"If your right hand causes you to sin...."

In today's gospel, Jesus talks about purposely maiming and crippling ourselves in order to avoid sinning - cutting off appendages and ripping out eyes. Although I've read or heard this passage many times, I always treated it as hyperbole - Jesus using an absurdly extreme illustration in order to hammer home a point He was trying to make. But today a couple of things occurred to me that I hadn't ever considered before. One, Jesus took sin very seriously. That's evident in all of His teaching. And even though He frequently used images from ordinary life to get His point across, He doesn't seem to have been prone to exaggeration. In fact, the thought came to me today that, as wildly extreme as His illustration is in this passage, it may not go far enough to really express the desperate need to avoid sin. It could be that Jesus felt limited by the constraints of language and was frustrated that this image was the best He could do to convey this truth.

Secondly, I thought about what His listeners must have been thinking. In those times, to be physically handicapped was to be relegated to a life of abject poverty, begging for alms to survive, being an outcast from society - without friends or maybe even family to help. You would be pushed or kicked aside daily by anyone who was more powerful than you - and, if you were crippled, that would be pretty much anyone and everyone. In short, your life would be a miserable hell. And Jesus tells His hearers that this is better than sinning. So - how horrible is sin, really, if a life of misery is preferable?

I don't think the Lord found words sufficiently strong to tell us how bad sin is. He did the best He could with the available vocabulary - and He painted a picture that even today, centuries later, shocks us when we take the time to look more closely at it and don't just dismiss it.

Then there's the knowledge that I sin - every day. Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.