Biblion Bible Commentary
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If Your Right Eye Causes You to Stumble
Matthew 5:27-30
27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery;’ · WEB
The second: adultery reaches the look that rehearses it, and the remedy is stated in terms nobody could mistake for moderation.
"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery;' but I tell you that everyone who gazes at a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart" Matthew 5:27–28.
The verb is continuous — a look that stays and works, not a glance — and the object of the charge is what the looking is for. The tenth commandment had already forbidden coveting a neighbor's wife Exodus 20:17, so again the teaching is recovering the law's own reach rather than adding to it.
What is new is the location of the offense. A man who never touches anyone has still done something, in the only place where his neighbor cannot see it and no court can reach. And the woman in the sentence is not the actor; she is the person being used, without knowing it, by someone who will go on greeting her normally.
"If your right eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it away from you" Matthew 5:29.
The remedy is deliberately extreme, and it is not a command to mutilate. Blinding one eye does not cure a lustful heart — the problem has just been located in the heart — so a literal reading defeats the passage's own diagnosis. What the hyperbole does is set a price. If a man would tear out an eye to escape ruin, then the ordinary measures he actually refuses to take are exposed as choices: the habit not broken, the association not ended, the thing not thrown away.
The right eye and the right hand are named because the right was the valued side — the best faculty and the strongest limb. Whatever is most useful to you is not exempt.
"For it is more profitable for you that one of your members should perish than for your whole body to be cast into Gehenna" Matthew 5:30.
The reasoning is arithmetic, and it is the same calculation the parables will make with a field and a pearl Matthew 13:44–46. What is at stake is the whole person, and against that a hand is a small price. The sermon that began by blessing the poor in spirit is now telling them what following actually costs, and it does not soften either half.
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