“Really, Jesus?” we might ask after reading Matthew 6: 22 and 23. “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”
How can our eyes fill us with light? How can our eyes be unhealthy and fill us with great darkness?
We use our eyes to see, yet what we see depends on our thoughts. Different perceptions occur when the same event or scene is viewed by different people or by the same person at a different time in life. Looking out the window at an early winter view, we might see ugly bare trees and dry brown grass, or we could see beauty in red leaves clinging to an oak tree with a dusting of snow. Our eyes are healthy or unhealthy depending on our thoughts. Seeing the beauty in our surroundings fills us with light—emotionally, spiritually, and even physically.
However, the important question is, “How do you see people?”
If we see with unhealthy eyes, we create great darkness. If our thoughts and eyes are healthy, we add to the light in our world. When we see people, do we see the individual beauty, or do we see biased limitations and conclusions?
A series of behavioral experiments by Brent Hughes and colleagues from the University of California, Riverside, confirmed that white participants were less sensitive to changes in the identity of black than white faces. Hughes says, “Here, we show that race biases extend as far down as our sensory processes, such that what our senses pick up isn’t necessarily a perfectly accurate representation of the world around us. If we quite literally ‘see’ other race individuals as more similar to each other, this may serve as an early mechanism of stereotyping,” (https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/racial-bias-has-its-roots-in-sensory-perception)
Do we see beauty and light or ugliness and great darkness in someone of a different race, religion, nationality, socio-economic background, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or immigrant status? When our viewing of others comes from unhealthy thoughts and eyes, we put limits on others and make faulty conclusions. We might see losers, slackers, thieves, rapists, murderers, the lost, the messed-up, or even animals.
Seeing the individual beauty and goodness of others begins with healthy thoughts. To obtain healthy eyes, I suggest using the most important commandment as our basis for seeing others. “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:36-40)
Indeed, whether our nation and we are in the light or in great darkness, hangs on these commandments.
Following my Leader 