Week 8 (02.11.08)

This week we looked at the passage in the Bible where Jesus talks about adultary, divorce and oaths (making a promise in the name of something).

In this passage (Matthew 5:27-37), Jesus reminds us of the Commandment, "Do not commit adultary" from Exodus 20:14 and then says that "Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already commited adultary with her in his heart. He then tells us to chop off the hand that causes us to sin, or to gouge the eye that causes us to sin out, for "It is better to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell." Then Jesus goes on to talk about divorce, quoting the place in the scriptures where it says that "Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce" and then adds that "Anyone who divorves his wife forces her to commit adultary and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultary." Finally, Jesus uses an old saying, "Do not break your oaths but keep those you made to the Lord," and then tells us we should "Not swear at all" by anything, for nothing is ours to swear by: it all belongs to to God. Jesus says instead that we should let our " 'Yes be yes and [our] no be no. " (ie, say what we mean; if we say we will do something, we should, and equally if we say we won't we should not do it.)

We first talked about the way in which all three of these subsections speak about how we as Christians should keep our promises. When you marry someone, you promise to give yourself only to them and to love and respect them for the rest of your life, so if you commit adultary, you break this promise and this does a lot of damage to the person you betrayed and also to yourself (all sin is always harmful to the one who commits it). Again, if you marry someone, you promise to remain married to them for the rest of your life as this is the way God intended marriage to be, so if you divorce them then you have broken this promise. If divorcing someone causes them to become an adulterer/ess (unless they have been unfaithful in the marriage, which Jesus says is different), then you should not want to do this as if it is wrong to sin yourself, it is worse to lead someone else into sin. Then Jesus tells us we should never swear by anything, for example, if I were to say I was going to do something "By Heaven," and then did not do it, I would have made a promise by something that does not belong to me in the first place which is really wrong. Moreover, if you are a Christian and you make promises to your non-Christian friends and family "By Heaven" and then do not keep your promise you will firstly be behaving the same way everyone else who does not follow Jesus does and therefore won't be showing that being a Christian makes any difference to your life, and secondly it will seem as if the Heaven you swore by meant nothing to you. So Jesus finishes by telling us that we should only make a promise if we really mean to keep it and that if we know we won't, we should say so to begin with rather than letting someone put their hope in us and us letting them down and ultimately being dishonest.

Then we said how this passage is telling us to put off sin. Jesus says that it is better to get rid of the part of our body which causes us to sin than for us to end up in hell. He did not mean that we should start going about loping off our arms and legs when we hit and kick people, but rather that we should take practical measures to avoid falling into patterns of sin in areas we know we are weak in. For example, if from time to time we feel tempted to go on websites we know we shouldn't, it is better for us to stop using the computer all together than for us to do this more and more often and risk falling away from God in the end. (That is not to say that our sins affect our salvation, or that any sin is too much to be washed clean by Jesus, but rather that when we sin continually without repenting / turning away from this sin our hearts become hard and it becomes more difficult to hear from God and some people can get so caught up in sin that they lose their faith altogether).

We then looked at how this passage is also talking about the fact that we should be respectful towards members of the opposite sex. Sometimes, we think that we are doing well because we haven't ACTUALLY commited adultary (this includes sleeping with someone before you're married too, even if you intend to marry this person), but here Jesus tells us that even if we have just wanted someone who we are not married to in that way then we have already commited adultary with them in our hearts. Purity is not just about actions we carry out, but about our hearts. If we think about people in a lustful way then we are not treating them with the love that Jesus says we should treat everyone. He wants us to look at our brothers and sisters and friends who are not Christians in the same way he looks at them and at us.

Finally, we spoke about what we can learn from this for all relationships in our lives: friends and family as well as romantic ones. We said that Jesus blesses us with relationships not just so that we can benefit from what the other person does for us all the time but also because of the ways in which we can bless them and their lives. We said that we should look at our motives behind certain friendships and romantic relationships; ie, do you just want a boyfriend because it 'looks cool' and all your friends have one? Do you just want to be friends with her because she's clever and lets you copy her homework? Do you respect your parents, or do you treat your mum in a way that shows that you think she is just there to run around after you? Or do you really love and value the people God has put in your life and want to be the sort of person that they always look forward to seeing and talking to because you show them this love so clearly?

Sometimes it's hard to tell if we are doing all these things properly because we can think we are showing everyone love when in fact we are just being selfish in relationships and therefore we should all regularly pray that God would reveal areas in our lives to us in which we are not living the way he wants so that we can give these over to him and start trying our best, with his help, to love everyone as we should.

Lois and Eleanor