Friday in the Eleventh Week of Ordinary Time, June 21, 2024

Matthew 6, 19-23

Jesus said to his disciples: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and decay destroy, and thieves break in and steal. But store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be. The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness. And if the light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be.”

“Store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal.”  These “treasures” are the merits attributed to us by God for our good works and sacrifices done for love of him.  They are the talents earned by the industrious men in the Lord’s parable, pleasing to the Lord and bringing words of welcome from him into Paradise.  But although we can gain them, we cannot really count them or understand their value.  They are a sort of heavenly currency which only God can count up.  We can lose them, but they cannot be taken from us, as the Lord says.  We lose them through our wickedness or loss of faith.  Other things may be lost through “moth and decay”, that is, through neglect and natural destruction brought on by, say, rust; but spiritual goods are not subject to physical forces.  They cannot be stolen by thieves, since they are watched over by Almighty God.  “For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.”  The Lord offers us a very practical way of gauging our faith and our desire for him.  We can look hard at what we spend our time thinking about, planning for, working for.  Is it God?  He is the ultimate Treasure, a Treasure who loves us more than we can possibly love him; a Treasure truly worth dying for.

“The lamp of the body is the eye.” The ancient Greek physician Galen, whose medical ideas influenced the western world through the medieval period, held that rays emitted from the eyes caused sight.  The fifth century thinker Empedocles taught that a fire existed in the eye that sent forth these rays.  Objections to this idea are easily raised, but the Greeks had ready answers to these as well, and so the theory seemed settled fact for considerably over a thousand years.  This fire or other source of the eye-rays shown out into the world, but also deep into the body, and the Lord refers to this general understanding of the time.  Therefore, “If your eye is sound”, that is, if your eye is functioning properly, its rays will stream out into the world around you, and they will also stream inside of you.  However, “if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness”, for either the source of the eye’s rays is not functioning or some blockage has occurred to prevent the rays from streaming inside the body.  The interior of the body will be dark indeed because one’s own light does not enlighten it nor does another’s.  Hence, the Lord’s remark, “And if the light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be.”  The Lord here is speaking about the need to be spiritually pure so that we might see what is true treasure for us to gather and what things we ought to avoid.

We might wonder that the Lord did not correct the people’s understanding of how the eye works, but this would distract from the point he was making, and which he could make simply by adapting to current thinking.  Does that mean that the Lord adapted other commonly held ideas without correcting them?  The presumption of the vast gulf that exists between the world of Abraham’s bosom and the place of eternal punishment that the Lord incorporates in his parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man.  The idea is not put forward in the Old Testament but is found in written form in the apocryphal but highly influential First Book of Enoch.  The answer to this question is no.  When the Lord spoke on religious matters, he revealed the truth about them.  His description of the bosom of Abraham and of hell confirms the existence of these places and their conditions.