Removing limbs

Removing limbs March 9, 2012

Jesus says we should deal with lust with violent decisiveness. If the eye, or the hand, or any other body part offends, it should be removed. The motivation Jesus gives is that it is better for us to enter life disabled than to have our entire body burned in the lake of fire.

Is Jesus teaching a sexual ethic centered on self-interest? Is he telling us to avoid lust for our own good? That’s certainly part of it. But I think there are other things going on here.

First, we can think about Jesus’ sexual commandments in the light of what He says about logs and specks later in the Sermon. There, we remove the log that damages our vision not only for the sake of seeing clearly (self-interest) but more specifically to be able to see clearly to remove specks from our brothers’ eyes. Self-interest is a subordinate, penultimate aim; we heal our own eyes so that we can heal others’ eyes. We might find the same dynamic in chapter 5: Can a man serve a woman if his eye is full of lust, if all he wants to do is to jockey for sexual advantage? Is a man useful to others if his body is serving the idol Sex? Removing a log from the eye is a kind of surgery; removing the eye is a more radical surgery, but the goal is the same: A healed body that is a servant of righteousness rather than sin.

Second, the sacrificial overtones of Jesus’ instructions ought not to be missed. A man who doesn’t deal with his lust is going to be a sacrifice; he will be thrown entire into the fire of hell. But that is not the proper sort of sacrifice. A sacrifice never involves burning a whole body on the altar. The body of the animal is always cut up, dismembered, limbs torn and burned. We become acceptable living sacrifices by tearing off offensive limbs, by taking up the cross and denying ourselves. If we don’t do that, we aren’t following the sacrificial procedures and our sacrifice will be a stench before God. Sacrifice is de-constitution and re-constitution. We cannot offer ourselves whole on the altar because we aren’t pure sacrifices. We need to be cut into pieces, laid in the fire, so that we can be transformed from flesh to smoke, which is to say, from flesh to Spirit.


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