Adultery of the heart is a very serious issue in Jesus’ view. But in teaching about it did he actually mean that eternal punishment in a fiery hell would be the consequence of not getting the issue sorted? In using the word Gehenna in Matthew 5:29-30 is this the picture of hell he had in mind?

First things first, Jesus takes ethical living in the here and now very seriously. There is no escaping this, not just on the issue of sex but on many other issues also. And in teaching on ethics in the Sermon on the Mount he wasn’t just concerned about what we do but about how we think and about the motivations of the heart/mind. Jesus looks at the whole person and whether our will is in line with God – not just a collection of individual actions. However we interpret the threat of hell here, we cannot downgrade the ethical teaching.

It is because of this emphasis that Jesus I believe uses such strong language and quite horrible pictures to underline the seriousness of his views – language like gouging out your eye or severing your hand off your arm. But I would contend that this is to be taken figuratively and not literally. For how far would we have to go to cut off limbs and organs before we had satisfied Jesus’ demands? Having gouged out the right eye, we still have the left one to leer with. If we lost both eyes we still have the sense of smell. Should we be tempted by the whiff of lovely perfume would we be expected to cut off our nose? And what about the key aspect of this passage – the thoughts of our mind and the decisions of our will – is it possible that Jesus envisaged the cutting out of our imagination? Of course not; he was using figurative language to make his point. So it may be reasonable to conclude that in referring to throwing the whole body to Gehenna he was also being figurative.

However, some may still want to insist that Jesus was being literal in this passage. So let’s look at it from this perspective. Jesus says that it would be better if our eye/right hand were to be ‘lost’ than for our whole body to be thrown into Gehenna. The word ‘lost’ in that paraphrase is key. The Greek is ballō and it means ‘to be lost, to be ruined, to be destroyed’. Immediately you can see that the meaning of ‘lost’ is not a simple matter misplacing of keys; it is far stronger than that. It means that something is destroyed in the sense that has no life left and cannot be used again.  And I would argue that this meaning should also be carried over to those parts of the verses that talk of the whole body being dumped in Gehenna. The body isn’t dumped there to suffer eternal conscious torment; rather it is dumped there to be destroyed. (Ballō is used predominantly in this way in the NT. The other use is when something is lost and then found again, e.g. the youngest son in Luke 15.)

To conclude: Matthew 5:29-30 can be interpreted in both figurative and literal ways (my preference is for the first) – but I would contend that neither of them can be used to interpret Gehenna as a place of eternal conscious torment.

The last post on hell can be found here.