Well-fed lusty stallions; that is quite the image. The abundance received from God has not left Israel grateful and beholding to God, but lusting for more. That's something we know about in our society. How is it that people who are quite wealthy, folks such as Martha Stewart or Bernie Madoff, still break the law, hurt others, and risk imprisonment so as to get more? Why do people with a nice home and cars spend themselves into crushing debt in order to have a bigger and fancier home and finer cars?
I feel a bit lusty myself from time to time. Not for my neighbor's wife, but I walk into a store and see a TV with a bigger screen than the one I have, and I want it. I see a snazzier smart phone or a new iPad, and I want one.
For reasons that I've always struggled to understand, many religious people tend to be overly fixated on lust of the sexual sort. But of course Jeremiah is speaking of Israel's unfaithfulness with God, not talking about sexual deviance. And the fact that Jesus speaks so often about our relationship to money, possessions, and wealth, and hardly at all about sex, seems to confirm where our real lust problems are.
I'm no expert on this, but lust, of all sorts, seems to bespeak something missing in a person's life. There is a real or imagined hole that the a person is desperate to fill. Unfortunately our lusts often lead us to fill the emptiness in our lives with that which does not satisfy. And we quickly need another fix.
The only way out of the need for such fixes is something that does satisfy deeply. And Jesus says that the answer is loving God with all our being and loving our neighbor as ourselves. Lusts aren't about relationships. They are about things or people we've objectified into things. But love is something else altogether.
Too often, Christian faith is understood to be about believing the correct things. But Jesus says it is about relationship. Jesus says it is about love.
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