Better to Go In Missing Something

This comes straight out of an argument. The disciples had been debating which of them was the greatest, and Jesus answered by standing a small child in the middle of the room, picking him up, and saying that welcoming a child like this one was welcoming him. What follows is what he says about people who do the opposite.

Better, he tells them, to be thrown into the sea with a millstone hung around your neck. Not the small hand mill. The large kind, the sort a donkey turns. Nobody swims out of that, and nobody sitting there thought otherwise.

Then it gets harder. If your hand makes you sin, cut it off. Your foot, cut it off. Your eye, take it out. Better to go into life crippled, he says, than to keep everything you were born with and be thrown into hell.

That is as harsh out loud as it looks on the page. It is meant to be.

He is not giving surgical instructions, and the reason sits inside what he has just said. Cutting off a hand would not fix anything, because the hand is not where the trouble starts. If it were, the operation would work, and every man in that room knew it does not. So he is measuring rather than prescribing. Whatever it costs to stay out of that place, pay it, and he reaches for the most extreme picture he can find because he means it to land.

The word we read as hell here is the name of a real place. A ravine ran just outside Jerusalem, the Valley of Ben-hinnom, and its history in the older books is genuinely awful: people burned their own children there in the fire. A king later tore the site apart so that nobody could use it again. Everybody listening knew that valley and knew what had happened in it, and he was pointing at somewhere they could walk to. The line about the worm that never dies and the fire that is never quenched is a quotation, the last verse of Isaiah, the closing sentence of that whole scroll.

Then a sentence nobody has ever fully explained: everyone will be salted with fire. People who love this book have argued over that line for a very long time, the passage does not settle it, and we will not pretend it does. His last words here are not hard at all.

Have salt among yourselves, and be at peace with one another.

He started this with twelve men arguing about who was greatest. He ends it by telling them to stop.