(11:29 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Everything in its right place

Sometimes I wonder what this part of the Bible means:

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 lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Matthew 5:27)

It might be weird to wonder. Everybody knows what it means:

• Never have a dirty thought.
  
• If you have sex before marriage, you are committing adultery against your future spouse, and/or your partner's future spouse.
  
• You must ignore a woman's body and focus only on her soul.

I think these readings are stupid. I think this verse has something to say to us in the contemporary "crisis of sexual difference," and the stupid readings make thinking people just ignore the verse as hyperbole.

In Jesus' time, as in much of the world today, women had an ambiguous status. On the one hand, they were obviously human beings, but on the other hand, they were also obviously very useful to the more powerful men in terms of providing children and sexual pleasure (which likely amounted more to the pleasure of dominance than simply genital pleasure). When Jesus prohibited looking at women with lust in one's heart, certainly some in his audience wondered why one would look at a woman at all.

In sharp contrast with the utilitarian approach to women, Jesus (who never married) sought fellowship and conversation with women. Except for the story of the gentile woman who has to convince him to heal her son, he consistently approaches women as equals -- which was likely bewildering to the women themselves.

Beyond that, in the gospel of Matthew, from which the saying in question was taken, prostitutes have a privileged role -- that is, the women who are most aggressive about advertising and enhancing their beauty. Although we tend to assume he must have, Jesus is never recorded as telling a prostitute to retire. This stands in stark contrast to women in our modern days who are aggressively frumpy, thinking in this way that they will weed out all opportunistic suitors who are "only after their bodies." This promotes the same exploitative logic in reverse -- instead of bracketing the "personality," now men are supposed to bracket the body, which leads to decisions that are every bit as arbitrary and every bit as based on fulfilling one's needs. We can read Jesus' saying on adultery of the heart as prohibiting all exploitative approaches to women, just as we can read his prohibition of divorce as a way of preventing ways of thinking that render women disposable when they stop fulfilling their promised functions. This is directly applicable in our day, when people divorce when the partner turns out not to have been the "soul mate" after all -- that is, not to meet all the emotional needs they thought the person would meet.

We might edit Jesus' saying to say, "Whoever looks at a woman with emotional neediness in his heart...." I know that I am guilty of thinking of marriage in this way -- more than just a more consistent sex life, marriage seems to provide a way to finally get those emotional insecurities behind me. Finally, I'll always have someone to hang out with, someone who is required to like me. Yet simply balancing out physical and emotional attractiveness is not the answer, either. We must never forget Jesus' deep suspicion of the institution of marriage, and we must not pretend that "our" way of doing marriage avoids the sinful, dehumanizing, utilitarian patterns that Jesus perceived.

To follow the traditional interpretation of "adultery of the heart" is not only to invite neurosis and despair through the imposition of an impossible demand, but even more seriously, it is to continue the utilitarian logic that Jesus denounces in this verse and throughout his teaching and practice. The way out of the logic of "adultery of the heart" is found in a description of Jesus' own practice:

Jesus, looking at him, loved him... (Mark 10:21)

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