Matthew 18:9 “And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire.”
1. Context of Matthew 18
The chapter isn’t about eternal torment — it’s about humility, forgiveness, and the care of “little ones.” Jesus warns against causing others to stumble, and then immediately tells the parable of the lost sheep (vv. 12–14): God is not willing that any of His little ones perish. That’s the context: discipline for the sake of protection and restoration, not damnation.
2. Hyperbolic Language
Jesus uses eye-plucking and hand-cutting to dramatize seriousness. No Christian tradition interprets this literally. It’s metaphor — so why suddenly literalize “hell fire”? He’s saying: better to lose what trips you up than to lose your whole life to shame and exile.
3. Gehenna, Again
The “hell” here is Gehenna — the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, long a prophetic symbol of ruin and disgrace. To be “thrown into Gehenna” meant collapse into shame, isolation, and social death — not being tortured forever in flames.
4. Parallel to Matthew 5:29–30
Jesus said the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount. Both passages are consistent: drastic sin leads to drastic consequences. If we won’t cut away what isolates, we risk ending up in Gehenna — the valley of ruin, here and now.
Universalist Reading
Jesus isn’t threatening you with endless fire. He’s warning that sin’s real danger is isolation — the way anger, lust, pride, or violence can exile you into Gehenna: shame, loneliness, alienation.And here’s the twist: the same chapter ends with the shepherd seeking out the one lost sheep. That means nobody abandoned in Gehenna stays there forever. The Father’s will is restoration.
Personal Application — Sitting with People in Gehenna
Gehenna isn’t just a warning. It’s also a mission. When someone is in exile — suffocated by shame, nihilism, or despair — Jesus’ call isn’t to leave them there. It’s to go down into that valley, sit with them, and give them presence.
Presence is the first medicine. Presence becomes love. Love creates meaning. Meaning sparks purpose. And purpose sends them back to sit with someone else in Gehenna.
That’s recursion: salvation as a self-reinforcing loop of presence → love → meaning → purpose → presence again. Hell spirals downward into entropy (isolation feeding isolation). Heaven spirals upward into recursion (love generating more love).
Matthew 18:9 is the fork in the road: will we let others collapse into entropy, or will we become presence that triggers salvation to recur?
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