Did you grow up feeling really squeamish about Jesus’ assertion from the Sermon on the Mount that if our eye offends us, we are supposed to gouge it out? I sure did. It seems particularly over the top, even for a radical like Jesus, and I reckon that we’d assume the only people to follow that teaching are probably mentally disturbed. But I think there’s something really deep and really valuable that is hiding in that brief teaching, and I’d love to open it up for our thinking today.
Every now and then, God just drops something on me with no warning, with no context, unconnected to anything else I’m doing, and this morning was one of those moments. And today it seemed like something worth sharing with you. But first, let me briefly set the stage.
I grew up in a fairly evangelical, slightly fundamentalist culture. While we certainly believed that God gave us unmerited favor through Jesus, there was quite a bit of structure underlying the grace. I suppose it would be fair to say that I inherited a theology full of behavioral rules, thinly layered over with grace if we broke the rules.
Put a bit differently, our morality was always determined by proximity to boundaries.
In some ways it was epitomized by Matthew 23:23, by those of whom Jesus says “You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill, and cumin.” Their morality was weighed out down to the infinitesimal size of a ground-up speck of spice. Too little, and they were sinning. Just a speck more, and suddenly they were right with God. If their head was not properly covered, they were sinning. Just a bit more cloth, and they were righteous.
But as I was slowly coming to wakefulness this morning, God dropped something totally new on me, where a verse I’ve known for years suddenly had new meaning to me. I just realized the hidden magnificence and brilliance of , where Jesus says “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.“
Any good fundamentalist or evangelical knows that verse. We quote it all the time about avoiding lust. But what God dropped on me had nothing to do with its traditional use.
What’s so earthshaking here isn’t the idea that we should mutilate ourselves to avoid sin. That’s a trivial understanding, and probably not really what Jesus was after. No. This verse is about so, so much more than our eyeballs, or even about lust.
It’s that in just a few words Jesus instantly and permanently took away our ability to point at someone else’s boundary as the basis of our sin.
It’s not about how much ankle, or shoulder, or cleavage, or sideboob, or nipple, or even genitals they are showing. It’s what happens inside of us.
It’s not about how much meat they are eating, or which particular deity that meat was devoted to honoring. It’s about what happens inside of us.
It’s not about whether they bump into us in line, or shove us aside, or force us to serve unfairly, or slap us on the cheek. It’s about what happens inside of us.
In that short sentence, Jesus forever internalized the matter of sin, removing our permission to externalize that problem to either our neighbor or our enemy. It took away our permission to blame anyone other than ourselves. He was speaking to the most religious of His day – the ones most concerned with strict boundary maintenance.
And similarly today, there’s a certain segment of American Christianity that is striving to implement a boundary-based definition of morality on society. They’re trying to draw public lines on behavior, and codify them in law, so that at a societal level they can look at themselves and say “we are moral. We are righteous. We are holy. God is our Lord and our society will be favored by God because we don’t cross these lines.”
But Matthew 5:29 is missing from that framework. They’re trying to step backwards into counting the mint and dill and cumin, and once again using THAT as the basis for their holiness, when Jesus actually rejected the effectiveness of that boundary maintenance.
And later in Matthew 7:12, in the exact same sermon, Jesus personalizes this principle – “do unto others as you would have them do to you.” He later drove it home in Matthew 22:36-40 as the second great commandment – “love your neighbor as yourself.” The ultimate commandments about our righteousness are first loving God, but then we see a matter of our response to others, not their treatment of us. Nowhere in this crucial foundation that undergirds all the rest of the moral codes is anything about what the other person does to us. There’s no permission for mistreating someone else, no matter what choices they make, no matter what moral code they live by. That revealing cleavage or sacrificed meat or cheek slap has no bearing on anyone’s standing with God – unless we allow it to cause us to treat them unlovingly.
All of this boundary-building, all the fundamentalism that’s being attempted, is a desire to ensure that our society is honoring God. But in Matthew 22:37, Jesus didn’t say that the greatest commandment was to HONOR God. It was LOVING God with every fiber of our being. And I think there’s a foundational difference between those two. “Honoring” will always carry with it a sense of obeying, of following rules, of keeping boundaries, of behavior, of external matters. But “loving” will always carry with it a sense of heart, of what’s going on inside of us, of internal matters.
And it’s really hard to measure love.
And it’s also really, really hard – no, it’s impossible – to write laws about whether we’re loving God or man enough.
And that’s ultimately the difference between a fundamentalist mindset and grace. Fundamentalism needs boundaries to define righteousness. It needs to externalize every problem to something that can be measured and observed.
But in Matthew 5:29 Jesus stripped away our permission to externalize our morality. He made it a matter of what’s going on inside our own heart, with respect to loving God and loving neighbor.
And the problem with fundamentalism is that it masks the internal; one might say that it even makes the internal irrelevant. And this is what Jesus was spotlighting in Matthew 23:23, with his comment about the minutia of tithing mint and dill and cumin. They were so concerned with the external that they missed the internal.
Here’s an important principle: having a behavior code always gives people permission to focus on behavior as the basis for their morality.
I watched this play out in 2020, as my church responded to COVID. Our leadership – and I was a key part of that leadership – obsessed on whether it was strictly following the government’s rules, but then all too soon forgot the effect that its choices would have on the people. When the government said it was safe again, all the masking and social distancing principles were instantly dropped, effectively disenfranchising all the elderly and infirm for whom masking was essential to protect them from serious illness and possible death. And I had been so proud of them – of us – for masking early on, unlike the churches that insisted on freedom at the expense of becoming “superspreaders.” And three people died as a direct result of an unsafe meeting. No, watching my church act out the counting of cumin and dill showed me that we were actually externalizing our morality. It wasn’t about what was best for others. It wasn’t about loving our neighbor.
And so I suddenly realized in 2021 that my church had lost the opportunity to teach its members the true meaning of Matthew 5:29 and Matthew 7:12, to focus on how we’re treating others more than what they’re doing to us, or whether their morality meets our behavior standards.
And here’s where it gets tricky. Recently I was talking with a friend about grace, and my sense that it’s often impossible to draw a line on behavior that we can point to as good or evil, and how ultimately the metric is whether we’re faithfully living out what the Spirit has revealed to us. He looked shocked and said “but that leads to license! People can do whatever they want, and nobody can call it wrong!”
Well, let me be the first to say that he HAS recognized something important.
But he’s not the first to notice that – in fact, the Apostle Paul discussed this very challenge in 1 Corinthians 8:1–13 and 1 Corinthians 10:25–27, talking about one’s conscience when eating meat sacrificed to idols. The issue of grace arises here: when two believers have different understandings of what is right and proper, how do we resolve the conflict?
Unsurprisingly, the answer is at the core of what Jesus had been teaching: we love our neighbor, more than we insist on our own way. We treat them as we would want to be treated.
Most pointedly, we don’t get to draw a boundary for someone else. Paul refused to tell the Corinthians that they were right to eat the meat without qualms. Rather than picking sides in the debate, he instead corrected their own attitudes, their own internals. We don’t make our holiness – or other’s holiness – a matter of boundaries of behavior. Put differently, we don’t externalize morality. What matters is how we respond internally. Are we faithful to Jesus? Are we giving grace and love to our neighbor?
In fact, backing up from Matthew 7:12, to just a few sentences earlier in Jesus’ sermon, are his words from Matthew 7:1 – “do not judge.“
And that goes beyond not judging their behavior, their external morality. It goes also to not judging their intent, their thoughts, their heart.
We have to leave their relationship with God to them and God.
So let me close by going back to Matthew 5:29, “if your right eye causes you to sin.” Jesus’ words are all about what WE do with what we see in others, about how WE respond to what they do, not about what THEY do. Let’s stop counting the spices, and start unconditionally loving those around us. To paraphrase another of Jesus’ metaphors, let’s worry about the log in our own eye, not the speck in our neighbor’s. And if our eye sees something that offends us, let’s focus on our own internal response, not what we see externally in others.
Thanks for spending some time with me today. If you found this useful, I’d love it if you shared it with someone, and drop me a like or a comment. We’ll talk again soon.
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