Adultery(02)

When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this. He answered, "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. (Mark 10:10, 11)

In the last paragraph of yesterday’s mediation, I mentioned being a prisoner of greediness for sexual desire was a more serious status than to desert a wife. However, we can not control the desire in our own choice. It is because the desire is a fundamental and structural fact ingrained in a man.

I do not explain here the concept of Freud's libido in detail. Though I do not mention such classical theory, clearly sexual desire working in a species named human is incomparably more powerful than other animal. Sex business and pornography business will never disappear as long as human civilization continues though the activity of the business may fluctuate depending on ages and environment. Sexual desire is the primitive phenomena.

The primitive phenomena usually have two sides. It sublimates life into transcendental level but it also destroys life. Simply speaking, the former is a formal sexual relationship which generally occurs between two lovers and the latter is a sort of sexual violence. We can not categorize sexual phenomena into two like drawing a line with a scale. Like man's unconsciousness, sex is a primitive life phenomenon and does not seem to reveal to us completely.

The matter is not the primitive phenomena of sex but the ethical one. Adultery of today's content can be discussed only our ethical life inside. In the primitive community, there might not be the concept of adultery. Entering into this civilization, we have to find out the way to reduce the conflict between a primitive instinct and ethics so as to create an affluent society. The passive answer for this quest is the warning against adultery in today's content.

Adultery(01)

When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this. He answered, "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. (Mark 10:10,11)

If a first part of divorce paused by verse 9, a second part of it begins from verse 10. If the first part is for the Pharisees then the second part is for his disciples. We don’t exactly know why the author of Mark’s gospel divided a plot of this theme in this way though it doesn’t have much difference in between two. Was it a literary device to extent the theme?

Outwardly the disciples asked Jesus when they were in the house. They were unsatisfied with Jesus answer for the Pharisees. Jesus answered “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her.” All of sudden, a stream of story seems to go to the extreme way. It transfers from theoretical discussion to practical discussion, from past Moses’ law to daily life of today.

If we look into this story a little more precisely, the second part has a different situation to the first part. The first is mere divorce but the second is ‘being discarded’. Divorce and being discarded is different. The former is legal but the latter is one-sided one. It is not clear that the author of Mark’s gospel distinguished it clearly. It might be another tradition and flowed into this story by the author. In this point, the authors of gospel are great theologians for they were able to sort, analyze and edit the traditions about Jesus.

To desert wife is a sort of result. Before doing this, a husband already became a prisoner of sexual desire at the extreme level. He became a blind for sexual desire. He is planning to desert his wife with various reasons. Mark’s gospel calls it as ‘adultery’.