As Preached by Sister Rebecca
June 25, 2017
Holy Wisdom Church
Today’s Gospel is part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus begins his teaching with the beatitudes. The following two chapters throw light on the path leading to the realization of the beatitudes in our lives.
Jesus’ teaching begins with: “The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is single (or clear) then your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is evil then your whole body will be full of darkness.” Mt6: 22-23.
Here, as in other sayings, Jesus is using Hebrew figures of speech, idioms, well-known to the Jewish people in Jesus time.
We have our own idioms, too: “she just hit the ceiling” or “it is raining cats and dogs”, all which, literally, do not make sense. Likewise, a number of Jesus’ sayings contain cultural idioms that we simply do not understand but make perfect sense in Hebrew. By understanding the Hebrew idioms in today’s Gospel we can get a much clearer understanding of Jesus’ teaching.
1. The first idiom: The lamp of the body is the eye: The Biblical communities of old understood that the eye was an organ that actually projects light or particles of energy from within a person, similar to the light of a lamp. The metaphor “lamp” is a person’s heart; the eye is the lamp’s light, meaning inner vision, attitudes, dispositions, and intentions of the heart. If your eye is said to be single: the word, ‘single’, describes the person as one of integrity, wholehearted devotion to God, who does not have a secret agenda of self-advancement and self-aggrandizement, and one who trusts in God.
2. 
“If your eye is evil”: The word evil is a hard one: as it has overtones of superstition, or something demonic. We may dismiss this word because it scares us to think we could have evil within us. But in this context, the evil eye is simply a heart that conveys ill will, meanness, miserliness, stinginess, and discord within oneself. Perhaps in the light of today’s understanding of our inner world, it would be better to speak of our inner blind spots, places in us hidden more or less from our consciousness. These words of Jesus challenges us to face the dark side of our personality and the emotional investment we have made in false programs for happiness and in our particular conditioning. We are hard-wired to God but when we lose focus our inner ‘single eye’ we tend to react in ways that are negative, and dark for ourselves, and others, not to mention the ripple effect it has on God’s creation.
“If your eye is evil”: The word evil is a hard one: as it has overtones of superstition, or something demonic. We may dismiss this word because it scares us to think we could have evil within us. But in this context, the evil eye is simply a heart that conveys ill will, meanness, miserliness, stinginess, and discord within oneself. Perhaps in the light of today’s understanding of our inner world, it would be better to speak of our inner blind spots, places in us hidden more or less from our consciousness. These words of Jesus challenges us to face the dark side of our personality and the emotional investment we have made in false programs for happiness and in our particular conditioning. We are hard-wired to God but when we lose focus our inner ‘single eye’ we tend to react in ways that are negative, and dark for ourselves, and others, not to mention the ripple effect it has on God’s creation.
3.
Today’s gospel invites us to be open to the gift of truly seeing. The enlightened person seeks no personal gain like Jesus who emptied himself and had nothing to gain for himself by coming into this world. It urges us to become like Jesus who summons us to trust God with a whole and undivided heart and serve as he did. Jesus expressly calls his followers to live in the present moment away from anxious worrying about life’s challenges.
By taking time each day for a period of prayer, a place of rest where our faculties are relatively calm and quiet, we learn to see our thoughts, our worries, our agitations fading away in the light of God’s presence and so we gradually let go of them and turn our lives in trust to God.
The poet Mary Oliver, a writer with a deep, natural mysticism, writes of a life free of egoistic constraints in these lines, "The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees - to learn something by being nothing." In other words, it is her prayer that we shift our attention to the soft gurgling sounds of a moving stream, to open our eyes to the light in the trees, the sun through the branches and therefore to God who shines in them and through them to be clear-sighted, consciousness, awake and aware, unencumbered and free. And if we look deeply enough with mindful, unobscured vision, what we shall see is God peeking through all things. The eye that is single sees the truth “That the cosmos is one vast burning bush, permeated with the fire of the Divine”.
No comments:
Post a Comment