreconcilable differences. However, most Protestant churches still consider marriage to be a sacred institution and do not promote divorce.
Jesus’ teachings on adultery and divorce emphasize the importance of purity in heart and faithfulness in marriage. Adultery is not just a physical act, but also an attitude of the heart. The central message remains: we must strive for purity and faithfulness in all aspects of our lives, including in marriage.
Saint Justin Martyr’s account of Christian Eucharistic worship, written around 155 AD, is one of the earliest and most significant descriptions of the liturgy outside of the New Testament. Composed as part of his First Apology—a formal defense of Christianity addressed to the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius—this passage reveals not only the centrality of the Eucharist in the life of the early Church but also the theological, communal, and sacrificial dimensions of Christian worship as it was practised just a few generations after the apostles [ … ]
The seventy disciples, or as some authorities state: the seventy two, are symbolic of the sending to all nations, and supplementary to the Twelve. There is a numerical symbolism here, the meaning of which we may with confidence say concerns a sending of the Gospel to all nations [ … ]
On Tuesday, His Grace turns to the theme of Jesus’ hidden years. His Grace asks the students to consider questions concerning what really happened: ‘Who, for instance, was Joseph? Was he indeed a carpenter, or has Joseph’s true role in the society in which he lived been misconstrued and forgotten to us? Though it be a beautiful, simplifying image to grasp, which offers to us much that is of value in Catholic faith… ‘A wise elder, which carpenter could mean, or a great engineer, an architekton, which in the Greek does not mean carpenter. But carpenter in the Hebrew could mean a wise man…’ His Grace turns the pages of his Bible back and forth, as if to itemize the paucity of information. Then he says: ‘What I think I can say to you with confidence is that it is of profound significance that we simply don’t know what Jesus was doing for most of his earthly life. There are some very different possibilities. One idea cherished by the Church is that Jesus worked with his father Joseph as a carpenter. Another possibility is that Jesus lived and prayed and studied closely with John the Baptist. They were cousins, and very close, almost the same, in age. Luke’s Gospel tells us clearly that Jesus and John knew each other from within the womb before they were born. So there may have been something quite important happening there. You see, we don’t know – it is an impossible mystery to us – just how much Jesus had to learn. This is because, if Jesus knew everything, humanly speaking, even as a tiny baby, then how can we say he is fully human? We simply can’t probe too far into this mystery, but we can draw extraordinary truth and healing from this thought, which becomes of immense relevance in our own lives. Jesus came to know and to understand himself not merely as a son of God, but as God the Son, and so as self-identical with his Father. It is not an adoptive relationship. Jesus is God. Now so much is hidden here. But this is a great gift. If you think about it, how do we come to know that we are loved by God, that we have our relationship with God? What are we born with in here’ – his chest – ‘and what do we have to learn? This is to say, what is gifted to us by other Christians at our baptism? ‘Jesus must have studied, and experienced profound revelation about who and what he truly was, and, so it seems to be, these studies cannot have been confined to the Semitic world. But this is the important point: there is a hiddenness about all of this. No matter which schools and which sects our Lord might have encountered all these years, this to us is as a desert space. What this means is that we can enter into the hidden life of Jesus, and there we can discover our own being with God, our own sonship. Our own particular being loved by God can come to us, if we can enter within this great unknown – into this desert space, where we are loved by Jesus. I firmly believe that there may be a great Lenten mystery in this period of our Lord’s life.’ A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 1 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 2 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 3 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 4 | King James Audio Bible | KJV A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 5 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Holy Week | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 6
