Drastic Measures

Near the end of junior high, my Sunday school teacher issued our class a challenge. Any of us who could memorize the whole Sermon on the Mount (all of Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7) would get a brand-new, top-of-the-line, red letter, black leather Thompson Chain Reference Bible tricked out with the three column New International Version format. As it turns out I’m more competitive than I sometimes let on and so I went home that Sunday afternoon and started memorizing immediately with verse one of chapter five:

Seeing the crowds Jesus went up on a mountain, and when his disciples came to him, he opened his mouth and taught them saying, “Blessed are the poor in Spirit…”

I knocked off a verse a day for the next couple of weeks— which put me well ahead of everyone else in the class (I checked). Then I hit verse 27—our passage today—and found myself at the edge of a precipice more terrifying than anything I can remember up to that point.

I might not have been able, in junior high, to give you a technical definition of adultery, but I knew lust. And suddenly the technical definition of adultery didn’t matter. By the standards of the kingdom, Jesus said that hungry, ugly look and the feelings that came with it were not some precursor to sin but sin themselves.

My attempt to memorize the Sermon on the Mount as a Sunday School assignment ended abruptly at this textual cliff. Up to verse 27, Jesus had simply been talking to a clump of his fans up on the hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee. But with verse 27, he turned and started talking to me.

You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

I knew the Ten Commandments. In fact, I think I got a milkshake for memorizing them a couple of years before. And while I didn’t think I was home free with the ‘big ten,’ at age 14 I felt that I had a few more years before I needed to start worrying about Number Seven: “You shall not commit adultery.”

I was wrong. According to Jesus, lust wasn’t just the beginning of some slippery slope that could lead to sin. Lust was sin itself.

I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

I tried to keep up my verse-a-day pace toward my red letter, black leather Thompson Chain Reference Bible, but I stumbled over these verses every time I came to them. I stumbled over them, that is, until the day I quietly concluded Jesus’ standard here was impossible and that I would find a way to minimize the meaning of the text or the seriousness of my sin…or both.

I became what you could call a ‘moral minimizer’ because of this very passage, Matthew 5:27-28, and, to be honest, the careful minimizing work I did with this passage I’ve repeated over the years with other passages. Maybe you know what I mean because you’ve done it too. We moral minimizers, when faced with an intractable and obviously impossible passage like this one today, give up trying to really understand it or even live with the tension it suggests between our current lives and the kingdom life Jesus sets before us. Instead we look for loopholes and exemptions: ways to explain reasonably what God might have in mind that requires…at the very most…minor adjustments on our part, but not deep transformation we won’t be able to control. We moral minimizers look for ways to soften the kingdom up…make it more palpable… less extreme.

Take this classic passage today that got me started. We minimizers would note that clearly adultery in the heart is not as damaging as actual physical adultery. No one else is involved. If it is actually damaging (which we can debate), it is only damaging to us, right? And then what really does technically qualify as out-and-out lust in a realistic view of the world? You know, as well as I do, that the Hebrews were an unusually earthy people, so genuine lust must have been something really dark, rather than just that occasional hungry, ugly leer and some internal musings about sex. Wouldn’t you agree?

We minimizers become masters at tossing in examples to muddy the moral waters. We pose theoretical questions to our disturbingly simple Savior in patronizing or bemused tones: So on the subject of lust and adultery, Jesus, does looking at the ladies underwear pages in the Penny’s catalog qualify? Or how about this? Can you really lust in your first look at someone or only in your second? Is there a minimum time limit for the genuinely lustful look? Ten seconds? Five? How about two?

Before long, we minimizers have so obscured the words of scripture, that we don’t need to change anything substantial in our lives. Mark Twain at least was more honest when he said: “It is not the parts of Scripture I don’t understand that disturb me, but the parts I do.”

But what other choice do we actually have…faced with the immensity of the sin in our lives? What other choice do we have? “Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Faced with the immensity of our sin, I think we all become minimizers in the end.

Because this is not just about lust. Any of you women out there who think that you’re golden because Jesus is so clearly picking on us guys, think again.

True…Jesus doesn’t pick adultery randomly out of a hat. The first thing recorded as evidence of sin in the Garden of Eden, was that Adam and Eve saw that they were naked and became afraid, and over the years I can’t think of anything more wonderful in God’s creation than sex that the devil has twisted to wreak so much havoc and destroy so many lives.

But if you think that all Jesus is talking about here is shacking up or considering it, think again. He is talking to every one of us and about much more than a leer here or a leer there when he says:

If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.

You see, in stark contrast to all of our attempts to minimize or justify our own sin or qualify this or that text, Jesus uses some of the most violent language that will ever cross his lips to describe how decisively we must separate ourselves from even a sliver of sin.

Jesus is not calling for the literal lopping off of a wandering limb or the removal of an errant eye, but do not minimize the urgency of this text.

It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. The truth is that we serve a forgiving God. We serve a God of grace and a God of love, but don’t mistake our loving God for a minimizer, soft on sin. Scripture says that the wages of sin are…death…and this is not some arbitrary decision by an unenlightened God that will be revised in Christianity Version 2.0. Our loving God is simply telling us as straight as he can that sin will separate us from the mercy he longs to pour into our lives. You see God is, in his very being, holy fire; and sin—any sin— simply cannot exist in God’s presence any more than darkness exists the moment you turn on a light. This is not up for negotiation. Salvation is not determined on a bell-curve.

“If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”

Can we hear this not as some ridiculous impossibility or rhetorical overstatement but as a realistic warning about the desperate danger of sin for us from a God who loves us enough to come and die that we might not? Jesus doesn’t just warn us, he gives his life to save us.

Years ago, Guideposts carried a story about a woman whose husband was often gone on business. During these trips, a neighbor down the street offered to help with any problems that surfaced, and he would come over, if she called, to move something heavy or fix a toilet that was overflowing. This went on for some time, and they became good friends. After he would help out, they would just talk. Then one day, something felt different. As they talked as they had done so many times before, she realized what it was, and she could see in his eyes that he felt it too. As it got dark, she knew without asking that if she gave the slightest indication, he would stay the night, and she realized she wanted him to stay. She was desperately lonely and he was more than just attractive, he was kind.

I don’t know if she remembered what Jesus says here in Matthew five, but she was a Christian and in spite of her longing for him to stay, she chose, by God’s grace, to fight the longing that night. They were standing on her porch and overhead there was one light—her porch light— burning in the dark. And rather than invite him back in— something they both wanted—she moved slowly to stand directly under the light and standing there she said goodbye…not “see you later,” but “goodbye.”

I love the image of her standing in the light as she said goodbye, but you know what? In our world where we have so muddied the moral waters and minimized sin, just standing in the light might not be enough anymore. You may not be able to find the light to stand in when you realize sin is asking to stay the night.

Did you know that in 1973, according to U.S. News & World Report, Americans spent $10 million on pornography? Any guess what this figure was in 1999 given the growth of the Internet? In 1999 we spent 10 billion dollars on porn—a thousandfold increase. And in 1999 this was far more than Hollywood’s domestic box office receipts and larger than all the revenues generated by rock and country music recordings combined. And that was six years ago. I’ve heard that over a hundred new porn sites go up not every month now, but every week.

Just standing in the light might not be possible now and Jesus knows this. His message is not ‘just say no.’ He tells us to tear ourselves away from sin the second it enters our heart. Gouge it out. Cut it off. Make no accommodation whatsoever.

Let me put it this way for us in Spokane, the home of Bloomsday, the largest timed road-race on the planet: run away.

Run away from sin! Flee as fast as you can—limping if you must—but run.

It’s the Joseph Principle. You remember Joseph, don’t you? In Genesis chapter 39 we find him serving as a slave in Egypt, and when his master’s wife demands that he sleep with her (adultery incidentally) and she refuses to take ‘no’ for an answer and grabs his tunic and won’t let go, he wrenches free, leaving his cloak, and runs.

Run from sin. It is the Joseph Principle, and I think it fits our text today, but based on our text, let me also say that while it is simple…to run…this doesn’t make it easy. Our run away from sin will not be some easy lope from darkness into light. It will feel, as we lurch away, like death. It will feel like we have lost a limb or our eye has been torn from its socket. We may need to scream as we run, but run. Trust God and run.

It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. If this is true… if Jesus isn’t just blowing smoke or being melodramatic, let me ask you this: Is there a place in your life where you need to tear away and run…from sin? You may think you have this particular sin under control. You may think you can contain it. You may think you can step back whenever you choose.

“You have heard it said…” Jesus whispers… “but I say to you….”

“You have heard it said…” Jesus roars… “but I say to you….”

Is there a place in your life where you need to tear away and run from sin?

You know in my twenty-four years of wrestling with this challenging text, I’ve failed to find any hope here, but as I talked with Karen last week, she pointed out that there is hope…even here…for if we take sin as seriously as Jesus does, we will find ourselves free to live into the joy of God’s design for our lives. Sin, as compelling as it looks and feels, is nothing more than a knock-off of real life, of God life, of the kingdom. But it is not until we completely cut ourselves off from sin…it is not until we trust God and run…that we discover this. If we try to contain it or control it, but keep it as an appendage in our lives we will die.

I have a friend whose mother has a deep paranoia about the medical establishment: hospitals, doctors, medicine, you name it. This fear has become so extreme she hasn’t seen a doctor for years. But the problem is that a while back she developed a tumor on her face. It would not have been a big deal if she’d seen a doctor early on, but she didn’t and it has gotten worse and worse to the point that it has now essentially devoured half of her face. And this is not just a cosmetic horror. It will kill her if she doesn’t get help, and even if she gets help now, she still might lose her eye.

Here is what made me think of this story in relationship to our text today: On the phone this week she told my friend she thinks she is getting better and that she might not need the surgery—the surgery, the doctors say, is the only thing that will save her life.

In stark contrast to all of our attempts to minimize sin, Jesus tells us to tear ourselves away from sin. Gouge it out. Cut it off. Make no accommodation.

We must trust God—believing that he who created us knows what will save us—and we must run from sin. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.

It used to be when people parted they would wish each other “God’s speed.” From what I know of our loving God, and in light of our text today, this is exactly what I want to wish you today. May you have God’s speed as you run…run from sin…and run into the arms of our Father.

This sermon first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 11, No. 3 (May/Jun 2005).