The Lamp of the Body

The Lamp of the Body

Matt 6:22-23

            I was watching PBS the other night and caught a little bit of a program about Cassius Clay, more commonly known as Muhammad Ali. They were showing his 1964 fight against the heavyweight champion of the world, Sonny Liston. At that time Clay had won a gold medal in the Olympics but wasn’t expected to stand a chance against the hard punching Liston. None of the sportswriters covering boxing gave Clay any chance at all at beating Liston and assumed the fight would be over very quickly. Liston himself trained for a short fight.

            When the fight began, Clay with his signature “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” dancing was able to dodge and dance out of the way of Liston’s punches. Years later the writers covering the fight admitted that their opinions of Clay changed, that he wasn’t terrible, but all Liston had to do was hit him one time and the fight would be over. As the fight wore on, all of Liston’s empty punches, along with his lack of endurance training wore him down.

Then something happened that changed the course of the fight. A few seconds after the beginning of Round 5 Clay began to rub his eyes as tears streamed down his face. Clay was blinded while Liston, as if on cue began hitting him with a flurry of punches. Clay miraculously survived the round, wandered to his corner, and told his trainer to cut the gloves off and get him out of there. The trainer suspecting something was up, rubbed Clay’s eye and then rubbed his own which immediately began to burn. Years later someone in Liston’s corner admitted that they had juiced Liston’s glove with a caustic fluid designed to come off his glove and burn Clay’s eyes long enough for Liston to knock him out. Liston had resorted to this tactic in two previous fights aswell. Clay’s trainer washed his eyes out the best he could between rounds and forced him back out with one simple command—“Run!”

Run Clay did. Sending him out blind to dodge the heavy hitting Liston would have been suicide for anyone other than Clay. Liston, however, was unable to connect against Clay and as the round wore on, Clay was slowly able to regain his sight and hit the tired Liston at will. After the sixth round was over Clay answered the bell, but Liston did not.

We are continuing our journey through the Sermon on the Mount tonight by looking at Matt 6:22-23 “Your eye is a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is good, your whole body is filled with light. ²³ But when your eye is bad, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!”

What’s it like to be blind? Everything is dark. Here Jesus is comparing the eye to a lamp. Imagine you are in a barn in the middle of a moonless pitch black night. You have a lamp, but it is not very good and it goes out—everything is dark. Perhaps you didn’t take good care of your wick, or used cheap watered down oil instead of what was recommended. Everything is dark and you have no hope of getting it lit again. If you properly maintained your lamp it would be putting out the much needed light but you didn’t.

The eye is compared to a lamp for the body. It provides light. It allows you to do so many things so much easier. If you disagree, put on a blindfold. First notice how dark it is, and then try to do your normal activities—like drive a car, pour boiling water in a tea cup, pee into a urinal. If you properly maintain your eyes—wear sunglasses in bright lights, keep them free of caustic materials that will burn them—you can reasonably expect them to continue to give you light for a very long time.

It doesn’t take a biblical scholar to figure out the difference between light and darkness in this passage. Light symbolizes good spiritual things. Darkness symbolizes evil spiritual things. Jesus said “If your eye is good, your body will be full of light. If you eye is bad your body will be full of darkness.” There is a computer programming terminology that says “Garbage In- Garbage Out.” Or GIGO. In other words if your programming is junk, you can reasonably expect that the program will not do what it is programmed to do. If you only allow good spiritual things to enter your eyes your body will be full of good light. But if you allow evil things to go into your eyes your body will be full of darkness.

What kind of evil things are we talking about? Pornography, violent movies or games, or violence in general. When I was thinking about this passage, the old proverb “the eyes are the window of the soul” kept coming to my mind. What are windows? They are barriers that separate the inside from the out, but are transparent to allow a person to look out, while another can look in. Have you ever seen someone, or even a picture of someone, and could just tell their hearts were full of darkness? That is the view of someone on the outside looking in. Lets talk about the inside looking out. Imagine you live in a house that has two windows: one window looks out to a beautiful lush valley before a snow capped mountain; the other window has a view of your neighbor’s window. Your neighbor is a mean ugly old man who has nothing better to do but to watch for you, flip you off, and moon you when you glance out. Which window would you peer out of, and which one would you put extremely thick curtains over?

Jesus said in a later teaching (Matt 18:9), “if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out because it would be better to go to heaven with one eye than go to hell with two eyes.” Apparently, Jesus thought it was important to guard what goes into your body. If you don’t guard what goes in, so much garbage will go in that you won’t even be able to tell the difference between light and darkness.

How can we practically guard what we see, besides plucking out our eyes? Internet blocker, bounce your eyes (Every Man’s Battle)—whether you see something tempting or violent, don’t watch violent movies, or play violent games. You can say that violent games don’t affect you but you don’t have science or empirical data on your side. I remember playing a game one time called “Carmageddon.” You literally drove a car around and tried to hit as many people as possible. It was awesome—or terrible, depending on your perspective. It wasn’t until the next day when I was driving past a playground full of kids and had a flashback from the game that I realized how much we are affected by the video games we play. The movies and television programs we watch, the games we play, the books and magazines we read, the music we listen to, all affects us. I’m not here to make anybody do anything. If you aren’t ready to put negative things away and grow spiritually then don’t. It’s cool. I won’t lose any sleep over it. I am here to tell you what the Bible says about the subject, and to tell you about my personal experiences with it. I’m just a beggar telling other beggars where I found food. Maybe you won’t have to look as long as I did before I finally found it.