From the Daily Lectionary for Wednesday in the Fifth Week of Easter
Matthew 6:19-24
‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
‘The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
‘No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.’
We’re about half way through Matthew’s account of Jesus’ sermon on the mountainside in Galilee. As a whole, the sermon is an explication as to what the kingdom of God looks like on earth. Contrary to Apocalyptic literature, so popular in Jesus’ day, with its otherworldly and dramatic allusions to the coming of God’s kingdom as a future event, signaling the so-called “end times,” Jesus describes God’s kingdom as a present and unfolding reality, on the ground, as it were, dependent on the orientation of the people of faith. You’ll remember that at Jesus’ baptism, John the Baptizer is exhorting his followers to reorient themselves towards “reasonableness,” to “see” differently. Matthew describes this reorientation as a baptism of repentance (“reorient to reasonableness,” literally, in the Greek).
And Jesus hones in on the illusory orientation that plagues human society, that is to say, disorientation: that we are consumed with the desire for material possessions and wealth. We get that. Many a sermon is preached on the obsession with wealth and the power that comes with it. The sermons usually come in the fall when we talk about stewardship, and then the congregation breathes a sigh of relief when it’s all over. But suffice it to say, to serve wealth is to give oneself over to self-interest, which is in opposition to God’s vision for the world.
I want to focus on the odd reference in this passage to “the eye.” The reference is used throughout the New Testament literature. Plotinus called the Greeks “people of the eye.” The idea of “vision” was of utter importance to the Greek philosophical academy, which of course had profound influence on the writers of the Gospels. The “eye” was the conscious center of being, the orientation toward reality. To be enlightened, a cardinal virtue in philosophy, one must have a discerning, reasonable eye. In Ancient Hebrew tradition the eye could lead one into evil, or into good. It is the eye that may tend toward envy, or tend toward empathy. The eye is forever being tested between these extremes, and most often, there is a fine line between the two. Matthew, I think, is saying that this tension is at the heart of what makes a community sustainable or not: the tension between envy and empathy.
The persistent commitment to a life of faith is the means by which we may see with the “eye” of God; and for Matthew it is practice that forms believing. In other words, to know generosity is to practice generosity; to know compassion is to practice compassion; to avoid envy, the first evil (according to Genesis: Cain murders his brother Abel out of envy) one must practice empathy. The eye has to see to believe, and Matthew’s premise is that we have to see Justice, the grand virtue of this Gospel, enacted in order to know justice.
To practice the Way of God is to bear God’s light to the world. Love must guide the eye, which is to say, the eye must look beyond the self to the other. Love is not an idea, but enlightened action for the good of the whole. At its best, the church is the community in which we live and move that emboldens us to action. Trust what you see with the eyes of faith, and by the grace of God, act upon it.
Collect for Epiphany (BCP p. 214)
O God, by the leading of a star you manifested your only Son to the peoples of the earth: Lead us, who know you now by faith, to your presence, where we may see your glory face to face; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
