Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Matthew · About this commentary
A Millstone Around His Neck
Matthew 18:6-9
6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him if a huge millstone were hung around his neck and that he were sunk in the depths of the sea. · WEB
The harshest words in the Gospel are spoken about damaging someone small — and then turned back on the hearer.
"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him if a huge millstone were hung around his neck and that he were sunk in the depths of the sea" Matthew 18:6.
The saying is in the earlier account Mark 9:30–50, and it is the most violent image he uses about anyone. The stone named is not the hand mill a woman turned in a kitchen but the great one an animal walked in circles to drive. Nobody survives that, and nobody is recovered.
The offense is causing to stumble — putting something in a person's way that trips their faith. Not persecuting them, not arguing with them; tripping them. And these little ones who believe in me has widened from the child in the middle of the circle to anyone whose hold is small enough to be broken.
"Woe to the world because of occasions of stumbling! For it must be that the occasions come, but woe to that person through whom the occasion comes!" Matthew 18:7.
Both halves stand. In a world like this one such things are inevitable, and their inevitability excuses nobody. Being the instrument of something that was going to happen anyway is not a defense.
Then the direction reverses. "If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and cast it from you" Matthew 18:8. Two verses about the harm you do to others are followed by two about the harm done to you, in the same words, and the audience for the amputation is the person who was just being warned about millstones.
The surgery is deliberate hyperbole and it is not thereby weakened. Nothing in Scripture commends self-mutilation, and the hand does not originate the fault Matthew 15:19. What the image measures is proportion: whatever it costs to be rid of the thing is less than what it costs to keep it, and the loss of a limb is offered as the closest available comparison.
"It is better for you to enter into life maimed or crippled, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into the eternal fire" Matthew 18:8. The alternatives named are entering into life and being cast into fire — that is the pairing, and it is the same pairing throughout Matthew 7:13–14. The fire is called the Gehenna of fire Matthew 18:9, after the ravine below the city wall where Israel's worst kings had burned their own children 2 Kings 23:10 and where the city's refuse was consumed afterward. The Hinnom Valley was a real place with a real smoke over it, and every hearer knew what was thrown there and what became of it.
settled What this mark means