Traps & Trip-ups

Matthew 18:1-9

⁷ Woe to the world because of snares! For there must be snares, but woe to the person who sets the snare!

⁸ “So if your hand or foot becomes a snare for you, cut it off and throw it away! Better that you should be maimed or crippled and obtain eternal life than keep both hands or both feet and be thrown into everlasting fire! ⁹ And if your eye is a snare for you, gouge it out and fling it away! Better that you should be one-eyed and obtain eternal life than keep both eyes and be thrown into the fire of Gei-Hinnom.

Skandalon (trap-spring or stumbling block) & Skandalizō (verb: to trap, or trip)

“So if your hand or foot trips you, cut it off and throw it away from you. It’s honorable for you to live life maimed or limping, rather than have two hands or two feet and be thrust into unending trials-by-fire. And if your eye traps you, tear it out and throw it away from you; it’s worthy of you to live life with one eye rather than with two eyes be flung into the burning garbage dump.” (adapted from Mounce Reverse-Interlinear)

It was unsettling to discover that the phrase “and obtain eternal life” simply isn’t there in the Greek. It’s just not there! How did that come to be? Removing that phrase gets rid of any least hint of bargaining, doesn’t it? It eliminates the idea that it’s possible to earn a reward (eternal life) by shifting blame and pretending that we can cut off parts of ourselves to avoid the responsibility for our own choices. As if our eyes, or hands, or feet somehow have it in for us, and are maliciously forcing us to do bad things. I say, “Phooey on that!”

The more literal translation that I gave above sounds much more like “Abandon your delusions!”

 If our habits, or our preconceptions, or our notions, keep interfering with our ability to live well and usefully; or if our insistence on taking a certain route or seeing things in a certain way keeps on resulting in mistakes or conflict, well , it’s much more decent for us to be less certain and confident, isn’t it?

It is more honorable for us to say, “I’m not capable of managing that,” than to insist on doing things in ways that keep on failing; ways that trip us up with perfectly foreseeable consequences that we persist in missing.  It is more worthy to say, “I’m not entirely certain,” than it is to claim that we understand something when circumstances have proved over and over again that we simply don’t.

I almost forgot to mention the first part:

“It’s necessary that such traps are to come, but Oh Woe! to the one that sets the traps along the way!”

That’s Jesus foreshadowing again. “Are to come” is code for the “one who is coming into the world,” or the Messiah; the Blessed One; the Rescuer.

(I could go and get all existential; and ask what it is that makes it “necessary”— but I don’t think I will.)

After all, the message is simple:

If you find that you are getting in your own way, then throw out all the entanglements that keep on tripping you up!  Abandon even those precious attachments that you think you can’t live without, especially if it feels as if you are crippling yourself. You really aren’t, you know….



Oh, and here’s Gautama Buddha saying nearly the same thing:

“Surely if living creatures saw the results of all their evil deeds, they would turn away from them in disgust. But selfhood blinds them, and they cling to their obnoxious desires. They crave pleasure for themselves and they cause pain to others; when death destroys their individuality, they find no peace; their thirst for existence abides and their selfhood reappears in new births. Thus they continue to move in the coil and can find no escape from the hell of their own making.”