This is a hard Gospel.
The Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany If Your Eye Causes Sin… Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ! Amen. In today’s Gospel Jesus says concerning everyone (Matthew 5:22, 28, 32), “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.” Dear Christian friends, We should think of these Words in today’s Gospel as a figure of speech. I do not really like figures of speech, especially in the Scriptures, mostly because figures of speech are hard to understand. I cannot see many other options for today’s Gospel. Some people have taken Jesus literally when He says, “Tear your eye out and cut your hand off.” They have lopped off their offending members, only to discover that their problem with sin did not go away when their body part did. That is because the real cause of our sin does not reside the eye or hand. Jesus declares elsewhere, “Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder and adultery” (Matthew 15:19); and again, “Their heart is far from Me” (Matthew 15:9). We know from other Scriptures that Jesus does NOT wish for us to do violence to our physical bodies. Jesus is the creator of our physical bodies. In my mother’s womb He has knit together my body and soul, eyes, ears and all my members, my reason and all my senses. What God has joined together, let no man separate. Luther might have been on to something when he stated that today’s Gospel speaks more about the spiritual than the physical (AE 212, 91). That is to say, we do not literally pluck out that physical mass of flesh seated in the eye socket. Instead, we must each turn a blind eye toward our neighbor’s vulnerability, rather than exploit our neighbor for the sake of our own sensations. Again, it would be far better for us to act as if we have no hands, than to raise our hand against our neighbor for his destruction and our gain. But now we are talking about surgery that only the Word of God is able to do. May God grant such surgery for the sake of our Lord Jesus! The question is, why would Jesus jump into a figure of speech here in His Sermon on the Mount, especially when He has just been so clear and simple about the sins of anger and adultery? Perhaps our Lord wants to make certain that no one escapes the condemnation He speaks in His Ten Commandments. What I mean is this: · An argument could be made that our Lord’s Words about adultery apply somewhat more to men than to women. Jesus said, “Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent,” and those Words seem to imply “every man.” · It might be easier to include women in our Lord’s Words about anger. I am not the one who coined the three-hundred year-old saying, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” (Too many men just nodded in agreement.) But these sweeping generalizations about anger and adultery can still allow some people to slip through the cracks. So, too, with our Lord’s later Words about divorce: children, for example, might not yet plead guilty to any of these things. No one escapes our Lord’s figures of speech. These Words apply as much to eyes and hands in the cookie jar as they do eyes and hands upon someone’s wife: If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. For all of the difficulty in determining what exactly they mean, our Lord’s figures of speech nevertheless provide us with certain benefits. For example, if I cannot determine what exactly something means in the Scriptures, it indicates that I will never become a master of the Scriptures. It is disquieting and uncomfortable, not to know the meaning every single thing that God has written. Still, it is necessary that the things of God remain larger than we are able to comprehend (Isaiah 558-9, Philippians 4:7). Otherwise, our presumption would destroy us. At the very least, when Jesus says, “Tear your eye out and cut your hand off,” we should understand that our eyes and our hands simply cannot be trusted. Perhaps this figure of speech will have the good result of causing us to trust only our Lord’s eyes and His hands, rather than our own: hands pierced through for our forgiveness and life; eyes that look lovingly and forbearingly upon us, despite our guilt. As Jesus said in another place, “See My hands… Do not disbelieve, but believe.” _______________________________________________ Sermons mailing list Sermons@cat41.org http://cat41.org/mailman/listinfo/sermons
