Let Your Light Shine
Day 253 – 10 September
The Single Eye
Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness. (Luke 11:34, NIV)
The Dark Chamber
Long before anyone owned a camera, people had discovered a small wonder of light. Darken a room completely, then make one tiny, clean hole in the wall or the shutter, and something astonishing happens: the whole bright scene outside, the street, the trees, the people walking past, appears on the wall opposite, upside down but in full colour and perfect detail, moving as the world moves. A Chinese philosopher described it some four centuries before Christ; Aristotle noticed the crescent sun printed through the gaps in a plane tree during an eclipse; and around the year 1015 the great Arab scientist Ibn al-Haytham worked out the geometry in a darkened room and gave the world its first real theory of light. He had already suspected that the eye works this way. Six centuries on, Johannes Kepler named the thing a camera obscura, a dark chamber, and proved the connection that matters for us: the human eye is built on exactly the same plan. Behind the small opening of the pupil sits a dark chamber, and on its back wall the whole outside world is painted in light. Everything the body knows of brightness comes in through that one small door. Block it, or cloud it, and the chamber goes dark; keep it clear, and the room is full of the world. Jesus, sixteen centuries before Kepler, said it in a sentence.
The Lamp of the Body
“Your eye is the lamp of your body,” He said (Luke 11:34). The saying follows straight on from the lamp in the cellar, and it is a deliberate turn inward. For three mornings we have watched lamps being covered, in the living room, in the bedroom, in the cellar. Now Jesus points to a lamp that is harder to cover, because it is part of us. In the picture He draws, the eye is the body’s λύχνος (lychnos, lamp). Whether we picture it as a window that lets light in, as we do now, or as a lamp that shines light out, as the ancients did, the point holds: the eye is the body’s one point of light, and its condition decides whether the whole person is bright or dark. Whatever passes through it fills the whole self. “When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light.” The word is whole, ὅλον (holon, entire): light through one small door reaches every room. And the reverse holds with equal force. “But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness.” A clouded aperture means a dark chamber, however bright the day outside. So everything turns on the condition of the eye.
What a Single Eye Is
And here the English translations part company, which is a sign that something rich is buried in the Greek. The NIV says healthy; the ESV says healthy too; the NASB says clear; and the old King James, closest to the letter, says single. The word is ἁπλοῦς (haplous, single), and its picture is of something without folds, unmixed, of one piece, the opposite of διπλοῦς (diplous, double). Three meanings flow from that one image, and Jesus almost certainly means all three at once. First, an eye that is single is clear and sound, undamaged, letting the light through without distortion; that is the healthy eye of the modern versions. Second, a single eye is undivided and sincere, fixed on one thing, with no hidden second agenda behind the look; that is the eye of a person whose motives are one, who is exactly what they appear to be. And third, in the Hebrew idiom Jesus grew up with, a good eye was a generous eye, and an evil eye, the πονηρός (ponēros, evil, bad) eye of the second half of the verse, was a stingy one, the eye that begrudges; the Old Testament uses the phrase that way again and again, and Jesus Himself does in the parable of the vineyard, where the grumbling workers are asked, in the Greek, whether their eye is evil because the master is good. So the single eye is clear, sincere, and open-handed, and the evil eye is clouded, double, and grasping. Put the three together and the saying comes alive. A person whose eye is single, whose whole outlook is clear and undivided and generous, is a person whom light floods from end to end. A person whose eye has gone bad, clouded by a divided heart or a grudging spirit, sits in the dark whatever the weather outside.
When the Light Inside Is Darkness
Jesus then adds a warning that ought to stop us in our tracks: “See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness” (Luke 11:35). The unnerving thing about a clouded eye is that its owner rarely knows. Everything looks dim to them, and they assume the world is dim; the fault is inside, but it feels like the weather. So a heart that has gone double, saying one thing and meaning another, or a spirit that has grown tight-fisted and begrudging, will read its own dark as ordinary daylight and never suspect the aperture. This is why the saying belongs in a week about lamps on stands. Every lid we have lifted so far, the measure, the bed, the cellar, was something laid over the light from outside. But a light can also fail from within. A lamp that has grown dim in itself has nothing to set on the stand, and no amount of uncovering will help it. Before a life can shine for those coming in, the eye through which it receives its light must be single. The inner window has to be clear before the outer lamp can burn.
Clearing the Window on a Thursday
This gives Thursday its task: the eye before the lamp. The honest question is whether the window is clear. Is there a second agenda behind your kindness at work, a self you are managing while you appear to serve? Then the eye has gone double, and the light dims. Has a grudge, a small tightness about money or credit or time, crept in and begun to begrudge what others receive? Then the eye has gone stingy, and the chamber darkens. None of this is fixed by trying harder to shine. It is fixed by turning the eye, single and undivided, back to the One who is the light, and letting Him flood the whole of you again: a few honest minutes in which you look at Jesus alone, a motive surrendered, a fist that opens. Do that, and the old physics takes over. Light through one clear opening fills the whole room, and a person full of light has something real to set on the stand. Keep the eye single today, and you will find you have a lamp to shine with, and the whole house will be the brighter for it.
Declaration
Everything the light does in me comes in through one small window, and today I am asking whether that window is clear. I know how a heart goes double, one thing on the surface and another underneath, and how a spirit goes tight, begrudging what others are given; and I know that when the eye clouds like that, the whole of me goes dim while I blame the weather. So I will do the one thing that clears it. I turn my eye, single and undivided, to the One who is the light, and I look there long enough for the whole room of my life to fill again. I lay down the second agenda. I let go of the grudge. I let the light come in through the one clear window and reach every corner it has been kept from. And then, with a self that is bright from end to end, I will have a lamp worth setting on the stand, and everyone who steps in from the dark will see by it.
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