“The Healthy Eye”
Matthew 6:22-23
As many of you know, this church has operated a ministry called “Safe House” since the year 2001.
It has been a labor…and I mean LABOR of LOVE.
It is an incredibly self-less and generous ministry.
And one reason for this is that it serves some of the most at-risk people who are at the same time—some of the most difficult to get-along-with…
…Middle-schoolers.
It provides a safe place for Middle School kids to go after school.
But lately it has become more and more difficult to find people to volunteer to help with Safe House.
At one point this year, David thought we would have to stop the program.
We even changed the name of Safe House to The Red Bank Community Safe House in order to try and find others in the community and outside our church to volunteer.
We called a community meeting.
The only folks who showed up were folks already affiliated with this church and almost all are already affiliated with Safe House.
But God is good; because of the faithful few, it looks as if Safe House will continue for another year.
This shortage of volunteerism or lack of giving of oneself for the sake of others is not unusual, though.
All across the country, people are giving up on giving…
…and that involves the giving of both time and money.
What has gone wrong?
It’s not something that just started because of COVID; it’s been happening for a long time.
Less and less people are giving of themselves and more and more people are unhappy.
We live in the most prosperous nation in the world, but have some of the most worried people.
We fight over money and buy weapons in order to keep others from getting at our “stuff.”
We often give very little.
Why is it so difficult for us to be generous?
And why is “stuff” so important to us?
And why am I asking this question after reading this difficult passage of Scripture?
And what is this Scripture passage about anyway…
…this cryptic teaching of Jesus about “The eye is the lamp of the body”?
It’s like… “Say what?”
“What is Jesus talking about here?”
Well, this isn’t a teaching on the need to see an optometrist; this is something quite different.
This teaching comes from rabbinical history.
You see, there was a good or healthy eye and a bad or unhealthy eye.
And rabbis taught that a person either has a good eye or a bad eye, a healthy eye or an unhealthy eye.
And the kind of eye a person had made all the difference in the world.
So, Jesus says: “The eye is the lamp of the body.
If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light.
But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.
If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”
This unusual teaching is all about how we see things.
For instance, if I see with a “healthy eye” I choose to see things in a positive light.
I choose to see things optimistically.
I choose to see the best in a situation.
Because, let’s face it, how we see the world greatly impacts who we are inwardly.
One theologian says: “What you look for you will find.”
And what he means is “If you want to find the good you will find it.
And if you want to find the bad you will find it.”
And a lot of us have a tendency to look for the bad.
And that is no fun, and it does no-one any good.
As a matter of fact, it inflicts a lot of harm.
My mother had an amazing view on life and a strong trust and faith in God.
She was known for her laugh, her smile, her generosity toward others.
This used to, sort of confound me.
And the reason this confounded me was that by the time my mother reached the age of 6-years-old both her parents had passed away.
I said to her one day, “Mom, you sure have had a difficult life.”
And her response was one of shock.
“I don’t know why you say that, I feel as if I have always had God’s grace at my back.”
Instead of being angry, holding grudges, and being sour about her situation—she was able to see the good in life, rather than the bad.
My mom had a “healthy eye.”
And because she had a “healthy eye” she was able to live “outside of herself,” to be generous, loving, compassionate, empathetic.
She spent more time helping others than she did focusing on herself.
Hers’ was a life well-lived.
I’d imagine most of us know or have known people like this.
“The eye is the lamp of the body,” says Jesus.
It’s health and soundness help determine our entire well-being.
In the first church I served as Pastor, there was a wonderful older couple.
They were salt-of-the-earth folks—simple, kind and faithful.
The light of Christ shone brightly in them.
And one thing they were known for in both the church and the community was their jail ministry.
It was something the two of them had started and led together.
They went every Thursday morning to the jail to lead a Bible study and to pray with the inmates.
They made friends with them.
They had birthday parties for them.
They wrote letters—thousands and thousands of letters over the years—to people in prison and out of prison.
They invited ex-convicts into their home for supper and for holidays.
They did this faithfully for nearly thirty years and many lives were transformed as a result.
What was it like to see the world through their eyes?
Many of us might look at people in jail and see only criminals, thugs, delinquents, predators, dangers to society.
This couple looked at those very same people and saw something quite different.
They saw human beings made in God’s image…
…men and women whom Christ died to save.
Men and women whom Christ is more than able to transform—just as He had been able to transform and was continuing to transform them.
In the section, before these two short verses, Jesus is talking about storing up treasures on earth versus treasures in heaven.
And in the section right after this, Jesus says: “No one can serve two masters…you cannot serve both God and money.”
And so, we can kind of see what Jesus is getting at here, but He’s talking about much more than money.
It’s about in what or in Whom we place our trust.
It’s about what we are training our eyes on.
“If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light.”
The Greek used to describe a “healthy eye” implies generosity.
And the Greek word used to describe an “unhealthy eye” implies stinginess.
If I’m seeing the world through an unhealthy eye I will take on a posture of scarcity.
If I’m seeing the world through a healthy eye I will take on a posture of abundance.
I will look around the world and see all that God is doing.
I will see the possibility.
I will see the potential.
I will see the excitement and adventure in being a part of what God is doing.
I will be filled with love for God and neighbor.
And that will cause me to want to give of myself.
In other words, if I have a healthy eye I am going to be generous, I’m going to volunteer to help others, I’m going to give lavishly.
But if I have an unhealthy eye that will make me think that there is not enough to go around…
…and that everyone is going to hurt me…
…they are out to get me and my stuff…
…and so, the last thing I want to do is give…
…and that makes me un-generous or selfish or stingy.
Or as one theologian has put it: “It is a life turned in on itself and focused on the preservation of oneself.
The unhealthy eye robs life from the other in order to build up its own life, and darkness closes in.”
But, “the healthy eye is turned toward the other, lives with open hands and an open heart.
The healthy eye extends the gift of life to others.
There is light.
And this fills and transforms our speech and shapes our passions.”
When I was at my last Church we had a ministry for homeless children living in an extended stay hotel down the street.
Those children were difficult and unruly, but the people volunteering in that ministry saw the children with a healthy eye.
They saw the potential in them.
They saw the image of God in them.
They knew God wanted to do great things in and through their lives.
They knew God loved them and so they loved them as well.
And a lot of lives, not just the lives of the children, were transformed as a result.
Several years later a mother of one of the children wrote me and told me that watching how we loved and cared for her child—helped bring her to faith in Christ.
She is now doing well and involved in a similar ministry for children.
And the child in our program is now a counselor at a Christian Camp and headed for college.
Even if those two persons were the only ones saved through that ministry, it would have been more than worth it.
I wonder how many lives have been transformed through the Safe House Ministry this church has been running since 2001.
You know, all this “healthy eye,” and “unhealthy eye” talk is really about trusting in God.
If we trust that God is good we have nothing to lose.
But when we don’t trust God, well, we see the results…
…we see them with Adam and Eve and the fruit…
…we see them with Cain and Abel…
…Noah and the vineyard…
…we see them with the Tower of Babel…
…all through history and all through our world we see what NOT trusting God does.
It keeps people from helping one another, from loving, from giving.
But trusting God releases all that stuff because we realize that God is in control and that God has our back.
And we know we are totally loved and totally valued and totally accepted.
And when we know this, we have a healthy eye and God is our Treasure.
And “our Treasure” shapes our inner person.
On the other hand, having an unhealthy eye is a way of seeing our-self, the world and others in a way where there is never enough and things are never good enough.
And that way of seeing engulfs us in darkness, and “how great is that darkness!”
It causes us to hoard, mistrust, hate, fight and go to war.
In the same conversation in which Jesus talks about the “healthy” and “unhealthy” eye, He goes on to talk about worry.
He says, “do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.
Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?”
This goes right back to the generous posture versus the posture of stingy-ness.
God’s eyes are generous: “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Are you not much more valuable than they?” Jesus asks.
What keeps us from being generous like God is generous?
Why don’t we give more?
Worry, at its core is a scarcity worldview—that is living with an “unhealthy eye.”
Worry cripples my ability to be generous.
Worry stifles my desire to “lay up for” myself “treasures in heaven.”
So, Jesus invites us to trust in Him.
He invites us to trust that God has our best interests in mind.
He invites us to trust that God knows what we need and will provide us with everything at just the right time…
…that is what the Israelites had to learn over and over again in the desert.
That is what we must learn as we try to walk with God but end up falling on our face, only to allow God to pick us up again and again.
Trusting God is what gives us healthy eyes.
In Matthew 6:33, Jesus says: “But seek first [God’s] kingdom and [God’s] righteousness…”
Righteousness, in the Bible, means to be generous and to care for others.
It means having a healthy eye.
So, that is what we are to seek to have as those who are committed to following Jesus.
Several years ago, someone gave me a simple pixilated sketch of Jesus’ face.
The instructions below tell you to gaze intently at the image, to focus intently on it for thirty seconds, then look away at a blank wall.
When you look away, the image of Jesus’ face is supposed to reappear suddenly on the wall.
I don’t pretend to understand the physiology of it—it has something to do with retinas and rods and cones—but sure enough, that is exactly what happens.
Jesus’ face shows up everywhere you look.
My goal, as a follower of Jesus Christ, is for that image of Jesus to never go away.
I want to see the image of Jesus on everyone and on every decision I make.
I want to see Jesus and know that I am loved beyond measure and be reminded that God so loves me that He came and died for me and for every other human on earth—and to see that God is so generous that He gave His all—His very own life.
And I want to love every other human just as Jesus does…
…that’s a high calling, I know.
But is there a better goal?
I want to be generous, like Jesus.
I want to give myself for the sake of the world, like Jesus.
It’s been said that if we spend enough time looking at Jesus, allowing Him to open our eyes and give us vision, sooner or later we will start seeing Jesus everywhere.
We will never look at things, at life, at situations, at God nor at other human beings the same way again.
Our whole body—the Gospel tells us—will be full of light.
And when that happens, we will seek nothing but the well-being of others—not just economically, but ultimately—through sharing the love, grace and transformative power of Jesus Christ our Lord with everyone…no matter the cost to ourselves, to our own lives, to our own bank accounts, to our own time.
For there is nothing more important in all the world.
Overflowing, generous love for God and others is the key to everything.
Let us join together as believers and seek—more than anything--to have healthy eyes.
Amen.
