Light of the Body

Verses 22-23: “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. ²³But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness”

Eyes give light to the body.  Similarly, our inner conscience should give light to our soul.  If your eyes are blind, then you may not see the world properly. The same could happen to sinful conscience.

“Your eye is good”

Eyes let you see things as it is. Here ‘eyes’ refers to your soul; his righteous and spiritual conscience.

“How great is that darkness”

Our Lord reminds us that similar to the eyes, if we are blind in our eyes, the whole body is dark.  We believe that darkness is great and is guided by the conscience, but if you are in sin, then how great our darkness will be.

St. John Chrisostom: The usage “eye” here do not refer to external eye but internal sense.  ‘Light’ means the conscience which soul sees God.  That is, a person with Godly heart has eyes full of light, which means, he has a clear soul, not corrupt from worldly desires.  Our darkness in us is the bodily emotions.  They lead us to darkness. One who has clear eyes – that is pure conscience – preserves him from sin.  Even if the flesh may seek evil, soul opposes it for the fear of God. 

Some scholars also interpret presbyters as the eyes.

God and money

Verse 6:24 “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

During the time of slaves, they had not rights or individuality. We should remember this when we read this verse.  No one can serve equally two conflating things. Here our Lord exhorts the choice between the two.  ‘Manon’ is an Aramaic/Syriac word meaning riches, money, processions, or whatever is one trusted in.

St. Jerome says, “Let a name sake Christian who is greedy of money hear this, ‘You cannot save both God and money’ (1 Tim 6:9).  Lord did not say ‘rich people’ but He said ‘one who is slave of the money’.   Such people preserves money like a slave. But one who threw away his slavery handles money like ‘an owner of money ‘.  Let the ‘owner of money’ be slave to God.  It is written ‘For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil’ (1 Tim 6:10) and not money is the root of all kinds of evil; this is a big difference. [Duet 8:18; Luke 12:15; 1 Tim 6:9; Mark 10:23-25; 1 Timothy 6:10; James 4:12]