“If your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away”

“If your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away” is the scriptural injunction Thomas invokes to explain why he cut off his hand. At his Psychiatric Security Review Board hearing, the command becomes more than an explanation of a past act: it opens questions about what he believes the sacrifice means, whose sins it is meant to answer for, and how far he might go if he understands himself to be acting under divine direction.

The Scriptural Rationale

The Board asks Thomas, in his own words, why he cut off his hand. His answer comes from Scripture: “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee.” The wording he uses is not the same as the injunction’s familiar English title, but the imperative is unmistakable: a bodily part associated with wrongdoing is to be removed. Thomas’s appeal makes the hand’s amputation intelligible within a religious framework, without making it an ordinary or medically explained decision. In the hearing, the verse is his stated reason, and the Board must examine what he means by applying it to himself.

The question that follows tests whether the act was an attempt at personal atonement. Thomas says it was not. He presents the amputation as atonement for America’s sins instead, naming “Warmongering, greed, the bloodletting of children.” That answer shifts the scale of the injunction: the hand is no longer being cut off simply to address an individual’s wrongdoing, but offered in response to national violence and culpability. The biblical command supplies a form for the sacrifice; Thomas’s explanation gives it a public and political object.

A Sacrifice Extended Beyond the Self

The Board then asks whether Thomas might feel compelled to harm himself again. He says he would not want to, but that he takes direction from the Lord God Almighty and is God’s instrument. He would do anything necessary. His answer places reluctance beside submission: he does not describe self-harm as something he desires, yet he does not claim the final authority to refuse it if he believes God requires it. The injunction’s force therefore lies not only in the mutilation already completed but in the possibility that its logic could be repeated.

The exchange also distinguishes the sacrifice Thomas says he has made from a general permission to injure others. When the Board raises the possibility of harming someone who stood in his way, Thomas calls the suggestion ridiculous and says Jesus would never tell him to harm anyone. He grounds that conviction in Jesus’s death on the cross, which he says was meant to show the world the light. The contrast matters: Thomas presents bodily injury to himself as an act of atonement, while asserting that the same religious authority would not sanction violence against another person.

The Board’s Test of Obedience

The Board presses the distinction through a hypothetical. It asks whether Thomas would obey if Jesus commanded him to return to the library and kill a woman behind the desk whom he believed to be an agent of the devil, supposedly to save the world and innocent children. The scenario draws together elements of Thomas’s account—the library, a perceived religious mission, and the protection of children—but changes the target from his own body to another person. It tests whether his claim to be God’s instrument has a limit when obedience would require violence against someone else.

In the available exchange, the hypothetical is posed as a question rather than reported as an event. Thomas’s earlier denial that Jesus would command harm is clear, but the hearing’s final test asks whether that belief would hold under a direct command framed as necessary. The passage does not provide his answer to that final question. The injunction thus remains suspended between two possible readings: a scriptural justification Thomas applies to his own body, and a test of whether absolute obedience could extend beyond self-sacrifice.

Meaning and Limits

The hearing makes the distinction between Thomas’s stated motive and the Board’s concern central. He describes the hand’s removal as an offering for collective wrongdoing, not personal sin; the Board asks whether the same sense of divine necessity could produce future self-injury or harm to others. Neither question can be collapsed into the other. His explanation supplies the meaning he gives the act, while the Board probes the consequences of a mission whose authority, as he describes it, comes from God.

The injunction’s significance in this scene therefore rests on its movement from text to body and then from body to possible action. Thomas cites Scripture to explain an irreversible act, names national sins as its intended object, and says he would follow divine direction if further action were necessary. Yet he also insists that Jesus would not command him to hurt another person. By ending on the Board’s unanswered hypothetical, the hearing leaves the boundary between sacrifice and violence under examination rather than resolving it.