Instruction for the Third Sunday After Pentecost

The lamp of the body is the eye. So then, if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness (Mt 6:22-23).

The meaning of today’s Gospel reading may be summed up briefly as follows: the human soul is darkened by the darkness of countless sins, and for this reason is in extreme peril, threatened, should it fail to repent and amend, with eternal torment. Meanwhile people think and care least of all for the enlightenment and salvation of their soul, and give all their care to the brief and swiftly passing body and to the goods of the body—food, drink, clothing, dwelling—to the evident, ruinous harm and injury of their soul. In today’s Gospel the Lord gently exposes this senselessness of ours, and teaches us to care first and foremost for the soul: is not the soul more than food? (Mt 6:25)—and to seek above all the Kingdom of God, which is within us (Lk 17:21) and ought to be, as we are made in the image and likeness of God—and the righteousness of God, since we live in every kind of unrighteousness, burdened with countless sins.

For the sake of clarity and persuasiveness, the Lord brings into His speech comparisons drawn from visible things. He takes as His example our eye and our body. The lamp of the body, He says, is the eye. So then, if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. So then, if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness? (Mt 6:22-23).

By the eye we ought to understand our heart or mind, and by the body our being, our life, for which the heart is the same as the eye is for the body. If a man’s heart is pure, his conscience pure, then our whole being too is pure and full of light, our whole life holy, all our deeds good and blameless. But if the heart is cunning and impure, and the conscience cunning, then our whole being is cunning too, our whole life cunning—all our thoughts, feelings, actions. So then, if your heart, your conscience, is already darkness, then how dark, how wrong, how cunning, how ruinous must your whole life be? Is this not clear? Yes indeed: for we are all convinced of this by the experience of life; we see it either in ourselves or in other people.

No one can serve two masters; for 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 God and mammon (Mt 6:24). St. Chrysostom explains these words of the Savior thus: God has said, once and for all, that service to God and to mammon cannot be joined together. Do not say, then, that both can be joined together. For when mammon commands you to seize what belongs to another, while God commands you to give away even your own property; when God commands you to lead a chaste life, while mammon commands you to live in debauchery; when mammon commands you to drink to excess and to overeat, while God, on the contrary, commands you to restrain your belly; when God commands you to despise the present goods of this world, while mammon commands you to cling to them with your heart; when mammon makes you marvel at marble, walls, and carpets, while God commands you to despise all this and to honor true wisdom instead—how, after this, can you say that service to God and to mammon can be joined together? For this reason the Savior adds: do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?.. (Mt 6:25) and a little further on He says: after all these things the pagans seek; your Heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you (Mt 6:32-33). It is evident, from the sense of this passage, that the Lord does not forbid caring for the acquiring or laying up of earthly goods for one’s daily provision, or for the paying of one’s dues, but forbids only excess, an exclusive care for earthly things—a care that swallows a man whole and estranges him from God, from the Church, from divine worship, from the fulfillment of the Christian duty of fasting, confession, and Communion of the Holy Mysteries, from works of mercy—a care that leaves him no room to think of eternal life, of his eternal lot to come.

Brethren, Christians! Let us set our minds more on heavenly things than on earthly, where Christ sits at the right hand of God (Col 3:1-2). After death we shall need nothing earthly—neither food, nor clothing, nor money, nor houses—but shall need only love, and the works of love. Food is for the belly, and the belly for food; but God will destroy both the one and the other (1Cor 6:13). Amen.