Sermon Tone Analysis

In May 2018, in a Connecticut hospital, a group of twelve surgeons worked for five hours to remove a tumor from the abdomen of a thirty-eight-year-old woman.

That may seem like a lot of doctors and a long time for a single tumor—until you learn that single tumor weighed 132 pounds!

The patient reported that, prior to the surgery, the tumor had grown at a rate of ten pounds per week.

That’s forty pounds a month!

“Ovarian mucinous tumors tend to be big,” said Dr. Vaagn Andikyan, who was the lead surgeon on the team.

“But tumors this big are exceedingly rare in the literature.

It may be in the top 10 or 20 tumors of this size removed worldwide.”

The tumor was technically benign, but it was far from harmless.

According to Dr. Andikyan, the patient couldn’t walk, she was malnourished because she’d been unable to eat, and she was at extreme danger for blood clots and other blood-vessel-related damage.

Her very life was in jeopardy.

“When I first walked into the examination room . . .

I saw fear in the patient’s eyes,” Dr. Andikyan said.

“She was so hopeless, because she had seen several other doctors, and they were unable to help her.”

Can you imagine trying to go about your day with a 132-pound weight dragging you down from the inside?

Can you imagine the pressure that must have built up in and around that poor woman—the squeezing, maddening, crushing pressure?

But then can you imagine what that patient must have felt like the day after the surgery?

The week after?

Can you imagine the change that must have taken place after a 132-pound burden was removed?

“She’s back to a normal life, she’s back to work,” the doctor said.

“And when I saw her in my office, I saw smiles, I saw hope, and I saw a happy woman who is back to her normal life and her family.”

Wouldn’t you like to experience that kind of joy?

That kind of freedom?

I have.

And believe me, it’s as wonderful as it sounds.

Vance Pitman, Unburdened: Stop Living for Jesus So Jesus Can Live through You, Baker Books, 2020.

We come to texts like today’s with all of our baggage, which often makes these things hard to read.

Sometimes we automatically shut down because of how the words have been used to perpetuate damaging patriarchal ideas about modesty.

This baggage can cause us to look at this text through a lens of unnecessary—yet still very real—debilitating shame.

Or sometimes we come to a text like today’s with an overwhelming sense of guilt over things we’ve done or the ways we’ve failed.

Maybe it’s something from a distant past that is still close enough to cause unease.

Sometimes we come to this text with immense anger because we carry the baggage of watching a marriage fall apart due to adultery.

Or maybe because we are a child who was born from an affair, which makes it so hard to read this text without feeling some sort of weight.

The truth is, this is a text that is hard to separate from our baggage—but we should try because there is something here for us to wrestle with, something that is important for us to know.

And maybe it is even more important for us to wrestle with because of the ways it has been misused, so we can discover the way this passage should truly be about restoration, love, and respecting the image of God in others.

If we take the time to work through this text and what it truly means, maybe we will begin to unpack some of the unnecessary baggage we’ve been carrying as well.

Defining Lust

The dictionary gives us two versions of definition for the word lust.

The first is in the case of it being a noun - very strong sexual desire.

The second is in the case of it being used as a verb - have a very strong sexual desire for someone.

The Greek word translated as “lust” here is a verb, not a noun.

We typically use nouns and adjectives to describe emotions, but a verb describing the action of lusting emphasizes the fact that it is more than just having certain feelings or emotions.

It isn’t just a passing glance noticing someone’s beauty, but instead it is a conspiring and planning to possess someone for your own ends.

In fact, the root of the word is the same root as the word for “covet,” which is a strong, sinful desire to have something that does not belong to you—and often the willingness to do whatever it takes to get it.

We are forbid to covet in the ten commandments.

In fact, Moses forbid the Israelites from coveting a neighbor’s property, which in that time includes a man’s wife.

Our culture often thinks of lust as the beginning of love, but that is a mistake.

If lust is linked to coveting as the Greek root implies, then lust cannot lead to love; it can only lead to sin.

Jesus calls us to a transformed heart that loves the other perfectly and is not enslaved to a sexual desire that uses the opposite sex to gratify itself, such as in acts of adultery.

Reexamining what lust means is incredibly important for deconstructing the baggage we bring to this text.

Jesus is trying to humanize women in a culture that often dehumanizes them.

A helpful story for us, in wrestling with this text, is the narrative of the woman caught in adultery in John 8.

The religious leaders bring a woman to be stoned for committing adultery.

We all know it takes at least two people to commit adultery, yet only the woman is held accountable according to this text.

Jesus says the famous words, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her,” and in response, the leaders drop their stones.

Another helpful story to contextualize this text is the Old Testament story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38.

While there are many complex ethical questions worthy of attention in this story, what’s important today is the fact that Judah knowingly has sex with a woman he presumes is a prostitite, then seeks to have his daughter-in-law burned to death for her adultery when he finds out about her pregnancy.

He only backs down upon discovering the children are his, from his own sin.

This Old Testament story illustrates once again how a patriarchal society is eager to lay blame solely at the feet of women for the sin of adultery.

In Matthew 5, Jesus seeks to emphasize the shared responsibility of men in adultery in a culture that has a tendency to scapegoat women.

These are just a couple of examples, but there are other biblical examples as well.

Patriarchal societies often hold women responsible for the sexual ethics of the men around them.

In Matthew 5 Jesus shifts that focus from women to the covetous act of male lust toward women.

Jesus is calling men to stop treating the women around them as mere objects.

Responsibility for Sin

Let’s take another look at verses 29 and 30:

I also want to read these in the Message paraphrase:

That puts it in a bit of plain English for us doesn't it!

“If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.”

Consider these words.

They seem like incredibly harsh words, and they are often interpreted as hyperbole, but when we examine them in the context of the definition of lust, they seem far less exaggerative.

These are drastic words intended to prevent a tragic act.

Coveting another human (lust) leads down a path toward rape or other forms of sexual violence, abuse, manipulation, and control.

Friends - it happens all around us, we often just aren’t noticing it since we are not looking for it.

In fact, did you know that Green Bay is one corner of a fairly significant human trafficking triangle between Minneapolis and Chicago?

Jesus’s harsh words here show the lengths to which someone should go in order to prevent inflicting their own sin upon others.

While the hyperbole isn’t meant to be taken literally, the meaning behind it absolutely is: if your desires are leading you to victimize others, do whatever you need to do to keep that from happening.

This is one area where we struggle as a culture.

Instead of helping people find freedom from their sin, we often cause them to push their desires down deeper, repressing them, pretending they don’t exist.

Then we are caught off guard when “heroes” of ours are found caught up in sexual sin even though we haven’t created any sort of “eye-gouging” systems for them.

We must create spaces for people to talk about the places they are struggling, in order to address the root of the problem.

What if the church truly became a safe space for confession?

Where we confessed individually and corporately in ways that helped us not to bury things within us (which never leads to good), but instead where we were confessional by our very nature and rallied around each other in prayer and accountability?

These safe spaces I’m referring to also include accountability systems, mental health resources, systems of corporate confession, encouraging true repentance, and systems of restitution.

A culture must be created and fostered that humanizes others and roots out the type of toxicity that leads to lust in the first place.

We have struggled with this in the past, evidenced by our tendency to blame victims.

Modesty culture that focuses on women is an example.

Another example is the way women are shamed and blamed for certain sexual ethics while their male counterparts are applauded and celebrated for the exact same actions.

These are not new—these patterns and systems are evident in biblical narratives too.

Ever heard the term “boys will be boys?”

We cannot stand for attitudes such as this!

It’s important to note that the blame for lust lies with the one who is lusting— not the objects or victims of that lust.

The verse is speaking to the sinner: “gouge out your eye,” not “ask your victim to cover up.”

This is an incredibly important distinction.

We are responsible for our own sins.

We are responsible for the consequences of our actions, however, we would much rather blame others than deal with our own sins.

If we take following Jesus seriously, we will do what we can to care for others.

Jesus affirms repeatedly, with both his words and his actions throughout the Gospels, that women aren’t objects or worth less than men but are created equally in the image of God.

Thus, they should be treated with the same respect and dignity as men.

Galatians 3:28 is a helpful reminder for us here.The kingdom of God includes women and men together, as equals.

Lent is a season that is designed to “gouge out eyes.”