Church of the Holy City

The Delicate Issue of Adultery

The Delicate Issue of Adultery
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
December 22, 2013

Hosea 1:2-2:1 Matthew 5:27-32 Psalm 50

The sixth commandment is the prohibition against adultery. When you are a divinity student or a minister, you end up hearing every religious joke there is. And there is one about adultery. Moses comes down from Mount Sinai and announces, “I have with me the fifteen commandments.” The Israelites respond, “O fifteen is too many! We can’t follow that many commandments. Please go back up the mountain and negotiate a better covenant.” So Moses goes back up the mountain. When he comes back down he says, “Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is I got it down to ten commandments. The bad news is adultery is still there.”
On one level, the sixth commandment prohibits the commission of adultery. But Jesus makes this commandment more severe and difficult. He says that when anyone looks upon someone else with lustful gaze, that person is committing adultery in their heart. In other words, the prohibition against adultery includes lustful feelings, not only the act of adultery. I spoke with a rabbi about this statement of Jesus and the rabbi thought that it was severe. He said that as a rabbi, he would never say the same to the people in his synagogue. He thought that Jesus was a strict rabbi. In fact even the evangelical Christian Jimmy Carter confessed to violating this commandment as expressed by Jesus. But as Christians, we are bound by Jesus’ teachings, be they difficult or easy. Swedenborg includes in this commandment all lewd or obscene things, thoughts, or speech.
There are some peculiarities about this commandment. First, committing adultery is not against civil law, as is murder or theft. Depending on how one views society, it is indeed questionable if today it is even against moral law. Everywhere we look, sex and sexuality is pasted before our minds and eyes in advertizing, in music videos, in television and movie programming. Recently a female pop singer made waves by dancing suggestively on TV. This is nothing new in popular music. And in stories, love triangles fuel reams of paper that go back all the way to medieval romances. While sex has been used as a marketing device for a long time, recently I have seen ads descend to a dalliance with adultery that alarms me. A car advertisement depicts a young man stealing a kiss from another young man’s date at a dance party. The commercial concludes with the proud young man driving home with a black eye and a big grin on his face. The final image is the girl at the dance party with a longing, listless look on her face. In another commercial, a man drives away in a boat with his friend’s girlfriend. She dumped her boyfriend and took up with his friend because her boyfriend took too long getting his insurance technicalities worked out. These ads are not only using sex to sell, which I am almost numb to. No. These ads are using adulterous stories to sell, which makes me shudder.
Our society has become so distant from what religion teaches about love and its contraries that we have lost language relating to these ideas. We almost never use the words “lust,” or “lascivious,” or “lewd,” or “unchaste.” I think that for some of these words the younger generation may not even know a definition. And yet the whole purport of Swedenborg’s book Marital Love, also called Conjugial Love is to distinguish between lust and love, or between unchaste and chaste expressions of love.
Another peculiarity about the sixth commandment is the way our biology figures in the issue. As Protestants, we do not favor absolute abstinence and a vow of celibacy. So for us, chastity does not mean total abstinence from sex. For Swedenborg, chastity has to do with the total dedication to one single person. And still, the opposite sex is loved and admired, but not desired. In fact, for Swedenborg, when a person is in marital love, love for the opposite sex in general is increased. When a person is in love, all the world is lovelier.
There is a deeper level to the sixth commandment that is apparent from our Hosea reading. The prophet Hosea is told to marry an adulterous wife as a symbol of Israel’s relationship with God. This is one of many places in which Israel’s relationship with God is compared to a marriage. In this case, Israel’s relationship is called adulterous because Israel has turned away from Yahweh to worship the Canaanite gods around them. In this case we see the spiritual meaning of adultery. In the spiritual sense, adultery means turning from the holy things of religion or spirituality. For just as the Israelites turned to other gods, the temptation is there for us to turn away from spirituality. In its highest sense, the sixth commandment means denying the holiness of the Bible. For despite all its difficulties, the Bible is God’s Word and is Holiness Itself.
The Bible is a difficult book to deal with. There are passages in it that do not seem holy; in fact, there are passages in it that seem contrary to what we know of God. I think of those warrior passages and all the killing apparently commanded by God. In fact, the whole idea of the Promised Land is difficult. What God appears to say is that Abraham and his descendants will get a land that others now live in. In other words, the Promised Land is one of conquest.
But there are also beautiful passages in the Bible. God is called compassionate and forgiving and all loving. God is especially concerned with the marginalized in society—widows, orphans, and foreigners. There are good moral laws in the Bible. And there are lessons of wisdom.
If we approach the Bible with an affirmative attitude, we will see the beauties of God and God’s kingdom. But if we are dead-set on denying the divinity of the Bible, we can arm ourselves with all those passages that derive from a first millennium bronze-age warrior world.
People who seek to discredit the Bible seek also to discredit religion in general. This is what adultery means in its spiritual sense. Spiritual adulterers set themselves against religion. They not only deny God, they laugh at the things of religion. They set out to disprove God, they set out to show the irrelevance of religion and spirituality, and they either secretly or openly hate God.
Again, we see the unity of all the commandments when viewed spiritually. We can see how adulterating the things of religion go against the first two commandments. Having no other god before the Lord means that there is a God and that He is real. Putting self as the centre of life, as many atheists do, is putting something before God–a violation of the first commandment. Not taking the Lord’s name in vain means not to deny, laugh at, or discredit the Bible and the things that come from the Bible. Since all true religion comes from the Bible, denying religion and spirituality is also denying the Bible. Since God is the all and everything of the Bible, making light of the Bible is taking God in vain, God’s name and everything God stands for. God as our Father and the church as our mother are to be honored, as we learned in the fourth commandment. And the love that is at the heart of all true religion stands against hatred, which is prohibited by the fifth commandment.
Finally, the sixth commandment comes down to love—to real love. If we love our neighbor, we will not lust after our neighbor’s partner. We want what is good for our neighbor, and what is better than the love our neighbor enjoys from that one certain someone. And loving that one certain someone is what the sixth commandment is all about–a love from and in God Himself.

PRAYER

Lord, we give you thanks for your gift of love. Love fills our hearts with spiritual warmth and joins the human race together as one family. We give you thanks especially for the dear love that finds its rest in marriage. For no sweeter gift do you give humanity than the intense personal love between two people. We ask you to guard our thoughts to keep them free of distractions from unholy desires. May the transient pleasures of sensuality disperse as we grow in confidence and heartfelt friendship with our partners and with the whole human race. In this world, there are many distractions. But we give you thanks because you have overcome the world.

And lord, we ask that you watch over those who are struggling and enduring hardship, be it sickness, poverty, or national unrest. Send your peaceful spirit to turmoil. May aid come to those in need and may all the nations of the world come together in good will to help nations that are suffering from natural disasters or internal strife.

Send the power of your healing love to those who are sick. We know on faith that in every trying situation, good can come. May we find the good in trouble, and healing where there is sickness.