One passage in the Sermon on the Mount poses problems for many folks. Talking about hatred, anger, and adultery, Jesus used a potent metaphor to illustrate the poisonous – even deadly – nature of such sins:

If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.

Matthew 5:29 – 30

Bible students of all ages find such instructions baffling and / or repellent. We read Jesus’s words and we assume that this must be one more example of Jesus using hyperbole to make an important point… in the same category as camels going through needle’s eyes.

I’ve read and taught the Sermon on the Mount for years, and I’ve been comfy with folks assuming Jesus didn’t really mean what He said here. 

I’ve been comfy with assuming that, myself.

But then I got cancer. And I want it cut out now. 

My sense of urgency testifies to the repugnance and terror that a part of my own body can generate. Cancer offends. I want to tear it out and throw it away. 

How does my visceral reaction connect to Jesus’s theological instruction?

Less than a chapter after Jesus’s teachings about self-amputation of offending body parts, Jesus has this to say about sight:

The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If, then, the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

Matthew 6:22 – 23

In order to understand darkness as darkness, there must be light to provide contrast. Jesus makes that point emphatically here: if we receive darkness, if we house darkness, if darkness becomes our visual home in the way that light is intended to be our visual home – that darkness will be profound (“great”). 

And it will make us sick.

Interestingly, cancer seems to have impacted my eyes by shining a new light within. I look at the fact of the deadly potential that my body harbors without my knowledge or consent, and I see my sin with startling new clarity. 

Consider:

Few of us actively seek sin, any more than we seek cancer. 

Sin, like cancer, is something we know other people struggle with… (Often we have opinions about how those other people could do a better job in their struggle.)

Many of us harbor sin about which we are wholly unaware – rather like those of us who have no cancer symptoms, and only discover our disease via fancy high-tech medical protocols.

Sin, like cancer, starts small. But it doesn’t stay small. Sin, like cancer, starts isolated – affecting one defined area. But sin, like cancer, busts out of that defined area as a matter of course. Sin – cancer – grows. That’s what they do.

Therefore, sin cannot be ignored any more than cancer can be. Because, left to their own devices, sin and cancer will take over – one cell, one system, one thought and word and deed at a time. And domination by sin or cancer = death.

I have been overwhelmed by the loving support of my community as I face this fight against cancer. The prayers of the saints are carrying me. Food offered by the saints will be nourishing me and mine throughout my treatment time. And if I was ever in doubt of the medicinal value of hugs, the affection I’ve received in the last several weeks has set me straight: Jesus used touch to heal, and touch remains His gift of healing!

But I am struck by the way that the physical reality of cancer – even in the midst of a Christian community that is rallying to my defense – has turned a spotlight on my spiritual reality. 

I can only articulate it like this: The cancer in my body has heightened my awareness of the sin in my soul.

Serious illness can prompt panicky questions along the lines of “will I get into heaven if this is really it for me?” 

I’m to the point in my faith walk where I know that I will only EVER get into heaven through the grace of Jesus Christ! 

But my sin matters. 

And my cancer is teaching me how very much my sin matters. 

I find myself caught off guard, multiple times a day, by the remembrance that I am carrying around cells that are working to kill me… and that only some of those cells are physical.

Jesus spoke right into the heart of this cancer / sin paradigm when He rebuked the Pharisees who were gossiping about His questionable choice of dinner companions:

But when he heard this, Jesus said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.”

Matthew 9:12 – 13

Pharisees were famously correct in their religious practice and famously loveless in their hearts; Jesus called out the uselessness of their self-proclaimed “righteousness.” 

Only receiving Jesus could bring true righteousness, so Jesus’s words satirized and condemned the Pharisees’ fraudulent faith. The sick people, the sinners, the (most important of all) people who KNEW they needed Jesus – those were and are the ones that Jesus could heal, redeem, and bring home to Heaven.

Pharisees had self-imposed, resolute vision problems. They chose not to see the evidence of Jesus’s Messiahship. They chose not to see the emptiness and powerlessness of their own religiosity. They chose not to see the disparity between God’s law and their own legalism. They even chose not to see the miracles that were performed right before their own eyes – as in the gospel of John, when they deny the fact of a blind man’s healing.

Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind.” Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.

John 9:39 – 41

Jesus’s words from Matthew and John’s gospel create a kind of schematics of overlapping truths: sin has to be seen as sin – darkness, other than light – and sin has to be excised; the sin-sickness which is universal and terminal has to be acknowledged before it can be cured; we get to choose… even blindness. Even death.

One of Mark’s favorite movies is Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart”, a chronicle of the short-and-violent times of Scottish hero William Wallace. Wallace was a freedom fighter who was tortured to death by his enemies at the ripe old age of 35. He walked out his own creed, which was, “Every man dies; not every man really lives.”

What does it mean for a Christian to “really live”?

Well, aren’t all Christians freedom fighters – part of what C.S. Lewis calls God’s great resistance army?

And aren’t all Christians delivered from the fear of death by the One Who defeated it – Who calls us to really live for Him, now – and forever?

Seen in those terms, life is not about longevity or safety or comfort or preference or ease. Life requires passion and courage and the willingness – even eagerness – to be spent for the glory of God. 

In that kind of life, cancer becomes a kindly reminder that the fight is today – this moment. 

Cancer kindly demonstrates that sin can’t be accommodated even for this moment, because the freedom in which and for which we fight is freedom FROM sin. 

Cancer kindly reframes our terms, a la William Wallace: Everyone dies. But today God invites us to really LIVE!

So, if we err, let us err on the side of extravagant sacrifice… like Wallace. Like Peter and John and all the saints and martyrs down the centuries. Like Jesus.

Let us not fool ourselves, as the Pharisees did (and as we are so tempted to do). Theirs was a shallow, hollow, diluted kind of smug complacency. The illusion of safety – the illusion of control – the illusion of power – the illusion of righteousness. Sound and fury, signifying nothing except squandered lives and disconsolate souls.

The Apostle Paul, who lived with a “thorn in his flesh” and endured countless beatings and physical deprivations, had this to say about cancer and sin and the inevitable toll taken on us by the world:

So, we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For our slight, momentary affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.

2 Corinthians 4:16 – 18