The eye is the lamp of the body
The Lord teaches us two things when he says: “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…”. He teaches us to learn to deliberately avoid looking at evil, and to deliberately seek to look at what is good for us. These two should be practiced concurrently.
Our first look at evil might be involuntary. It might move us somehow, creating a desire to see more. At this stage it is merely a temptation. If at that stage we deliberately refuse to take a second look, then the incident is a temptation resisted. Each resisted temptation is a source of merit, a notch of victory for the will. It is probably that Eve had seen the tree of the knowledge of good and evil before. But when under the seduction of the Evil One she looked at it more intently, it became more pleasant to the eye and desirable for the knowledge it could give (cf. Genesis 3:6). That was the source of all the trouble we have. If David, on seeing Uriah’s wife bathing (2 Samuel 11:2), had turned away and gone to do something else, this would have been a temptation resisted. However much it would have cost him, it would have saved him a lot of troubles that were to come. However hard turning away from looking at evil is, it is not as hard as plucking out an eye (Matthew 18:9), and if plucking out the eye is better than going to hell with two eyes, then turning away is worth every effort. And it is not as hard as it seems; we cannot close our ears or noses at will, but we can close the eyes or turn away.
Our age is particularly bombarded by temptations of the eye: the screens, whether television, personal computer or mobile phone, the print media, adverts, and even the way people dress. For this reason, it is even more imperative that we strengthen the discipline of looking at what builds the soul. Rather than turn away all the time, we can school the eye to deliberately choose what is wholesome in these modern sources of what we see. We need to deliberately choose when to see and what to see. Prominent among the things suitable for us to see is the word of God. Christ who is the light of the world should light our path every day. There should be a suitable and stable time in our daily timetable to read and meditate on the word of God.
