Biblical Wanderings: Mark 9:43-48

“If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and enter into Gehenna: into the unquenchable fire, where the worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched. If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off.  It is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two feet and be cast into Gehenna: where the worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched. 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 cast into Gehenna: where the worm never dies, and the fire is not quenched.”

It’s always a challenge for me to structure these writings. If I walk in with a structure in mind, then there’s no truth to it. It’s hollow. I’m running an experiment with the conclusion already written - I have to warp everything to fit into the structure. A neat little moral conclusion to satisfy you readers - to satisfy me, too! I need some answers. But we have to start with some questions.

First off: what is Jesus talking about here when he talks about cutting off body parts? I’ve already challenged myself to start with the literal meaning, but this has always seemed too gruesome to me. I’ll start with a milder image, then. I remember seeing an interview of a child with cancer who described a technique they’d been given to deal with their pain, a sort of mental “shutting the lights off” as they focused on individual body parts, patches of pain. When we’re in deep physical distress, we find ways of living through it. There are rooms inside ourselves that can shelter us. I remember watching from a cave in my mind as the worst of my histamine reactions surged through my limbs.

I think this is a decent starting point for this parable. We are not what we think we are. We are not the structure that we exist within. Every morning, we hop inside our bodies - sometimes it’s painful. If we are completely associated with our bodies, then physical pain can be unendurable, and you don’t need to chop your hand off to encounter physical pain. We all get our share in our lives. To be in a healthy relationship with your body means not being completely entangled with it.

So let’s talk about “stumbling” next. We saw this word back in Mark 6. There, it was a story that got in the way of you believing what’s going on in the present moment, what’s happening in front of your eyes. If we apply that meaning here, maybe we start to unravel a bit more of what Jesus is talking about. If our hands, our feet, our eyes are telling us a story that’s not true, then they’re not doing what they’re built to be doing. They’re built to sense and take in the present moment, and give an honest report to the little soul sitting in the control room of your brain. But when they stumble, suddenly the reports aren’t correct. We see money on the table and start to envision all the things we could buy with it. Then, suddenly, we’re putting it into our pockets. But what was actually going on? All we really saw was money on the table. All those visions of the results of that money were just delusions. So maybe we can start to make a distinction between our real eyes, who only look at the money and say, “that’s money” - and those secondary, imaginary eyes that behold a luxurious future.

I think it’s these secondary, imaginary limbs that Jesus is talking about severing. They arise within us all the time, and they’re like grit in our system. They get in the way of allowing us to see what our actual limbs are telling us. In the early 1900s, Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov made a short film and showed it to audiences as a test. It starts with a shot of a bowl of soup. Then it cuts to a guy, looking at the camera with an ambiguous expression. Then it shows a girl in a coffin. Then it goes back to the same guy, same expression. Then it shows a lady sitting sensuously on a couch. Same guy, same expression. You get the idea. Anyways, allegedly, the audiences talked about the power of the guy’s performance in each sequence. He sees some soup he forgot to eat, he’s regretful. He sees a girl in a coffin and he’s in mourning. He sees the woman on the couch and he’s filled with lust. But it’s the exact same shot of the guy each time. There’s no actual change in what he’s emoting. But what the audience’s inner eyes were reporting to them was different from what their actual eyes were perceiving. They were trying to keep up with a narrative.

We walk around with these false eyes all the time. I look at my room, and get a report back - “what a mess! This is the room of someone who doesn’t take care of things. You’re going to get some sort of disease living like this. You’ve probably already got one.” I find it almost impossible to see what’s actually in the room, which really is not that messy. My false eyes are blocking out the real ones. And even if it does need some tidying, that narrative is useless to me because it clouds out the options that I do have. If the room could potentially be cleaner, what are the specific items that are causing it not to be? I need my real eyes for that. Or I’ll pull up a working mix of a song and get the report: “this sucks. I’m through as a musician. People are going to laugh at this album.” I have to tune out my false ears and let my real ears tell me: “the guitar is a bit quiet”. We have no ability to advance until we cut off these false appendages. That’s why Jesus talks about “entering into life”. When we’re trapped by these false reports, we’re stuck in limbo, where we can’t advance with time. Those thoughts of worthlessness, those cyclical stories that play out in our minds, that’s the fire that can’t be quenched. You can’t change those stories by racing around trying to change the world, because they’re not true stories to begin with. What is a true story? Come back to yourself - see, hear, and remember. What’s actually going on? Never use those false reports as your starting point. Cut them off, and find your real ones.