So much of church teachings have relied on the following passage to frame their conversations about purity and sex. In Matthew chapter 5 Jesus says:
But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, 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.
Yikes. What is it about a look that would wind you up in hell?
Here’s the deal though. I don’t think Jesus is wrong. I just think we’re talking about two different things.
When we use the word lust (or heard the word lust in sermons or youth group talks) it is so often equated with sexual arousal or attraction. Sometimes the word lust was code for pornography or masturbation.
Always it was used to talk about men’s sexuality, and always it was talked about with women as a warning. We heard things like, men have a lust problem, don’t make it harder for them. Men, you can’t help it, you have to fight it and control it.
So there were tricks like “bouncing your eyes” or wearing a rubber band on your wrist (anyone?) and measuring our shorts and shoulders traps.
But Jesus didn’t say whoever looks at a woman has already sinned…he said with lust.
So what exactly is lust if it’s not attraction? What does it mean when you notice someone’s attractiveness? Have you sinned? If you’re married, do you just stop noticing other bodies? If you’re single, is your sexuality just boxed up on a shelf?
When Jesus says “anyone who even looks at a woman with lust…” I think this is what he was saying; He takes the law of Moses and cuts to the heart: it is who you see her as that matters. It is a matter of your heart, not your actions. It is not did you look too long, did you think too much, did you feel too much. It is what did you do with her personhood, her God-image, to make her useable to you.
We need to talk about desire or attraction and how that’s different from lust.
How is it different? Lust is the using of someone or something for your own gratification. Lust requires dehumanizing. Attraction, desire? These are not lust. Can you notice a beautiful body without lusting? YES. Is arousal lust? NO. Can you experience sexual pleasure without lust? I’m going to go with yes and I don’t mean just if you’re married.
It is when a person becomes only a body to you that lust becomes involved. Does that make sense? And so when we communicate to girls that they are not more than the sum of their body parts, and we teach boys that girl’s body parts are dangerous if they notice them, what have we done? We’ve inherently dehumanized women. We’ve taught men to see women only as their bodies which is the whole problem in the first place.
Now, if we zoom way out, it is clear to me that this is the issue of every aspect of our lives…down to the clothes we choose to buy and the food we choose to eat, the tips we choose to give. I have to separate myself from the humanity on the other end of my transaction to be okay with exploitation.
Sexuality has to do with everything. Do you see it? It has everything to do with our connectedness and our disconnectedness. The way we go about reconnecting with ourselves and with each other is holy work. And it is absolutely core to being human.
What we need is a better conversation about desire. About being sexual beings. About how men and women carry the same desires and capacity for pleasure and connection. About the difference between recognizing someone in a sexual way as a whole human being, a whole person, and using that person in a dehumanizing way by removing their personhood for your own gratification. Owning our desire and arousal would serve us well as we seek to grow with God into who we were created to be. How can we do that if there is a part of our selves locked up and off limits, or we deny exists?
If the church is going to talk about sexuality, then let it talk about it honestly. Let’s talk about sexuality as very good and very human. Let’s talk about being these whole humans together. One Body. Let’s please talk about women’s sexuality beyond how it relates to men, and men’s sexuality as something that is their own responsibility.
Let’s talk about the goodness of pleasure. Let’s talk about lust in an honest way. Let’s talk about how to be able to use someone, you have to dehumanize them. We aren’t wired to hurt other humans. We have to distance ourselves from their humanness - make them less than human - to hurt or use them. To lust, we have to turn off part of our own humanness, and that is hell.
I don’t want to talk about sex in a way that disconnects us from ourselves or from each other and heaven forbid from God. Let’s talk about how it brings us together.
Some questions to ponder: How have church teachings shaped your relationship with your own sexuality? Your relationships with the opposite gender? Was lust equated with sexual desire? How has this impacted your experience of pleasure?
Great points! My husband and I were just talking about this the other day. The conflation of lust with desire or arousal is so harmful to the goal of seeing sex and sexuality as good. It also, I think, prevents churches from talking strongly enough about the ACTUAL sin of lust and what that might look like (failure to gain consent, pursuing a relationship only for the possibility of having sex, etc.).
This is so good, Elizabeth! So needed! I grew up with a very healthy (not perfect) attitude about sexuality because my parents made conversations about it common place. My dad, a preacher, spoke often to us about the beauty in the world, including people - lust was different.