It was a stunning, sad moment for San Diego Medical Examiner Dr. Brian Blackbourne. He and his team of physicians had the gruesome task of performing not one, or two, but 39 autopsies. Twenty men and 19 women, all residing at 18241 Colina Norte in Rancho Santa Fe, had taken their own lives, using a fatal cocktail of phenobarbital, applesauce, and shots of straight vodka. The Heaven’s Gate cult had finally decided to “shed its containers” and try to move to The Next Level, in the tail of the Hale-Bopp Comet.

A few days earlier, waiter Eric Morales, a 24-year-old kid working at Marie Callendar’s, had earned himself a $26 tip for bringing the cult members 39 identical meals of turkey pot pie, house salad with tomato-vinagrette dressing, blueberry cheesecake, and iced tea. He and others noticed the strange, almost androgynous, sexless appearance of the men and women. You could hardly tell who WAS a man or a woman: they all had short hair and baggy clothes which hid a person’s distinctive figure.

But now as Dr. Blackbourne did his autopsies, he made a horrifying discovery. Cult leader Marshall Herff Applewhite and five of the other men in the group had actually submitted to mutilating surgery, for the purpose of removing all sexual desire. A cooperating doctor in Mexico had performed the operations; an AP report after the tragedy described how the men were “smiling and giggling” after it was over.

Well, you know, we think back to those sad days, and say to ourselves, “How in the name of God?” And actually, as we prayerfully read through some of this week’s difficult-to-understand sayings of Jesus in the four Gospels, we can understand how a misguided person would think that mutilating yourself in order to get to heaven might BE in the name of God.

The passage we’re discussing today comes from Jesus’ well-known and beloved “Sermon on the Mount.” The Beatitudes are in there; the Lord’s Prayer and the Golden Rule and “Love your enemies” are front and center. But all of a sudden, right here in Matthew chapter 5, we find these shocking words:

“ If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.” Jesus goes on: “And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.”

By the way, this is verses 29 and 30, which come directly after verses 27 and 28, where Jesus tells us that even to look on a woman lustfully is a sin. So we can understand how Mr. Applewhite and his followers made the fatal connection from plucking out eyes . . . to cutting off arms . . . to the kind of surgery they ultimately accepted. A New York Post book about the cult uncovered how, years earlier, Professor Applewhite had struggled mightily with homosexual temptations, being fired for having affairs with young men, sometimes with his wife in the next room.

Friend, what do we make of this? The world turned away in sickened anger just months ago when it heard about the Taliban cutting off people’s hands and feet in crowded soccer stadiums in Afghanistan, as punishment for moral sins. But here in the New Testament we have to wonder if the Christian faith is a cultic religion of self-mutilated crazies. Is Jesus really saying what it sounds like here?

Let me ask you a question before we grapple with the metaphor-vs-reality debate of this Bible passage. Is it possible for you and me to see things with our two eyes that could jeopardize heaven? Are there visual scenes in this world which could build up into a mountain that could keep us from entering into a relationship with Jesus Christ? You know the answer to that question, and so do I.

Right around Christmastime last year, we had a Monday morning worship here at the Adventist Media Center, shared by Eugene Amey, one of our new trust officers. And he talked about new believers making a pile out of some of their old books. And magazines. And even CDs. Things to see and read and listen to . . . but not things that would help a person who is trying to grow a love relationship with God. And people were actually burning up those piles of temptations. Now, I’ll be the first to concede that the expression “book-burning” has a bad connotation, which we get when we don’t just burn our own books but try to burn all of our neighbors’ books as well, in a misguided attempt to “help” them get into heaven. But is it possible that an earnest seeker after God, who really wants to get in love and stay in love, might well light a fire and get rid of some of the deadly distractions in the way? And that this could actually be what Jesus means by “gouging out” an eye? You’re really gouging out the wrong things the eye is prone to look at.

I think I’ve mentioned before a great football book entitled Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer. Describing the hugely successful ‘67-‘68 Super Bowl season, he tells how he and the other Packers had to train at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin. I mean, we’re talking mid-July. In Wisconsin. Need I say more? They had the dreaded two-a-days, long, muggy practices, morning and afternoon in the melting heat of the day. Coach Vince Lombardi loved to watch the men do something called “up-downs,” where you had to run in place hard, picking up your knees as high as you could. Then the coach would shout, “Down!” And you’d fling yourself down on the grass, flat on your stomach. “Up!” Running in place. “Down!” They would do 65 or 70 of those, until grown men were literally passing out with pain.

Then in the cafeteria, Kramer, who was trying to get his playing weight down from 265 to a lean, mean 245, would eat a tiny piece of meat, a little dish of peas, and one half-filled glass of iced tea.

And why did the men sacrifice like this? Some days it probably felt like they were having their arms and legs amputated, they were so sore and fatigued. But they pushed and perspired so that when they faced Dallas in the playoffs and the Raiders in the Super Bowl, they would be ready for victory and a Super Bowl ring.

The Apostle Paul says the same thing in I Corinthians 9:25-27:

“Do you not know,” he asks, “that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to GET the prize.” Then he adds: “Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.” And now notice this: “Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. No, I BEAT MY BODY and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.”

Listen, friend, there may be times that your body will actually hurt because you’re trying to be an ambassador for God. You may stay up all night on a plane or in a jeep going on a mission trip. You may be a young person trying to be sexually pure for the Lord, and there are hot August nights — or hot March nights too — when biting your nails and having a cold shower doesn’t seem like it’s going to do the trick. But really, what our loving Jesus is saying here is this: “My Father’s kingdom is so good, so perfect a prize, that it’s worth it to be in training now. It would be better to stumble into heaven as a cripple than to be perfectly healthy on the highway to hell.”

In his great commentary for the Tyndale series, R. T. France strongly recommends that we take this warning by Jesus seriously but not literally. Here’s how he puts it:

“The eye, which should keep us from stumbling,” he writes, “can in fact ‘trip us up’ (the basic meaning of cause to sin, skandalizo, which is ALWAYS used metaphorically in the New Testament). . . . Jesus makes His point memorable by exaggeration; the self-mutilation is not to be taken literally, but indicates that the avoidance of temptation may involve drastic sacrifices (the right hand is the more valuable), which may involve the severing of relationships or the renunciation of favorite activities. The alternative is the loss of the whole body (i.e. the complete person) in gehenna.”

That’s a good point about the right hand representing relationships. We talk about the “right hand of fellowship.” Friend, if you truly want to be in God’s family, then there are some people you should not marry. Some people you should not go into business with. Some people whose parties you should not attend. If that feels like cutting off your right hand, it’s better to miss those so-called companions for a little while now than to face an eternity of them outside the gates of God’s paradise.

Well, friend, one thing is sure. We need Jesus. If we need a surgeon for our heart of stone, let it be Jesus. He promises all His help; He promises we can do all things through Him. Let’s never try to gain heaven with our own knives and bonfires.