Friday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 369

“The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness. And if the light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be.”

This verse about the lamp of the body from Saint Matthew is echoed in Saint Luke's gospel. The editors of the Catholic NABRE offer no explanation for it, nor do I recall a traditional one. 

As a child I supposed that I could see by the eye beams that went out like laser rays. Didn't Superman's x-ray vision work like that? It was not a great theory but I lacked the critical abilities at the time to see its shortcomings. They would come later, along with better information. 

Perhaps the thinking of Jesus's prescientific age imagined the same eye beams mechanism. But the important question is, "What is he saying here?"

In our time I have heard the expression, lens, to describe our ways of seeing things. We are always looking through lenses. Some people see the world -- or would prefer to see the world -- through a positivist, scientific, secular lens that cannot see religious meaning in anything that happens. Not only does the theory of gravity explain the orbit of the planets, but economics describes the flow of money; and psychology, human interaction. Positivism, if it had the tools, would name the causes of every incident and predict all future events. 

That's called determinism and I have heard, on the radio, bona fide scientists insist there is nothing to see beyond that world view. If we cannot predict the future yet, it's theoretically possible, like time travel. (Hello?) Even human behavior will finally be predictable when we have devised the computer large enough to handle all the data we could feed it. 

But positivism is only one kind of lens. More familiar sorts are resentment, greed, lust, and so forth. Many men, flipping the channels, discover a women's basketball game and wonder why would anyone watch that sport. The women are not dressed to look sexy! What's there to see? Others watch women playing beach volleyball and see something sexy about that sport, despite the women's intense focus on winning the game. Their lens is lust and they look for its satisfaction everywhere. 

If your eye beams see nothing but lust, they don't see much. Likewise, people who are possessed by greed, fear, resentment, or racism squint at the world and can't figure out what's going on. 

The metaphor may apply also in non-judgmental situations; as, for instance, a police officer reads a situation differently than a soldier, lawyer, medic, or clergy. 

We can use it nonetheless in prayer, asking the Lord to give us clear eyes that see truly. God sees us with kindness, mercy, and benevolence. There is no rancor in God. The Incarnate Son of God, knowing the challenges and complexity of human life, appreciates our courage, creativity, and willingness. It is the Spirit of Jesus that sees these virtues. 

In our daily examen we ask God to help us see the lenses that we wore throughout the day; and to ask if they were gifts of the Holy Spirit or deceptions of Satan. If we are willing, it's not that hard to recognize their differences. If I cannot see my own eye, I can see how I am seeing. 

But neither do we see through rose-colored glasses, like Pollyanna. Our vision is always realistic for it is tempered by the cross in its joyful, luminous, sorrowful, and glorious meanings. 

Seeing as God sees, our eye beams are bright; they bathe the world in the sunshine which falls on the just and the unjust, the wicked and the righteous.