�鶹��

Available for over a year

Good morning. As another male celebrity is in the spotlight for allegedly engaging in acts of sexual abuse and rape, I find one Bible verse playing through my mind. In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says to his listeners: “I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” I’ve sometimes regretted that that verse seems to condemn the flirtatious eroticism that can be part of healthy sexual attraction between adults. But this weekend, I’ve been thinking of it in terms of what some people call “the male gaze”: an attitude that objectifies women as sexual commodities. The Bible is full of paradoxes, but shining through the Gospels with little ambiguity is the extent to which Jesus counted women among his most faithful followers and friends. He subverted concepts of male authority vested in ideas of divinity, kingship, and political and religious leadership with models of loving service, friendship, and care for those who were poor and exploited. When a woman was caught in adultery, he turned the focus back on her accusers, saying let the one without sin cast the first stone. I wonder if there’s an implicit suggestion that the male adulterer was in the mob, braying for the woman to be stoned. So often, in situations of sexual abuse, the woman is blamed. Along with many modern biblical scholars, I read the story of the creation of humankind in the Book of Genesis as a multi-facetted myth which brings into play many interpretative possibilities. Yet throughout Christian history, it has most often been interpreted as a story of the sexual temptress, Eve, bringing sin and death into the world through her seduction of Adam. Such ideas have insinuated themselves deeply into our culture. Time and again women decide not to report their attackers because they know they risk being disbelieved or even blamed. Predatory masculinity still finds hidden places to flourish in many of our religious and secular institutions, including in the Catholic Church to which I belong. I long for the day when my church reflects that community of equals exemplified by Jesus in the Gospels. Then it would have a credible voice to speak out with and for all victims of sexual violence and abuse, just as it already does for other victims such as refugees, the homeless, and those who are poor. But sadly, in an institution still challenged by so many stories of misogyny and sex abuse, another saying of Jesus comes to mind, also from the Sermon on the Mount: “first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”