⚡WEB · Mark 9:47
What does Mark 9:47 mean?
"If your eye causes you to stumble, cast it out. It is better for you to enter into God’s Kingdom with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into the Gehenna of fire,"
— Mark 9:47 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
‘where their worm doesn’t die, and the fire is not quenched.’
If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life lame, rather than having your two feet to be cast into Gehenna, into the fire that will never be quenched—
‘where their worm doesn’t die, and the fire is not quenched.’
If your eye causes you to stumble, cast it out. It is better for you to enter into God’s Kingdom with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into the Gehenna of fire,
‘where their worm doesn’t die, and the fire is not quenched.’
For everyone will be salted with fire, and every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt.
Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, with what will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”
Explanation
Mark 9:47 records Jesus speaking to his disciples in strikingly graphic terms: if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. He says it is better to enter God's Kingdom with one eye than to keep both eyes and be thrown into "Gehenna," the fire of judgment. On its face this is startling language, but Jesus is not giving a literal command to mutilate the body. He is using hyperbole—deliberate exaggeration—to make an unmistakable point about the seriousness of sin and the value of eternal life compared to anything in this present existence, including a body part as precious as an eye.
The context is Jesus teaching his disciples about the cost of discipleship and the danger of causing others, or oneself, to fall into sin. This saying comes right after Mark 9:42-46, where Jesus warns about causing "little ones" who believe in him to stumble, and repeats the same pattern with the hand and the foot before addressing the eye. The word "Gehenna" refers to a valley outside Jerusalem historically associated with idolatrous child sacrifice and later used as a symbol for final judgment and destruction—so Jesus is invoking a vivid, culturally loaded image of ultimate loss, not merely physical suffering. He is speaking to his followers, urging them to take drastic, decisive action against anything that leads them into sin, using the shock of self-mutilation language to underscore how deadly serious the matter is.
Theologically, the verse teaches that entering God's Kingdom is of supreme value—worth far more than preserving an
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