Hello, and welcome to the one-year anniversary edition of The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ, your comprehensive and exhaustive study of the Gospels of Jesus Christ. If this is your first time here, please feel free to avail yourself of the Introduction, which can be found here.
For the uninitiated, this gospel study will easily be the most detailed and thorough gospel study you've ever read by the time of its completion. Its size will dwarf the Bible itself, and its scope is already preposterously wide. Today, not by design but by happy coincidence, this study will surpass the 100,000 word milestone, which means that this study is already significantly longer than all four gospels combined.
As I've mentioned before, this study is inspired, more than anything, by the late work of the late Leo Tolstoy, perhaps the most influential and well known Russian writer in history. On our one-year anniversary, then, I am obligated to draw your attention to him once again.
Tolstoy was easily the best-selling novelist of his time. After having become famous the world-over for tomes like "Anna Karenina" and "War and Peace," Tolstoy turned his attention and his writing efforts away from fiction and toward spiritual, philosophical, and political matters. Over the course of a few significant texts, Tolstoy gave a revelation to the world. That revelation was, to put it most simply, that Jesus Christ's life and teaching had been grossly misunderstood and misapplied by nearly all of his so-called followers throughout history since the time of Constantine or even earlier.
Tolstoy came to believe that a pure and lasting happiness could be found by anyone who correctly interpreted and applied the teachings of Jesus Christ. Tolstoy also believed that, properly applied, the teachings of Jesus Christ would literally liberate the world from the bondage of war, iniquity, and statism. Furthermore, Tolstoy pointed out (not believed, but pointed out) that Jesus Christ had been an anarchist. That is to say that Jesus Christ unequivocally opposed any state apparatus whatsoever based on his moral understanding of the universe.
I'd like you to have a sense of what Tolstoy was saying. In what I consider his most valuable work, The Kingdom of God is Within You, Tolstoy wrote as follows:
If the more or less good, and the more or less bad cannot be distinguished in the heathen world, the Christian conception of good and evil has so clearly defined the characteristics of the good and the wicked, that it is impossible to confound them. According to Christ's teaching the good are those who are meek and long-suffering, do not resist evil by force, forgive injuries, and love their enemies; those are wicked who exalt themselves, oppress, strive, and use force. Therefore by Christ's teaching there can be no doubt whether the good are to be found among the rulers or ruled, and whether the wicked are among the ruled or the rulers. Indeed it is absurd even to speak of Christians ruling.
As you can see here, Tolstoy's thinking about Jesus was deep and atypical. Had he not been the biggest celebrity in Russia at the time, Tolstoy might have easily been jailed or "disappeared" for writing such things. This gospel study is designed to prove beyond any doubt to the world that Tolstoy's assessment of the morality of Jesus Christ was unquestionably correct.
That said, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you how I became interested in Tolstoy and, through him, in Jesus Christ. Some years back, during the course of curious studying, I was brought to the realization that the human race has a deadline to meet. Whether people in your life are talking about it or not, whether the news media is talking about it or not, whether our leaders and institutions are giving it creedence or not, our species has an important deadline to meet. That deadline is the extinction of the human race by war.
You see, there exist in this world enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on the planet Earth over and over again in a short period of time. The possibility of such an all-out nuclear war will not begin to diminish until we begin to dismantle the bombs en masse. In fact, the possibility of all-out nuclear war increases daily as super-powers increase their stockpiles and smaller nations attempt to manufacture their first bombs. So long as the world's governments, lead by the example of the first nuclear power, the United States of America, stay their course, the threat of a species ending nuclear-war is not a matter of "if," it is a matter of "when." Consider the words of US president John F. Kennedy:
Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.
It is my belief that the only thing that can prevent the accident, miscalculation, or madness to which Mr. Kennedy referred is the voluntary abolition of nuclear weapons throughout the world. Be it tomorrow, ten years from now, or one-hundred years down the road, the deadline we face for this task is the day that something or someone slips, the sword of Damocles falls, and the missiles begin to soar into the sky. This deadline is inevitable, and certainly nearer than most would imagine. It is my sincere belief that the only thing that will allow us, as a species, to do away with this mechanism of global suicide that we've created in our nuclear arsenals is the honest application of a Law of Universal Love. Realizing all this years ago, I went looking for an applicable Law of Love.
When I went looking for a Law of Universal Love, I found Leo Tolstoy pointing straight to Jesus Christ. When I read the gospels for the first time, it felt to me as if Jesus had looked forward through a couple of millenia and somehow seen our deadline, just the way JFK clearly saw it. When I read the gospels for the first time, I wept as I realized that the true miracle of Christ's teaching lay directly in the hands my generation, and that the salvation that Jesus offered his first-century followers was equally offered as a real-world salvation attainable by myself and my generation.
Jesus Christ offers us a freedom from the risk of a species-ending nuclear annihilation. Amazingly, Jesus Christ offers us, in the same breath, a freedom from the personal pain of everyday life. I believe this with all of my heart and mind.
Truly, Jesus Christ offers us an attainable, real-world Kingdom of God. And truly, as Tolstoy said, that Kingdom is within you.
I am so very excited and blessed to celebrate one-year with you today. To those of you who have read this steadily: thank you so so much for your time and interest. To have your attention here means more to me than almost any other thing in the world. The only thing that means more is Jesus Christ's Law of Love itself.
Now, as always and without further ado, please enjoy my brief thoughts about the following verses.
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Matthew 5:29 through 5:30
29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than to have your whole body thrown into Gehenna.
30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than to have your whole body go into Gehenna.
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Did anyone do a double-take on these verses?
Did Jesus just recommend that his followers yank their own eyes out of their faces and cut their own hands off?
To put it simply: yes, yes he did. And, woah.
Recall that these two verses are still part of what is called, in modern times, Jesus' "Teaching About Adultery," and that many Bible scholars would directly relate the previous two verses (Matthew 5:27-28) to these. When taken apart from the previous two verses, however, these verses retain a very similar meaning, and remain consistent with other teachings of Jesus.
The first question that probably came to my mind when I initially read these verses is "does Jesus mean this literally, or is he being hyperbolic and metaphorical here?" The answer to that question is a difficult one to find, and I think that it could probably be argued either way.
Jesus' recommendation that his followers avoid sin by cutting the parts of their bodies off that are leading them to sin will be reprised later, and fits within the mold of extreme asceticism which I think Jesus filled. Recall that Jesus' ministry began after a grueling forty-day solo journey in the hot desert, during the course of which he fasted. His ministry begins with a great act of asceticism. Later in the gospel, we will see Jesus recommend various ascetic lifestyle modes to his followers, and he will go as far as telling his male followers that they would be best off castrating themselves in order to more easily focus all of their living energy on God. Jesus deliberately structured his Galilean Ministry so that the state would execute him at the end of it, so some might argue that everything he said or did during his ministry was focused on a grand public death. Jesus was undoubtedly a morbid character, then, and it seems clear through several multiply attested verses that ascetic mortification of the flesh was an ideal to him.
Knowing all of that, what remains to the reader here is to determine to what literal extent Jesus advised this extreme mortification of the flesh to his followers. Did he actually mean "if you are distracted by a lusty eye, you should poke your own eye out and be blind?" Does he actually mean it later in Matthew 19:12 when he tells his followers that they will be closer to God if they castrate themselves?
For once, today, I am not going to postulate an answer.
Instead, in celebration of our one-year anniversary, and to enhance your consideration of these verses, I am going to offer you the very first visual aid for this study. Below is a fifteenth-century depiction of one of the very first "Church Fathers," Origen of Alexandria, whom we've discussed before. In this painting, Origen is shown taking Matthew 19:12 seriously to the highest possible degree.
Ouch!
That's right, brothers and sisters. We will discuss this at greater length later, but there were many people in history who took Jesus' prescription to mortify their flesh extremely seriously. Origen is not the only one we have record of castrating himself in order to refine his love for God.
Certainly, if Origen was willing to go to the extent he does in the above painting based on the gospel, he believed that Jesus was one-hundred percent serious in today's verses when he advised them to pluck out their eyes or cut off their hands.
Amazing.
I hope this didn't gross y'all out too much. It shouldn't have. After all, this is just Christian history.
For lack of time, we will leave it here today.
Thank you again for a wonderful year. I look forward to many more with you.
Please share this writing.
Love.
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