Avoiding Offences

S. Mark ix. 42–50

Jesus had spoken of the blessedness of receiving children and childlike men in His Name, and He now places over-against it the fearful punishment in store for those who put a stumblingblock in their path to impede their spiritual progress. Better, infinitely better, to die a violent death, even the most dreaded kind of death, than risk the salvation of the soul by committing such an offence as this. “It is better for him that a millstone x were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.” It was a mode of punishment reserved only for great criminals, and its terrors were aggravated by the thought that the body could never be recovered for burial, the deprivation of which was the sorest trial.

Then from offences against others, our Lord proceeds to warn men not to place stumbling-stones in their own way. He selects the chief instruments of sin, — the hand, the foot, the eye, — and counsels their immediate destruction, if need be, rather than allow them to work the threatened mischief.

It is the hand which men lift up to do violence, as Cain did to his brother, or to appropriate what does not belong to them, like Achan.

It is the feet which hurry us into forbidden paths, as they hurried Gehazi, or the old man of God whom the lion slew for his transgression.

It is the eye which excites the lust to desire in the spirit of Eve something which God has seen fit to withhold. To hurt, to trespass, and to covet: what a common triple cord of sin it is! There is no important distinction to be drawn between them, and any one of them by itself would have sufficed, but the threefold repetition, as so often in Scripture, appears to lend force to the warning. It is a recognised principle in surgery to cut off a limb to save a life; for the wellbeing of the soul it must be applied, and with an unsparing hand, to the instruments of moral temptation. The alternative is presented to us under the ghastly imagery drawn from the familiar terrors of Gehenna. In the Valley of Hinnom, on the south of Jerusalem, besides the fires of Molech which blazed in the great furnace, through which the idolaters made their children to pass, there was a constant burning of the heaps of refuse, and the worm of corruption fed perpetually upon the carcasses of animals, and the offal of the city, which was thrown there. It formed not unnaturally a lively emblem of the terrible torments of the lost; and Milton, who moulded so largely the Christian idea of the pangs of hell, stereotyped the old Jewish conception when he wrote —

“And black Gehenna called, the type of hell.”

But there are many passages in Holy Scripture which show that in the place of retribution there will be no need of any external apparatus of torture such as this, but that the sinner will be his own tormentor.

It is more in accordance with Divine revelation to conclude that there will be a close correspondence between the sin and its punishment. “Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap.” “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” “They shall eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices.” “They that plough iniquity and sow wickedness reap the same.” Lusts and passions unchecked in this life may last on to the next, and be there the instruments of an unending and intensified torment, because the gratification of them will be for ever denied. “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still.”

The same truth is indirectly taught by our Lord when He tells us to cut off the special instrument of sin while we have opportunity, rather than carry it with us in all its unimpaired strength and vigour into the place of punishment. “It is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell.”

Jesus then points to the necessity of sacrifice, intimating that the surrender of hand or foot or eye is part of that discipline which all must pass through. The salt and the fire of which He speaks are, in relation to this, allied forces: the one preserving from corruption, the other purifying and cleansing. It was for this reason that God enjoined that all oblations should be seasoned with salt, and that “the fire should try every man’s work of what sort it is.”

“Salt,” He says, “is good;” good in the natural world, and good in the spiritual; but as in the one, if it lose its virtue, it is fit only “to be trodden under foot;” so in the other, the inward grace, of which it is the symbol, if it cease to purify the life, becomes hopelessly useless. Christianity which is no longer Christian, a “name to live” while one is “dead,” what profit is it?

Remember, Christ seems to say, that you were made, at your call to the Apostleship, “the salt of the earth.” You were destined to be in the New Society that element which should purify the world and preserve it from corruption. Be jealous of the office unto which you were called; let nothing rob you of those gifts and properties, which should be a savour of salvation to all around you. Do away at once with those unworthy disputes about honours and distinctions, purge out all selfish aims and ambition, “have salt in yourselves, and have peace 1 one with another.”

Note: “Millstone.” In the original it is “a stone turned by an ass” — not, i.e. the ordinary one which women used in grinding, but a huge heavy stone which would sink one “like lead in the mighty waters.”

Note: The clause, “and every sacrifice shall be salted with salt,” is omitted by the Sinaitic and Vatican MSS., and finds no place in the Revised Version.

Note: This expression was suggested from the custom of strewing salt which had become worthless on the steps and pavement of the Temple in wet weather to prevent the feet from slipping.

Note: It is quite possible that the connection was suggested by His recollection of the old” covenant of salt,” the symbol of peace and concord.