And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter into life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the Gehenna of fire.
In this verse Jesus again uses severe figurative language to emphasize the necessity of a decisive struggle against sin, even when the source of sin is found in a place as precious and beloved as the “eye.” Here the eye can symbolize a person’s misguided affection, the way of looking or evaluating, wrong motives, deceptive notions, a distorted vision of life, envy, pleasures that lead into sin, and so on. Being, to put it mildly, lenient toward all this can lead to destruction in the fire of Gehenna.