Matthew 5:29-30

The context

These sayings come in the Sermon on the Mount, in the section on the antitheses, immediately after the teaching on lust and before the paragraph on divorce. The language is deliberately extreme, and it uses the imagery of the body's members being discarded. The point is the seriousness of what causes stumbling.

What it establishes

Jesus uses shocking hyperbole to insist that nothing, however precious, is worth preserving at the cost of sin. The saying treats the occasion of sin as the thing to be removed, not merely the act.

What it does not establish

It is not a command to mutilate the body. The hyperbole is evident, and the passage is not prescribing self-harm; read literally it would contradict the same sermon's teaching about the body and about reconciliation.

Short note, first pass, October 2026. Corrections welcome.

Cited in these answers

• I guess I can’t be a Christian because I don’t hate my parents. Why does Jesus tell us we need to hate our parents in order to be his disciple (Luke 14:26)?

Part of Scripture, Opened — the exegetical layer behind every citation on this site. Scripture quotations are from the ESV.