Cut Off Your Hands and Feet, and Pluck Out Your Eyes-- Really?
by Deacon Bob Schnell
One of the difficult things about reading scripture is to ascertain the true intent of the words-- are we to take them literally, or are they words intended in a metaphorical or illustrative way. It would be easy, of course, if we could just say that we should do what the Bible says we should do, or at least what Jesus says we should do. But that simply isn't the case. Today's reading from Mark's Gospel (Mk 9: 41- 50) proves the point. Jesus tells His followers, which presumably extends to us, that if our hand causes us to sin we should cut if off. If our foot causes us to sin, we should cut it off. And if our eye causes us to sin, we should pluck it out. I have no doubt that all of us have had body parts that cause us to sin (at least in some sense), particularly our eyes (see, e.g., pornography), but I have never heard of someone plucking out their eyes because the eyes cause sin. We have an intuitive sense that Jesus did not mean His words to be taken literally, just as we have an intuitive sense that Jesus did not want people to take literally His discussion in Matthew 19:12 about men making themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. Historians still argue about whether early third-century theologian Origen took the phrase literally and castrated himself, a possibility that causes us to recoil in disgust. But the fact that what Jesus is saying was not intended to be taken literally does not mean that we should just ignore it. In using these dramatic metaphors Jesus is trying to get our attention. He wants us to act as if we had done the thing He discusses in a metaphorical sense. He wants us to ignore those sources of sin in our lives as if they no longer existed, and He wants us to deal with those sources of sin in a way that is as dramatic as cutting off a hand or foot, or plucking out an eye. What are the sources of sin in our lives and if we really wanted to get rid of them, what would we do? Are we willing to do something powerful, drdamatic, life-altering, something as powerful as cutting off a limb or plucking out an eye? That's the question Jesus wants us to ponder today.