The Sanctuary

“A Matrix Gospel” Mark 9:43-47

Guess what? You’re in for a real treat this morning, that is if you think eating broken glass is a delicacy or something. I’m going to deliver a text that I’ve only spoken on once before in over thirty years. So, you can imagine how that went over. We’re going to wade into a passage that’s somewhat troubling, that leaves you whistling through the proverbial graveyard at night. There are some texts that are best left to interpret themselves, or in the privacy of one’s own reading.

Such as this one:

If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell.

Last week, I was thinking about times when I’ve been given the choice between two awful things and the first thought I had was the political one I read on a Facebook post. Someone posted that the choice between Democrats and Republicans feels not unlike the choice between Syphilis and Gonorrhea these days. Whoa.

In our text for today we are seemingly confronted with a similarly unenviable choice, namely the choice between hacking off our own hands and feet or going to hell. Some choice, huh? On the surface it looks like Jesus is saying to us: here is the cost of discipleship – if you really love me you will be willing to hack off your own limbs to avoid making any mistakes. At least that’s what I remember hearing when I was growing up, that if you really love Jesus you would want more than anything in the world to be good enough for him to love you back. And sometimes that might mean hurting yourself.

So, are you willing to cut off a hand, would you literally gouge your own eye out if it made you a person who was worthy of eternal life? Because that’s the level of commitment demanded here. That’s the prescription for following Jesus.

But if that’s what it takes to be a disciple, all I can do is look with despair at these extreme and somewhat creepy demands I can never live up to and wonder why in the world Jesus wants me to hurt myself and not be a whole person. I mean, I love him but I kinda love my hands and feet and eyes too.

But what if this passage in Mark isn’t a discipleship manual. What if it’s not prescriptive. What if it’s descriptive. Maybe it’s not a prescription for how to make yourself a good Christian, but a description of what happens to you, to us, when we are swept up into this kingdom of God thing.

I may not be willing to maim myself in order to be a good person, but I can tell you that God has removed some hellish attitudes in my life that I was so attached to that they felt like parts of my own body.

Maybe the cutting away that Jesus describes is less like some kind of weird self-mutilation of redemptive suffering and is more like being freed from the Matrix. I’m aging myself here, the Matrix was a movie where humans were unwittingly plugged into a computer organism and the characters who had been unplugged, who had been freed from the Matrix were identifiable by scars on the back of their necks because the back of the neck is where they had previously been shackled to the Matrix. When they absolutely chose to have real life and not just be in bondage to the machine, they were unplugged from it. But it hurt like a son of a gun to be unplugged. Like having something cut off of their body, it hurt to have the illusion pulled away. But in exchange, they got life. Real life, not an illusion and with that real life came real freedom and real purpose.

As Morpheus says in the movie, “Wake up Neo, as long as the Matrix exists, the human race will never be free.”

I’ve had things like that in my life. Things that blocked out the light of Christ, but that I was so profoundly attached to that I was sure I’d never survive without them. Everyone of us have had things like that. Someone in an unhealthy relationship that they were so certain that if it ended they’d die, and it ended and they were better off for it. Or like how before an intervention, alcohol was making one’s life hell and yet doing without it was the most terrifying thing they could imagine. They believed they could not possibly function without drinking, as to have the bottle taken from them felt as though their own hand was being cut off.

So, I started to wonder what other things we are so attached to that they feel like essential parts of us but are actually making our lives hell and the very things that we need to be freed from.

Like how sometimes my fear is such a part of me, it is like sinew connected to bone. My self-interest has nerves and veins. My resentments or addictions, or self-loathing or pride can seem like such an embedded essential part of me that they become my own eyes.

This set of eyes may work for us for a while but sometimes we become so attached to them – we become so attached to seeing ourselves and the world in a certain way so when we are forced to change it feels like having an eye gouged out. And yet, sometimes our perspectives need to be cut off. Meaning, when Jesus says that if our eye causes us to stumble, we should gouge it out, that maybe removing our eye means having a viewpoint that we have clung to be taken away. Which, just for the record is pretty much what the word repentance means—it means being changed by seeing things differently. Maybe we could use a good eye-gouging repentance of our perspectives.

Like maybe you’ve always seen yourself as a victim. Or the way your relationship to money, regardless of how much you have is always one of scarcity. Or maybe you see your family of origin in the same way you did 10 or 20 years ago even though perhaps they’ve changed.

Because if these things cause us to stumble, meaning if they get in the way of God doing God’s thing in our lives and in the world, watch out, because God will have no regret about cutting it all away. We may want to keep these viewpoints, keep these ways of seeing ourselves, others and the world but that can be hell. And having them removed can be life. Even if the process is painful.

The freedom provided by living out this Gospel is real. But I respect you guys too much to not admit that the process isn’t usually a pleasant one. It hurts to have things torn from us, to have the bottle taken out of our hands, to have bad relationships end, to have the way we see ourselves and the world change. Even if the result of this cutting away is life and freedom, but to be clear: God cuts and hacks and heals these things not to exercise power or punish—but to free us.

So, I guess I hear this teaching of Jesus like this: If your hand or anything else you think you are so attached to causes you to be in bondage, if your old way of seeing yourself and the world is causing you hell, God may just cut it off; it is better for God to take away that which is killing you than for you to keep it and remain unchanged.

You see, that’s being a disciple. People think Christians look like Ned Flanders: Super-duper clean cut and sparkling with painful politeness, but the world can actually identify us by our wounds.

You wanna see a Christian? look for someone who is figuratively missing a hand.

You wanna spot someone who lives in real Christian freedom? Look for the one-eyed guy.

The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the church in Philipi said, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, sharing in his suffering, conform to his death.” This process of being these one eyed, gimpy, handless disciples—this is what it means to be conformed to Christ. For lest we forget, the very body of our risen Lord was a wounded body.

Which brings me back to Democrats, Republicans and politics in general. Wouldn’t it be a transformative thing if our elected representatives, the people who wield the real influence in this nation, the US Congress— people perhaps attached to the Matrix of power, profit and self-interest, instead of seeking an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth would make this land a better place if they were to lose a metaphoric hand or foot, as though an axe removed from what they are so attached to so, that this nation might have life. But that’s not gonna ever happen, because the things that Washington seeks diametrically opposes God’s rule and his kingdom. What we should pray for is to see more gimpy, one-handed, half-blind disciples who can’t see him or herself and the world the same way again residing in the halls of Congress.

This is the Word of the Lord for the day.

Amen.