I remember the first time I ever preached on this text. I was more than a little reluctant...not because I was concerned about the sensitivity of the subject, but rather its relevance. You see, I was serving a congregation at that time that was OLD. I mean REALLY OLD - twenty percent of them were over 80! Did they NEED to hear, "You shall not commit adultery?" But I was in the midst of a series on the Ten Commandments, so I could not comfortably skip this one. I mentioned my concern, and the word that came back was, "THIS is the one we have been WAITING FOR - just because there is snow on the roof does not mean there is no fire in the furnace." OK.
On the other hand, how does one explain this to the children in a congregation (presuming there happen to be any)? Those of you who worship regularly at St. Paul have noted recently that Jennifer's children's sermons lately have been following along with our Ten Commandments series. Last week, after her lesson on No Murder, folks asked her what she planned to do with THIS week's subject - all agreed that a slavish devotion to following the current series might not be the best idea.
So saying, we probably all would be either shocked or amazed at just how much our youngsters know, and particularly in light of all the news coverage recently. In another church I served (in which there were lots of children), the 5, 6, and 7 year-olds were studying about Moses, and they came to the story of the giving of the Ten Commandments. The teacher called the laws off one by one - the children explained what each one meant. Suddenly, they came to #7: "You shall not commit adultery." Rachel gulped. What would these little ones know about adultery? And how would she explain it anyway? Sure enough, a couple of children raised their hands. One boy said something like, "It means when you're driving down the road, you're not supposed to look at the pretty women in the other cars." Another said, "It means that if a girl is wearing a dress, you're not supposed to look at her legs." Not bad answers, really. For kids who would not possibly understand completely what this commandment is all about, they had somehow picked up on the relationship between sexuality and adultery.
Put yourself in the teacher's place. If the youngsters had not been able to come up with any answers, how would YOU have explained adultery? Of course, most folks do not bother to explain it; they figure kids will find out soon enough. True. Sex is something we all learn about, some sooner, some later.
There is the classic story of the father who wanted to make sure his eight-year-old son learned sooner rather than later, bought him a series of books on the subject, told him to read them, and then promised to answer any questions when he was done. The boy did the reading, then when the father asked for a reaction, the lad responded, "Well, it's all right if you like that sort of thing." Uh-huh.
Of course, most everybody gets to the place where they DO like that sort of thing. Fine - sex is one of the most delightful gifts that God ever gave. Unfortunately, God's gift CAN sometimes create problems, and that is the reason we find this direction about No Adultery.
To be accurate, when Moses came down from the mountain with this rule, it referred to a very specific sexual activity - that between a married woman and any man who was not her husband. A married man was guilty of adultery only in the case of having an affair with a married woman - nobody seemed to care if he slept with a prostitute. If it were a young, single Monica Lewinsky type, and actual sexual intercourse occurred (not just the fooling around that the Starr report so graphically chronicles), the man would have to marry the girl with no divorce ever allowed, a "life sentence" for both.(1)
It would not matter that the fellow might be already married and have a Hillary at home; polygamy was OK. Double standard? Absolutely. I am not defending that view; I am simply stating the facts as they existed.
Basically, the Jews looked upon adultery as a crime against property. A wife was the property of the husband; chances are he had paid her father for the privilege of marrying her (remember the story of Jacob and Rachel and the fourteen years he had to work for her father Laban to get her?(2)). A husband had the right to expect that his wife belonged to him and him alone and that any children she might bear would be his. Adultery was not simply sexual sin.
If you recall our study two weeks ago on Commandment #5, "Honor your father and mother..." we noted that the family was the basic building block of this new Israelite society. An insistence upon the care of elderly parents was the social security system. Now, this 7th Commandment comes along - No Adultery. This one insures a decent society's orderly system of family survival through inheritance. You see, if mother can be trusted to bring forth only children who are unquestionably the offspring of father, property will be passed from generation to generation without problems and it will STAY IN THE FAMILY.
Bloodlines. But if mom fools around, who knows whose child might suddenly claim inheritance rights? The word "adultery" itself is instructive - it comes from a Latin root which means to corrupt. When we talk about adulterated milk or soup, we mean that something has been introduced into it that makes it not as pure as it was. Adultery has the potential of introducing something "foreign" into the bloodline. Come inheritance time, this could get very confusing, not to mention incredibly nasty. No adultery! An instruction to keep folks morally pure? Only accidentally. This was designed to put one more protective fence around the family.
The penalty for adultery was death. Leviticus: "And the man that commits adultery with his neighbor's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death."(3) The method of death is not specified. Deuteronomy: in the case of a girl who is already engaged, both she and the man who seduced her are to be brought outside the city gates, "and you shall stone them to death with stones."(4) The Mishnah, the Jewish law as expanded and explained by the rabbinical scholars, states that the penalty for adultery involving a married woman is strangulation - "The man is to be enclosed in manure up to his knees, and a soft towel set within a rough towel is to be placed around his neck (in order that no mark may be made, for the punishment is God's punishment). Then one man draws in one direction and another in the other direction, until he be dead."(5) Yuck! But historically, it is safe to say that the penalty was rarely enforced. Good thing too, because as often as the commandment was violated, if we are to take the word of the prophets, there would have been dead bodies all over the place.
What became actual practice was divorce. If a wife or fiancé were found guilty of adultery, the husband threw her out. (If you recall the Christmas story, that is what Joseph figured to do with Mary.(6)) If the husband were guilty of adultery, the wife's only choice was to beg him to take the necessary steps to free her. She could not initiate divorce proceedings on her own, because she had few rights in the eyes of the law. She was, after all, property, not much more than a slave.
The Christian understanding of the commandment became much more highly developed. With the words of Jesus as our guide, adultery came to be understood as ANYTHING that violates a marriage - not just mom having intercourse with someone other than dad, but even inordinate desire for someone else, and of course, that ultimate marriage violator, divorce. Women were no longer merely property; as Paul wrote, "Men ought to love their wives as their own bodies,"(7) treated with the greatest possible care and concern. Casual sexual relationships came to be understood as just as immoral as those that defiled a marriage.
Without a great deal of change, that is the way most people think today - and that is why children would answer a question about the meaning of adultery with a description of anything having to do with an interest in the opposite sex. Folks still kick over the traces, of course, because sex is such a powerful drive and can cloud the judgment of the best of us - just ask you-know-who. We excuse ourselves by saying that sex is a private matter - as long as nobody else gets hurt, we do not want anyone telling us what to do. And most of us do not want to tell anybody else...unless they happen to be preachers (remember Jim Bakker or Jimmy Swaggert?) or politicians.
But is sex all that private? Ask the 80-year-old grandmother who went to her doctor asking for birth control pills. The doctor looked at her rather strangely but went ahead and gave the prescription anyway. A few weeks later, she came in and reported that the pills were working wonderfully - she was sleeping like a baby.
"What?" the doctor asked. "Those are not sleeping pills; they keep ladies from getting pregnant."
"I know," said the grandmother. "Each morning I crush one up into my teenage granddaughter's orange juice, and I SLEEP LIKE A BABY!"
Sex is not simply a private matter. People DO get hurt - the parents of an unwed mother, the children of divorce, the families of those who die from AIDS. I recall an episode of "Happy Days." During this particular program, the father, Howard Cunningham, had to find a substitute bowling partner for an upcoming mixed doubles tournament because his wife had come down with a bad back. His new partner turned out to be quite a looker, and at the same time, one whom we might describe as of "easy virtue." She made no pretense...she wanted him to come home with her, and not just for coffee. Yes, he was tempted, but he turned her down flat. He said that he loved his wife and would never knowingly do anything to hurt her. The audience applauded. They knew he had done right. All of us know it. That is why we still call adultery a sin.
Of course, these days there is more at stake than simply a certain level of morality. Sleeping around can kill you. I recall a cartoon in which a young fellow says to his grandfather, "Gee, Granddad, your generation didn't have all these social diseases. What did you wear to have safe sex?"
Grandfather replied, "A wedding ring."
One other subject must be addressed in connection with this seventh commandment...divorce. Jesus said, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery."(8) He seems to be saying that while a married person commits adultery by having sex with a single person, a single person - if divorced - could commit adultery by getting married. Whew!
No divorce ever? That would be wedlock with a vengeance! But what about the young girl who marries her boyfriend only to find out after the ceremony that he regularly flies into jealous rages and brutally beats her anytime he gets the notion? She divorces him to save herself from such terror, eventually marries a fine, loving man, makes a home with him, has children, is active in church and community, and they live happily ever after. Is she an adulterer? Or consider the strange innocence of a man who deserts his wife, disappears without a trace for years, is meanwhile divorced by his wife, finally comes back home to find her happily remarried, forces her to have sex with him, and then takes off again. The "no divorce ever" rule would mean that this is OK. Is it? What do you think Jesus would say?
If we take as a given Jesus' concern for the welfare of people, we can get a clearer picture. Divorce was a serious social problem in the first century. A woman could be divorced for no other reason than that her husband was tired of her - she could be thrown out of the home with nothing more than the clothes on her back and no hope for keeping body and soul together except by prostitution or begging. No wonder Jesus would come down so hard on it. Sex was not the issue. Survival was. A loving Lord could never condone such abuse.
Things are different now. You know and I know that Jesus would not call that young lady escaping the torture of an awful husband to find a decent life an adulterer. We could be equally sure that he would have called the long-lost husband who suddenly came back a rapist and a brute. I honestly think that if the question of divorce in situations like that were ever presented to the Lord, he would have helped those ladies file the papers.
Adultery is an often misunderstood issue...and not only by young children or politicians seeking some partisan or personal advantage. Probably the simplest way to explain it is to say that when men and women get married they make a promise that they will love each other in a way that they will never love anybody else, "as long as we both shall live." When one of them breaks that promise, that is adultery. The bad news is that lots of people DO break the promise. But the good news for those who have fallen is that there is real comfort...gospel...in one of the tenderest stories in all of scripture.(9)
Poor woman! Dragged out of bed by a bunch of strange men. Maybe she had had time to wrap a sheet around her as she was led out of the house...maybe not. Paraded down the street, at least partially naked and then finally stopped in front of this wandering preacher. Now, they were asking about whether or not she should be stoned to death.
Why she did not faint from the terror of it all, we will never know. Maybe it was the gentleness in the attitude of the preacher as compared to the fierceness of her captors. Maybe it was the fact that he did not want to embarrass her any more than she already was, and instead of looking at her nakedness, he looked down at the ground and doodled in the dust.
When they asked him about killing her, he said, "Feel free...but only on condition that the one who throws the first stone has never been guilty of anything himself." Hmm. Slowly, the crowd began to thin out. It had become apparent that the excitement was over for today. No stoning.
Finally, only the two of them were left there: the preacher and the woman. He asked what happened to the crowd that wanted to kill her, and she said they had gone. She realized that he was looking at her now, but she was afraid to look at him. She turned her eyes to the ground...in shame. She knew that she had done wrong, and she was sorry. That was all he wanted. There was no scolding, no lecture about breaking the commandments, just two short sentences...to her, and to us who perhaps have done much worse...two short sentences that give us faith in him and renew it in ourselves: "Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again."
Those who have ears, let them hear.
Let us pray.
O God, we are grateful for the knowledge that Jesus did not come to condemn us, but to save us. Help us to share that precious knowledge. Keep us from judging others, and remind us of our own shortcomings when we are tempted. We pray in the name of Jesus. Amen!
1. Deuteronomy 22:29
2. Genesis 29:1-30
3. Leviticus 20:10
4. Deuteronomy 22:13-24
5. Quoted in William Barclay, The Daily Study Bible Series, CD-ROM, (Liguori, MO: Liguori Faithware, used by permission of Westminster/John Knox Press, 1996)
6. Matthew 1:18-25
7. Ephesians 5:28
8. Mark 10:11,12
9. John 8:2-11