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Good morning. As a student I once had to visit a clever but eccentric professor. I found him pacing up and down muttering to himself “Jesus lusted after a woman”. What he was trying to do was think through what it meant for the divine word to be made flesh, that is, for God to be fully human. For it means of course that Jesus shared the same human nature as ourselves, sexual attraction and all. The question for all of us, including him, therefore, is how to manage these powerful desires, as the allegations now being made day by day in Hollywood highlight. and as we have just heard discussed in the conversation in the studio. One of Jesus’ statements is very startling indeed. You have heard that they were told, “Do not commit adultery.” But what I say to you is this: if a man looks at a woman with a lustful eye, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart. That sets the bar very high indeed. But sexual attraction itself cannot be wrong. Its an essential part of us. Without it there would be no evolution and we would not be here. Physical attraction in the widest sense makes us warm to other people. I once said to a gay friend, many years ago when people were far less accepting of gay sexuality, “Don’t you find it difficult when you are strongly attracted to someone else?” “Not all, Richard “, he said “The difficulty is when I am not attracted to them.” He was a man who used his sexuality to build a wide range of warm, very supportive friendships. Sexual attraction is part of us, and as such part of God’s good creation. If we gave thanks for what attracts us in other people perhaps there would be less of that predatory lust which Jesus condemned. At the same time all religions and all human societies recognise that because of its sheer strength sexual expression needs to be disciplined and our society, quite properly stresses the need for genuine consent. One of the most moving aspects of the Gospels is the positive attitude of Jesus to women in a culture when this was not always the case. St John’s Gospel records Jesus asking for a drink from a Samaritan woman and having a serious respectful conversation with her even though she admitted having had five husbands and was then living with someone who was not her husband. When his disciples returned, the gospel records that “they were astonished to find him talking to a woman.” Then, it was another woman, Mary Magdalene, to whom he appeared first of all after his resurrection. Laws, rules, and codes of conduct, are essential. But even more crucially is what goes on in our heads, and how we think of other people in the first place- as sexual objects or people to be respected.