When running for president, Jimmy Carter once confessed that, while he’d never bodily cheated on his wife, he was guilty of lusting in his heart. This came to light in an interview he did with Playboy, and opened him up to a steady string of quips and jokes that has never quite abated: in connection to the magazine, or perhaps just in general, people found this declaration to be quaint, even puritan. But Carter wasn’t going far off the books in drawing this distinction; in fact, he drew the notion of lust as adultery directly from scripture.
Carter knew then, and has amply proven since, that despite the grandeur of his career he’s only ever been just human. He thought himself qualified for the highest office in the nation; but he also considered himself a Christian, and drew from that association a need for deep humility, and a recognition that trying hard doesn’t always result in moral perfection. We learn from our readings today that, as Carter reminded us, it’s not enough to have avoided the deed; we have to expunge the desire from our consciousness.
We’re driven by seemingly different theological realities: we’re given gospel imperatives to clothe ourselves in humility and strive for moral perfection; simultaneously, the example of Jesus as the only living being who has ever achieved perfection, and who derived it from his divine nature and hardly from his humanity, assures us that we’re destined not to get there in our lifetime. Atonement became necessary because humanity could not; God did for us what we proved incapable of doing ourselves.
So, what are these verses and their repeated dualities? Are they invitations to throw up our hands in despair over our inherent depravity and give up trying? Are they an excuse for checking out of moral discussions and doing what we will, because Jesus has done the hard work for us anyway? Some have interpreted them so; there are Christian traditions which have believed that Jesus’ erasure of sin was so total that nothing we do, even decidedly negative things, can have the slightest impact: salvation is assured despite us.
But we’ve always wanted, in general, to believe something more complex—that the gift of atonement is not despite us, but wholly for us: a gift of grace so thorough that attempting to deserve it threatens the fragility of its beauty, and risks obscuring God’s great love. Whether we deserve what God gives is a moot question—we know we cannot; whether we can bring ourselves to live in grateful light of it is the more rewarding, and complex, task.
So we’re showered with dualities this week, as a reminder. Deuteronomy gives us the classic, life and death: “If you obey…by loving the LORD your God and walking in [God’s] ways,…then you shall live and become numerous; but if your heart turns away…you shall perish,” we’re told, in the shadow of Sinai, with the glorious history of the exodus looming (Deuteronomy 30:16, 18). We know that this dual image is more than what it starkly denotes: at Sinai and beyond, human beings have proved themselves never entirely collectively capable of either always obeying, or even always loving, God. We’re human creatures; we cannot generate perfection; even when we try our hardest, we don’t make it entirely there.
Deuteronomy knows that moral perfection isn’t a summit that humans can reach, and mark; it locates success in the climb. At every turn, Deuteronomy says, life and death, blessings and curses are before us; are job at every moment is to choose life, and choose life, and choose it again. And the Torah knows that we will sometimes falter, but does not suggest that a stumble is eternal; there still remains the task of the next turn, to choose again.
Sirach fleshes out these complexities by offering that God, though in divine wisdom knowing that we’ll sometimes falter, gives no one permission to sin; the choice between “fire and water” is available, but we’re expected to choose water, to choose that which feeds a life in God (Sirach 15:20, 16). When we manage to choose it, we briefly transcend the fleshly existence Paul talks of—water represents the realm of God, obscurity and moral thirst is the realm of humans (1 Corinthians 3:3). And Matthew explores how complex the choice is: not always black and white, the nuances of our choices are innumerable and sometimes difficult to discern, so that adultery is not, as Carter intimated, simply one kind of thing, but is even implicit in the movement towards a kind of thing; so that swearing falsely doesn’t happen simply when the words leave your mouth, but begins when it occurs to a person simply to swear by anything (Matthew 5:27,28, 34).
Simultaneous to the introduction of any choice are the twin births of choosing righteously, and choosing brokenly; we can choose brokenly, the option is always there. Part of our job as Christians is to discern the correct option, and embrace it; but faith alone is not a guarantee that we’ll be able to do this inerrantly. The Bible serves as a guide, but believing that we’re always perfectly familiar with its guidance reflects arrogance bound to trip us up.
It is sometimes painful to admit that our politicians have the ability to, on occasion, utter truths. It seems to contradict what we’ve come to expect of their jobs; it defies the cynicism we’ve come to find implicit in political discussions. But all of us, in all positions, remain only human; presidents, like us all, have choices before them, between fire and water, between stoking poor inclinations and putting them out. Carter repeated an important truth in the Christian story in his infamous interview, and it’s one that has deserved its repetition; not because it exposed him as a curiosity or an anomaly, but because it exposed him as a Christian, as a person trying. It’s not our place to judge how successful he’s been at those pursuits; we have only to remember that the intricate obedience he alluded to is something we, too, should pursue.
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