A Word for the Third Sunday After Pentecost (16)

The lamp of the body is the eye: if therefore your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is evil, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness? (Mt 6:22-23).

Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ sets before us, in today’s Gospel, moral, saving lessons, and, for greater clarity and comprehensibility, speaks in similitudes and parables. The word concerns the lamp given to every man as a guide on the path of this earthly life—that is, the reason, the conscience, and the heart of man. This lamp of man’s, that is, his reason and conscience, is likened to the bodily eye, which has been given by God the ability to see the objects of the visible world and to distinguish white from black, or one color from another, and likewise things great or small, rough or smooth, comely or uncomely, genuine or false, bright or dark. A healthy, clear eye distinguishes things well; but a sick or damaged eye sees them unclearly and dimly, or perversely, or does not distinguish them at all, sees nothing whatever. So it is also in spiritual matters, with the soul of man. If the reason is truly enlightened by the light of the Gospel, if a man’s conscience is good, upright, truthful, he sees people and all things in their natural form and light, his relations with people are upright, sincere, honest, genuine, Christian; but if a man’s reason is unenlightened, or is enlightened falsely, not in a Christian manner, if his conscience is impure and cunning, his heart unclean, bad, then his outlook on people and on things too is likewise wrong and false; and his thoughts, feelings, and actions are cunning, unclean, un-Christian. Whatever his conscience and heart are—simple or cunning—such too are his thoughts, feelings, words, and actions, such is his whole life. We see this constantly, in ourselves and in others, every day. 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). And yet the human heart is extremely inconstant, and subject to every kind of change: simple and cunning, good and evil, in one and the same man. Living faith, repentance, and prayer sometimes change the human heart completely for the better, and turn a vessel unfit for use into one fit for use and pleasing to God. The Lord says through the prophet Isaiah: put away the evils from your souls… learn to do good (Is 1:16-17), or promises to give people a new heart and a new spirit: a new heart and a new spirit I will give you (Ezek 36:26). Why, then, in man, created in the image of God, are the conscience and heart cunning, instead of being blameless and righteous? — Because the imagination of man’s heart is intent upon evil from his youth (Gen 8:21). First, from our original corruption in our first parents; for after their fall, the first-created humans acquired an unclean conscience and an unclean heart, and passed on this unfortunate inheritance to all their descendants; second, we ourselves too, by our own voluntary and involuntary sins, increase within ourselves this inborn corruption, especially through associating with corrupt people, or through a lack of proper upbringing, through the reading of bad books, through temptations and bad examples; for temptations must needs come, says the Lord, yet woe to the man through whom the temptation comes (Mt 18:7). A cunning heart is a common ailment, a common sin of the descendants of Adam, excepting the righteous, who, by unceasing study of the Holy Scriptures and by the labors of their whole life, have cleansed their soul and heart of a cunning conscience, and have acquired a pure heart and a blameless conscience. From the cunning of the human heart it comes about that our whole life goes somehow perversely, inside out, contrary to the commandments of God—for example, the Gospel says: seek first of all God’s Kingdom and His righteousness, and all this (that is, the needful earthly goods) will be added to you (Mt 6:33); but our earthly, cunning reason, and our earthly, cunning heart, keep telling us: seek first fleshly pleasure, gather riches by every means, gaze at earthly beauty, at earthly treasures, acquire wisdom or experience only of the earthly, worldly kind, and put the salvation of the soul, the Kingdom of Heaven, the pleasing of God, in last place, or leave it altogether, and hand it over to monks, or to people of the clerical calling. The Gospel says: everything earthly is perishable, will pass, will end, will vanish like a dream, like an apparition, like vapor or smoke, but the soul is immortal and eternal, as God is eternal; but the cunning heart looks at things quite the opposite way—everything earthly seems to it, as it were, permanent, contrary to the plain evidence of experience, while the soul seems a mortal thing, dissolving like air. This is why the whole life of people with such a cunning conscience is vicious, dark, hopeless. They give themselves over to earthly pleasures insatiably, give themselves over to a frenzied greed for money, enrich themselves by unlawful means, by oppression, by plunder, by bribe-taking, by embezzling public funds. The Gospel says: give, and it will be given to you (Lk 6:39); but a man with a cunning, covetous, unbelieving heart, trusting in money rather than in the living God, who gives us richly all things to enjoy (1Tim 6:17), says: no—let it be given to me, but I will not give to others; I will seize it all for myself; let riches flow to me like a river, but only I will draw from that river, and let no one else come near it, or take even a drop from it. Such was the rich man in relation to Lazarus. The word of God demands that we conform our own will to the will of God: Your will be done (Mt 6:10; Lk 11:2), says the Lord; but the cunning heart, on the contrary, does its own will, the will of the devil; you are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you wish to do (Jn 8:44), the Lord rebukes the Jews. The Gospel says: love your enemies (Mt 5:44); but the cunning man says: this is impossible, I must avenge myself on my enemies, repay evil for evil, dishonor for dishonor, injury for injury. A cunning eye sees, even in a good man, only what is bad, and refuses to see his good, respectable, and admirable qualities; thus the scribes and Pharisees imagined they saw, even in the God-Man, a liar, a disturber of the people: he flatters the people, they said, he forbids the paying of tribute to Caesar; in general, a cunning eye suspects everything bad, unclean, evil, in people; it judges a man not by his true worth, but by his speech, by his wealth and his standing in the world, by external, trifling advantages; a man with a cunning eye bows in servility before tinsel splendor, and not infrequently humiliates, persecutes, and reviles a virtue that is humble and unremarkable in its outward appearance, because it does not accord with his own views and thoughts. Who is without a cunning eye? — It is noticed even in infants, and to them, it seems, not infrequently, the morsel in the hand of another child seems bigger and better than their own morsel; and envy, greed, cunning, malice, and disobedience are noticed in them too, even though they themselves are not aware of it. Let us all strive, beloved brothers and sisters, to be simple-hearted, conforming ourselves to the divine simplicity; for our God, Three in Persons, who made us in His own image, is a simple Being, the purest Goodness, Holiness; the purest Light, in which there is not a single darkness, for whom sin is impossible, for whom an unrighteous thought is abhorrent. Amen.