If it's possible that Jesus was talking just about the way that we live in the Kingdom on this side of eternity when He told us to cut off our sinful hand and gouge out our sinful eye, then we have to understand something very important about this:
We will be judged for it.
It's actually quite interesting if you pay attention to it. Follow me here.
In the culture in which Jesus was talking, indeed all the way back through the old covenant, a deformed offering was no offering at all. You couldn't bring an animal with a blemish to God.
That's how so many folks who were labeled "unclean" ended up being cast out of the Temple...and of the community in general. If you were deformed in any way, you were unacceptable to God.
It's also, somewhat, related to how we got the idea that a deformation or disability or illness was a mark of personal sin. Remember the man born blind? Everyone wanted to know: who sinned? Every time Jesus meets someone who is imperfect in their body, His first words are, your sins are forgiven. Why? Because it was believed that sin was the great deformer.
Now, here He is saying that if you're sinful, might as well deform yourself. It is better to be deformed if it helps you to overcome your sin than to be whole and living a lie to yourself.
But...if you cut off your hand, other folks are going to know. If you gouge out your eye, everyone else is bound to see it.
Take care of your sin, and you'll be walking around as a marked man. In attempting to rid yourself of the offense, you'll actually make yourself untouchable. You'll put a mark on you. The world is going to look at you and tell you that you're not acceptable to God.
Even if, in cutting off your hand, you have made yourself more acceptable to Him.
This is important because Jesus is doing a couple of things here.
First, Jesus is giving you permission to ruin your own life for the sake of it. He's giving you permission to step into something that looks unclean for the sake of being cleaner. He's telling you how extreme an action it is to address your sin, to take it seriously, and to do something about it. He's telling you that you're going to be marked...and then telling you you're going to be better of for it.
Second, Jesus is saying something about everyone who was thought to be unclean. He's speaking to the ones who were ready to judge them for it. He was saying, in essence, "Maybe you see a man with one hand and you think less of him. But maybe he's doing the greater thing. So mind your business." Because you never know if the crippled man might actually be more holy than you think you are.
Third, Jesus is saying something about the sacrifice in general. He's saying, now, it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to come from the right heart. Which, honestly, was the point all along. God never said that He wouldn't accept a deformed sacrifice because He doesn't like deformed things; God didn't want a deformed sacrifice because He didn't want the people offering only their rejects - their unprofitable, unfit, weak animals to Him. He didn't want them to think that sacrificing to Him was as easy as getting rid of the things they wanted to get rid of anyway, the things that weren't going to pay off for them. But now, what Jesus is saying is that if your sacrifice is made in the right heart, in an effort to get closer to God and to do the right thing with your life, then it's okay to be a little deformed.
I love all of this.
And it still leaves us some room to talk about what we started with, which is this: what happens to your hand when you come into eternity?
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