Matthew Ch 5 Lose A Body Part Rather Than Go To Hell.

[superblue]

The only person I know who tried to take these injunctions literally was a person with a severe mental illness. She was very anxious about going to hell and thought that cutting off body parts might save her. She had quite serious problems with self-harm and in her unwell mind this Gospel passage was a divine seal of approval on what she was doing to herself.

 

Christ is the Divine Physician and he didn't come here to hurt us. His whole ministry on earth was about making people whole. Urging them to mutilate themselves is hardly in keeping with his miracles of healing, and nor is it in keeping with our understanding of sin. In the Garden, Adam blamed Eve (and even tacitly tried to blame God - "Well, you put her here with me!"), who blamed the snake. The Genesis story makes it very clear that trying to put the blame for sin on external things - whether that's other people, passing fauna, or body parts - is a mistake: it is our choices that are at fault and our choices only. That passage is an allegory, intended to make clear the importance of breaking away from sin, without any excuses or equivocations and it does so by necessity in very visceral language. But to renounce sin is to affirm belief in a world where pain and hurt need not exist, through the pure love of Jesus, and so it makes no sense to deliberately hurt yourself in order to try and bring yourself there.

 

 

While this is all true, it makes me wonder then, Christ is either speaking only to those who are mentally well and able to interpret what he means, or he made a mistake , which one would say cant happen because of his divinity,

 

Why allow then humanity the opportunity to twist scripture in such a way, that a mentally ill person, could find an answer he or she was looking for, come across a mutilation scripture passage, for then everyone to turn around and go woa woa woa wait mentally ill person Christ didn't literally mean for you to do that .  It isn't like Christ didn't know what he was saying and how it could be interpreted, to then say well that is why others came back and wrote something to counter it or explain it.

 

And then if we are to keep going with scripture there is the story of the man, who asked Christ what he must do, to follow him, the reponse was to give everything he had away and to follow Him,  Matthew 19:21 / now if we take that to be a factual account that physically happened,  Did Christ really mean what He said to that man at that specific moment in time, or was He merely wanting to point out human weakness by challenging the man to something he knew he would not do.... now for that specific passage it has been said that the man was not asking an honest question, but wanting to challenge Christ, I don't know I find that to be subjective, since I do not think there is anything to point out the question the man asked was not genuine to begin with.  If the man was asking an honest question,  and the response Christ gave, how was the man to understand that answer, as being literal or a spiritual message.

 

 

Exactly how literal from scripture is it to be interpreted that we live a pacifist or life of physical poverty.

 

 

I think this will be last line of examples n questions, I do understand the difference between literal and spiritual but at times it does become confusing on when we are to take examples literal or not.

[CatherineM]

Part of the requirement before something qualifies as a mortal sin is that you are capable of stopping the behaviour. If you can't to where it is to the point you are thinking about mutilating yourself, it's probably not a sin that would send you to Hell anyway.

[Kia ora]

That doesn't exactly hold up, when there is only the obligation to receive the Eucharist once a year during the Easter season, or at Easter.  Which seems to suggest a lot to me which I wont get in to.

 

How about I just don't want eat God or his flesh because it is rather disturbing , not to mention no one can explain exactly what part of the body we are actually consuming.  From what a priest once said during a mass, we have about 15 minutes until the species is fully digested, to have Christ in us so to speak. 15 minutes is a lot of time for some and not enough for others.

 

It isn't that I don't believe, it is too much to go into, what is beautiful to some is merely a giant basket of convolution to others, the truth is God can do what ever he wants, he could have easily said, spin in a circle two times on Sunday and say an Our Father and we are united,

 

it may sound stupid, but it is the truth, and if it did happen, there would be someone else saying how beautiful it is we are united with God through simply spinning in a circle two times and saying an Our Father  and we are thus yada yada yada.

 

Plus there is a lot more needed in the human survival besides food, and if anyone wants to go an give a shot , it appears humans can survive roughly 40 days with out food,  ( water is a different thing we have to have water ).

 

don't interpret this as sarcasm it isn't  if anything I am getting at, is indeed the complexity and mystery of the Eucharist and why Christ chose what he chose.

 

Christianity is as much as you put into it as you take out of it. Cocnerning things that might be meaningless to you, you must find your purpose and significance in order to accept it, in order to do it, in order to live your life according to it. Otherwise why bother?

 

Put aside whether you believe that it's true or not. I'm talking about whether it's iimportant to you. There are plenty of Christians who believe that Jesus is the Christ, and yet live their lives as if it that meant very little.

 

Sure someone can tell you what this and that doctrines means, like what I tried to do, but basically the only thing I did was tell you what it means for me. And evidently it doesn't work. It sure didn't work for me when I was an atheist and others were telling me what Christianity meant.

 

I think you have to find your own way into it. 

 

The Eucharist not so much about food as what the fact that we need to eat to survive means. You could take breathing as an example as well. It's something that we do so often, so regularly, that we don't even notice that we're breathing most of the time. Yet stop breathing for even a little bit and there's damage to our body and eventually death. Breathing is more important to our survival than food, but for me the next question isn't why is the Eucharist not some kind of air that we intake from an inhaler. That seems kind of overly literal. Rather my next question is what does it mean for me that the Eucharist is food and that we're supposed to eat and digest it.

 

According to one perspective, breathing is a biological process of the body and it's how we get energy and so forth. Oxygen enters into our bloodstream through osmosis in the lungs. Breathing is also a way that we are constantly connected to the world around us. The oxygen we breathe comes from the plants and trees around the world, that are connected to the sun, and that are connected to the people who chop them down, cultivate them, etc etc. An endless web of relationships. The other narrative that I believe is one that synthesises the aforementioned medical and biological data. What does breathing mean to me aside from these facts? To me breathing means we are endlessly receptive beings, through and through. We're not hermetically enclosed bubbles but permeable fleshy vulnerable things that aren't just connected to the world, but completely suffused with it.

 

I'll be honest, breathing and eating for me teaches me religious lessons. It may seem ridiculous to others, but it teaches me many things. If we're receptive beings, then a lot of the time we're thankless and ungrateful for the gifts we receive. Just like air, God's grace fills the world but we're so accustomed to his invisible presence  that a lot of the time we don't even realise or recognise, let alone be grateful to God. Like a fish that doesn't realise it's swimming through water because it's lived its whole life there. If we can't even be amazed at such a simple and yet endlessly complex process that converts oxygen into energy that is with us 24/7, how much more neglectful are we about God, who gives everything to us, who keeps us in existence?

 

When I think about it like this, then the Eucharist as something we eat with my mouth becomes something that I can 'digest' spiritually. To someone who isn't a Christian it may just seem like bread and the wine may just seem like wine, but we're supposed to know and see better. Even if it looks the same, we're supposed to look deeper. See something that others cannot see. Just like when others saw Jesus, they saw just a man, whereas when others saw Jesus, they saw a man like them certainly in every respect, but also something more.

 

It's not that I stop questioning 'why did God did it this way and not that way?' I certainly hope you don't take my speculations as what God himself thinks. Rather my most important question is: well God did it this way and not that way. Those are the facts if you're a Christian. So what do I do now?

 

I hope this helps.

[marigold]

This ^^^ is excellent. I'm reading and re-reading it.

[superblue]

Ty, Kia. didn't mean to spin what you said prior out of context.