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Your Eye is
a Lamp of Your Body Your eye is the lamp of your body, when your eyes are good your whole body also is full of light. Who knows what this is? It’s an Ophthalmoscope. This statement of Jesus reminds me of something my husband Geoff once shared with me. He had wanted to be an ophthalmologist when he first qualified as a doctor and when I asked him why, he explained to me that the eye is a window into the interior of the human body. By simply looking into someone’s eye with an ophthalmoscope one can literally diagnose over a hundred diseases! Did Jesus know this when he said: “The eye is the lamp of your body, when your eyes are good your whole body also is full of light.” Luke may well have known this for Luke the writer of this Gospel was himself a physician, a medical doctor. Clearly Jesus was speaking metaphorically here. He was responding to the demand from the cynics that he should produce more miraculous and revelatory signs to prove who he was. Jesus makes the point that the problem is that people will only see what they allow themselves to see. If we look with honesty and integrity for the truth we will find it. However, if we look with jaundiced eyes we will fail to see the truth even when it is staring us in the face. There were countless signs at that time during Jesus’ ministry that authenticated who he was and validated his credentials as the Messiah. These would include the miraculous healings he performed; the ethical way he walked the talk and the soundness of his teachings about God and God’s purposes for the world. Jesus had publicly exhibited the light of the gospel for all to see, and yet many people especially the Jewish religious leaders, were demanding still more spectacular signs. The problem was not with any failure on Jesus’ part in giving light, the problem lay with the faulty vision of those cynical Jews who did not want to see him for who he was. The word perspective comes to mind here. A perspective is a mental view or outlook; a point of view; it is to look at things from a certain angle. I think Jesus is talking about perspective, the angle from which we view the world. When we have a healthy perspective then our lives will be healthy and our souls will be healthy, but when we have an unhealthy perspective then we find ourselves experiencing un-health. Faith works like that. When we look with faith in God then we are able to see God’s hand at work in our lives. When we look for God without faith we find it hard to notice his hand at work in our lives. St Augustine said: “I believe that I may understand.” “I believe that I may see.” He uses the metaphor of the eye. Jesus uses the metaphor of the eye to make this point. The eye is like a doorkeeper. What the eye lets into the mind makes up the person and the persons faith. When the eyes are good they let in light and the person becomes full of light and is thus enlightened. But if the eyes are bad letting nothing good come in, then the body is a dark place. If the eye is healthy the body receives all the light, information and data it needs to form a healthy view of the world. If the eye is diseased or jaundiced, then the light of God’s truth cannot penetrate our beings and we find ourselves in darkness. If we look at the world with a spiritual lens seeking God and his truth then that is what we will find. If we look at the world with eyes that deny God and his truth in the world, then we will fail to find God’s truth. In a sense Jesus invites us to choose how we use our spiritual eyes. I’d like you to do something for me now. Open wide your eyes. Notice what you can see without moving your eyes. Now squint your eyes, notice what you miss. Eugene Petersen translates this passage from Luke as follows: Stop squinting, open your eyes wide and you will see God. It’s all about big and small vision. With what perspective do you view God and your spiritual life? Do you follow Jesus with wide-eyed vision? By that I mean do you allow your perspective to wander outside your comfort zone, do you allow yourself to take steps of faith and explore your relationship with God with wide-eyed imagination? For example are you prepared to entertain Scriptural passages about miracles and signs and wonders that with limited vision you may find hard to believe? Are you prepared to believe that Jesus is able to incarnate your life through the Holy Spirit in the same way as he incarnated the lives of the disciples at Pentecost? If you are then you will see signs of the Holy Spirit at work in your life. Or do you confine your faith and your Christian walk to the small, narrow, squinty view of what you can easily understand and what fits conveniently into the view of the world that comes most easily to you? If you do then you are less likely to see signs of the Holy Spirit at work in your life Next time you are at the doctor or optometrist and they use one of these ophthalmoscopes or ‘eye lights’ be reminded of Jesus’ words. Your spiritual eye is like a lamp a kind of ophthalmoscope. It lets the light of God and his revelations into your life. Last week Phil spoke about how the wide-eyed children in the Temple were able to recognize Jesus as the Messiah while many of the cynical adults could not. Jesus the Great physician recommends that we take a step of faith today: To, open our eyes wide and allow as much of God’s light to flow into our beings so as to enlighten our thinking and our understanding, that we may come · to see so much more of who God is · to recongise the signs of his hand at work in our lives and · to recognize Jesus as our Messiah. · It is in that recognition that we will be saved from the darkness of unbelief and that we will become children of the light. Jesus warns that without God’s light only darkness presides……………. I invite you now to sing with me the song that reminds us to allow the Holy Spirit to open the eyes of our hearts, so that we might see God. Sing with me…. Open the eyes of my heart. |
