Desire

The anatomy of scandal (Matthew 5:29-30)

Further, if your right eye scandalizes you, pluck it out and cast it from you. For it is preferable for you that one of your members is destroyed and your entire body not thrown into Gehenna. And if your right hand scandalizes you, cut it off and cast it from you. For it is preferable for you that one of your members be destroyed and your entire body not go to Gehenna. Matthew 5:29-30

Desire not sex

In my previous post, I wrote: “When Jesus said ‘if anyone looks at a woman to desire her,’ he referred to the desire to possess what belonged to another. Though possessing another’s wife could include sex, the purpose of Jesus’s statement was wanting—desiring—what another person possessed.”

Commentary after commentary focuses on lust, the sensual yearning for sexual relations with another person. Everyone focuses on sex as the driving factor of the desire.

But that is not the focus of what Jesus had to say.

He was specifically connecting the seventh commandment, “You shall not commit adultery” with the tenth commandment, “You shall not desire your neighbor’s wife,” etc. 

Jesus’s focus was not on sex, but desiring what others have.

In western culture, the inordinate focus on sex has obscured what Jesus says. While sex is one endpoint of desire, it is not the more fundamental desire that Jesus spoke of.

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The Nature of Desire

René Girard has had a profound impact on the way I read these verses (and the entire Bible). He explained that many, even most, of our desires are imitations of the desires of others. None of us naturally desires an object in itself. Instead, I desire something because someone else desires it. 

When I was in grade school, my desire to make good grades came from my friends’ same desire. We ended up competing for who could do the best. In another setting, I may not have cared about grades at all. In high school, I liked one girl and my best friend liked her because I liked her and when he dated her, I liked her even more, even though there were plenty others to like (he remains a friend to this day, as does she—they both married other people).

This transfer of desire is exactly what the tenth commandment talks about: we desire what our neighbors—those around us—desire. 

Now desiring a house or a wife in itself is ok (even though the nature of those are often culturally driven), but desiring what belongs to another is not. That is inordinate desire.

Love triangles are all about that. When one guy has a girl, the other guy wants her, not because she is prettiest, but because the other guy thinks she is. But when the second guy succeeds in wooing her away, he loses interest; the desire disappears, unless the first guy tries to get her back.

Then there is desire to have the prestige or power of another, then acting in ways to bring that about.

The entire advertising industry works on this principle. When Matthew McConaughey drives a Lincoln, the intent of the ad is to incite the same desire for prestige in us. Even the voice-overs of the rich and famous do the same (I am thinking of Lowe’s and Home Depot ads). And I desire an iPhone 14 because others have it, not because I need it. So much of what we desire is driven by the culture around us. In other cultures, what they desire would drive my desire. In our consumerist and abundant culture, we often can just buy the same thing. 

But not a relationship, nor prestige, nor position, nor power. These cannot just be “purchased.” Spending money on these is either inordinate or corrupt.

Girard termed this entire we-get-our-desires-from-others phenomenon “mediated desire.” His first book explored this idea, but then he showed how the Bible exposes mediated desire from the Garden of Eden onward.

But the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die, but God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.

Genesis 3:5

The serpent incited desire by implying that God was playing keep away.

The Progression of Desire

James, the brother of Jesus, wrote a letter to the entire early church some fifteen or twenty years after Jesus’s resurrection. In that letter full of wisdom, he makes a statement about temptation and desire that may well derive directly from what Jesus says in Matthew 5 (and from Genesis 3):

But each person is tempted by his own desire being drawn away and enticed. Then the conceived desire births sin, and sin coming to full term brings forth death (James 1:14).

In these verses James delves into desire and its results but never refers to sex. The desire that leads to death can be anything in the world’s system.

My question is where does “his own desire” in this verse come from? Not from God but from others (and ultimately Satan): being drawn away and enticed by what others want. God does not give me earthly desires at all;  I get my desires from others, then act on those desires toward sin and death.

James’s plain statement about the progression of desire is the very reason for the tenth commandment. If we don’t desire the desire of others in the first place, we will never act on those desires.

So the tenth commandment: “You shall not desire …” is the key that unlocks the fifth to ninth commandments. If you don’t desire what others have or desire (including your parents) you will never get to the point of dishonoring your parents, or killing, or stealing, or committing adultery, or even lying.

If your right eye/right hand causes you to stumble

With this background we can now understand and connect Matthew 5:27–28 with 29–30. When Jesus says, “if your right eye causes you to stumble,” he is not talking about lusty sex, but about wanting what another person has.

Yes, adulterous relationships are one manifestation, but simply looking at the corrupt political system in our country shows the principle. The rich want to be richer, because their rivals are richer. They don’t need the money at all. Greed is a function of desire to have what others have. Anyone who gets in their way becomes a stumbling block/scandal.

The translations of this phrase are all over the place: “if your right eye: causes you to stumble/offend thee/causes you to sin/causes you to fall into sin/makes you sin/be a snare to you/is causing you to fall/leads you astray/causes you to lust/makes you do wrong.”

The translators are all trying to render the Greek verb skandalizō into English. Skandalon is the term for stumbling block or an object that causes a person to trip and fall. The verb skandalizō conveys the idea of the stumbling block actually occasioning a fall: the person tripped and fell.

Jesus said that a person’s eye or hand can be a stumbling block (a cause of stumbling). This seems strange. What about the things the person sees or grasps after—aren’t those the actual stumbling blocks?

Technically yes.

But once again, Jesus is not concerned with the object, be it sex, money, power, prestige, but the very act of desiring anything but God.

The woman/wife is not the stumbling block; it’s the very act of looking there instead of at God.

We imitate the desires of those we look at (our neighbor and his possessions), and perform the actions of our models (like seeking riches or fame).  

When Jesus is our model, our desires come from him, whose desire was to do the will of his Father.

With our eyes on Jesus (Hebrews 12) our eyes are not desiring anything else but his desire and he never causes us to stumble.

Jesus’s intent was not the physical act of plucking or cutting but the spiritual act of desiring God’s desire instead the desires of others.

Even the very earliest interpreters called Jesus’s words about plucking the eye and cutting off the hand hyperbole. None of Jesus’s disciples did either as far as I can tell. Around AD 200 the church father Origen cut another part of his body off to the horror of his friends, but that was a unique or very rare act.

The progression of desire is first seeing (eyes) then acting (hands). Plucking out your eye means putting on spiritual blinders to the world by looking steadfastly at God (see the Beatitudes).

Whatever the world says you should want, want the opposite.

Repentance

What does the follower of Jesus need to do to pluck and cut?

We pluck our spiritual eye and cut off our spiritual hand by repenting, by a change of mind as one of my early posts explained.

When our eyes fixate on something besides God we acknowledge it, confess it, and turn to God.

And we keep doing that every single day for the rest of our lives.

The goal of repentance is to become single focused—single-eyed—looking straight ahead toward our Father who beckons us to him.

The Alternative

The alternative to spiritual excision via repentance is entrapment in the world’s game of desire. 

Humanity as a whole is blind to the hold that their desires have on them or that individuals or the culture drive the very desires they have. 

The phrase “if your right eye scandalizes you” is not even in the mental frame of most people, because sin does not exist in their consciousness. 

There may be a vague idea of “right” and “wrong” or “legal” and “illegal,” but sin with respect to the Ten Commandments is not known or considered. 

For them a scandal is the aftermath of what society deems scandalous, not the cause of stumbling in the first place. 

Later in the Sermon Jesus spoke of “the broad way that leads to destruction.” All those not abiding in Christ are on that broad way. Here he used the image of Gehenna, the place of fiery judgment.

That judgment may be in the future, but often the consequences burn a person and often devour him in this life because his eyes are focused in the wrong place and the hands follow the lead of the eyes.

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Invitation to “Critics of the Bible”: In September and October I will be teaching an on-line class via Zoom “Critics of the Bible.” If you are interested here is the link to sign up. I’d love to have you.

Here is the course description:

“It is almost axiomatic that people trust the Bible when scholars trust the Bible. In the last few centuries, famous critics of the Bible, such as Voltaire and Spinoza, have used their formidable intellects to influence other scholars to ridicule divine inspiration. As a result, Scripture generally has no standing within the university to serve publicly as a legitimate source of truth. Doubt has been injected into Western Civilization such that whole nations have unmoored themselves from biblically revealed truth. In this course students will be given the opportunity to learn how to defend the authority of Scripture and stand firm in God's Word.”

Observations on the Greek Text

29 Εἰ δὲ ὁ ὀφθαλμός σου ὁ δεξιὸς σκανδαλίζει σε, ἔξελε αὐτὸν καὶ βάλε ἀπὸ σοῦ· συμφέρει γάρ σοι ἵνα ἀπόληται ἓν τῶν μελῶν σου καὶ μὴ ὅλον τὸ σῶμά σου βληθῇ εἰς γέενναν. 30 καὶ εἰ ἡ δεξιά σου χεὶρ σκανδαλίζει σε, ἔκκοψον αὐτὴν καὶ βάλε ἀπὸ σοῦ· συμφέρει γάρ σοι ἵνα ἀπόληται ἓν τῶν μελῶν σου καὶ μὴ ὅλον τὸ σῶμά σου εἰς γέενναν ἀπέλθῃ.

1. Εἰ δὲ ὁ ὀφθαλμός σου ὁ δεξιὸς σκανδαλίζει σε, ἔξελε αὐτὸν This sentence is an example of a so-called first class condition. The if clause (Εἰ + a present tense σκανδαλίζει) is assumed to be true for the sake of argument. So we could say, “If your eye scandalizes you (and let’s assume that true), pluck it out.” This understanding of the first class condition is important, because it is the assumption of truth, not actual truth. There are places in the New Testament where that assumption verges on reality such as Philippians 2:1. There Paul assumes the truth of the condition: “If there is any encouragement in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of spirit, if any compassion and mercies …” Now in our very, Jesus may indeed be stating that every human has an eye that scandalizes in reality, so he is calling for each one to pluck it out (spiritually as I argue above).

2. ἔξελε (aorist active imperative, 2^nd p. sing) This verb is the aorist of (εξ)αἰρέω. αἰρέω (“take” is one of the nine irregular verbs in the Greek New Testament that have different roots/stems for different tenses. αἰρέ- is used for the present/imperfect/future/perfect middle-passive/aorist passive, but -ελ is the root of the aorist active and middle. Weird but true. In this case there is a preposition added to the front ἐκ/ἔξ that adds “out” to the verbal idea “pluck out.”