Matthew 6:22 to 23 · Passage · Modesty and Simplicity
The Simple Eye
Jesus' saying of the eye as the lamp of the body stands in Matthew 6:22 to 23 and again in Luke 11:33 to 36.
Matthew sets the saying between two commands about money, and readers have weighed its meaning by that place.
The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light.
- The passage
- Matthew 6:22 to 23, Luke 11:33 to 36
- Books
- Matthew, Luke
- Hold in memory
- Matthew 6:22
Summary
Jesus uses the eye as a picture of the heart's aim. An eye fixed on one treasure lets light into the whole life, and an eye that grudges or divides its aim leaves the whole life dark. The saying belongs to modesty because a plain and simple life grows from an undivided heart. Its last line warns that a person can take his own darkness for light and never know it.
- In the Hebrew of Proverbs a generous man is good of eye and a stingy man is evil of eye.
- The Greek calls the good eye haplous and the bad eye ponēros, the common New Testament word for evil.
- John Gill read the single eye as a generous mind, and Augustine read it as an intention fixed on heaven.
Where the Saying Stands
The two Gospels give the saying different hearers and join it to different sayings of Jesus.
Among the texts of modesty, this saying looks to the desire behind what a person shows and what he keeps. A reader meets its question whenever money, envy or a divided purpose pulls at his attention.
The question is what Jesus meant by a good eye and a bad eye, and what the saying asks of the one who hears it. The answer comes from the Greek words of the saying, the Hebrew idiom of the eye in the Law and Proverbs, and the parable in which Jesus uses the idiom again. John Gill, Augustine, John Wesley, Adam Clarke, Jerome and John Chrysostom give the readings the church has held.
In Matthew the saying belongs to the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus has just taught giving, prayer and fasting done in secret (Matthew 6:1 to 18).
Luke places it after Jesus' answer to the growing crowds who demanded a sign, to whom He promised only the sign of Jonah (Luke 11:29 to 32).
No one lights a lamp and puts it in a cellar or under a basket. Instead, he sets it on a stand, so those who enter can see the light.Luke joins the saying of the eye to the lamp set on a stand, so that the eye becomes the lamp a person must not hide or let go dark.
Be careful, then, that the light within you is not darkness. So if your whole body is full of light, with no part of it in darkness, you will be radiant, as though a lamp were shining on you.”Luke alone gives the warning to take care and the promise of a body full of light with no part in darkness.
Three Sayings in Matthew 6
Matthew sets three short sayings of Jesus in a row, each about where a person fixes his heart.
In each saying the hearer holds one treasure, one eye or one master, and cannot hold two.
A ladder of three rungs, one for each saying of Matthew 6:19 to 24, each with a phrase of it in the Berean text and the two things it sets against each other.
The first and the third sayings each have a study of their own.
The Lamp, the Light and the Darkness
The saying runs from the eye as a lamp to a cry over a light within that has become darkness.
The Greek of Matthew 6:22 opens ho luchnos tou sōmatos estin ho ophthalmos, which runs word for word as the lamp of the body is the eye. A lamp lights the room it stands in, and the eye gives the body its light in the same way, by letting in what it sees.
The adjective for the good eye is haplous. The STEP Bible lexicon from Tyndale House defines it as "properly, folded together, i.e. single (figuratively, clear)" and gives its meaning as sound. Haplous stands only twice in the New Testament, in Matthew 6:22 and Luke 11:34.
But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!Jesus sets the bad eye against the good one and gives the same whole body the opposite end.
The adjective for the bad eye is ponēros, which the same lexicon glosses as hurtful and evil. Matthew uses it in the Lord's Prayer for the evil one from whom the disciples ask to be delivered (Matthew 6:13).
The closing clause of Matthew 6:23 turns from the eye to the light within, to phōs to en soi in the Greek, word for word the light that is within you.
But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness. He does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.John uses the same picture of a darkness within that blinds the eyes, and ties it, as Deuteronomy 15:9 ties the evil eye, to a man's dealings with his brother.
The Good Eye and the Bad Eye in Hebrew Speech
The Law, Proverbs and two sayings of Jesus describe a person's way with his goods by the state of his eye.
In six verses an eye called good or evil describes a giver or a grudger, and the Berean text renders each without the word eye.
| Verse | The tagged words, glossed word for word | The Berean rendering |
|---|---|---|
| Proverbs 22:9 | tov 'ayin, "a [person] good of eye" | A generous man will be blessed |
| Proverbs 23:6 | ra' 'ayin, "a [person] evil of eye" | Do not eat the bread of a stingy man |
| Proverbs 28:22 | 'ish ra' 'ayin, "a person evil of eye" | A stingy man hastens after wealth |
| Deuteronomy 15:9 | vera'ah 'eineka, "and it will be evil, eye your" | you look upon your poor brother begrudgingly |
| Matthew 20:15 | ho ophthalmos sou ponēros, "the eye of you envious" | are you envious because I am generous? |
| Mark 7:22 | ophthalmos ponēros, "an eye evil" | envy |
Deuteronomy 15:1 commands Israel to cancel debts at the end of every seven years, and Deuteronomy 15:9 warns the lender who refuses a poor brother as that year draws near. The evil eye there is the hand closed against need.
In the parable of the workers in the vineyard the landowner pays the last workers the denarius he promised the first for the whole day, and the first grumble (Matthew 20:1 to 16). The landowner names their grudge with the very phrase of Matthew 6:23 and sets it against his own goodness to the latecomers.
Mark lists the evil eye among the things that come out of the heart and defile a person (Mark 7:20 to 23). The STEP Bible lexicon gives envy as a figurative sense of ophthalmos, "from the jealous side-glance".
The Single Eye and a Simple Life
Paul and James set the undivided heart against the divided one.
I am afraid, however, that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may be led astray from your simple and pure devotion to Christ.Paul's word for simple devotion is haplotes, so the single heart he fears to see led astray is the single eye of the saying.
He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.James sets this divided man against the God who gives generously in James 1:5, where the Greek for generously is haplōs, a word that shares its stem with haplous.
The person whose eye rests on one treasure has no need to display his goods or to hoard them.
How the Fathers Read the Darkness Within
Jerome and John Chrysostom explain how the light within a person becomes darkness.
died 420 · Jerome
Jerome reads the saying as a likeness drawn from the senses and applies it to a soul darkened by vice.
“This is an illustration drawn from the senses. As the whole body is in darkness, where the eye is not single, so if the soul has lost her original brightness, every sense, or that whole part of the soul to which sensation belongs, will abide in darkness. Wherefore He says, If then the light which is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! that is, if the senses which are the soul's light be darkened by vice, in how great darkness do you suppose the darkness itself will be wrapped?”
Jerome · Catena Aurea by Aquinas · on Matthew 6:22 to 23Patristic
John Chrysostom, in his twentieth homily on Matthew, ties the darkened eye to the treasure saying before it.
Read the page on John Chrysostom
He warns that buried gold nails the heart "to all that is below". Jesus, he says, had spoken "of the mind as enslaved and brought into captivity", and then "transfers the lesson to things outward, and lying before men's eyes".
Two Readings of the Single Eye
Readers from Augustine to Adam Clarke divide over the adjective, and each reading meets one strong objection.
The generous eye of the Hebrew idiomJohn Gill
John Gill's Exposition of the New Testament (1746 to 1748) takes the single eye to mean a mind "liberal, generous, and bountiful". Gill reasons that "Christ is still upon the same subject of liberality, and against covetousness". He says that Jesus "speaks entirely in the language of the Jews".
Gill cites the Mishnah's tractate Terumot, which ranks the offering of first fruits by the giver's eye. There "a good eye" gave the fortieth part, a middling one the fiftieth, "and an evil one, the sixtieth part".
The objection: haplous means single or sound, and the lexicon gives the sense of generosity to the noun haplotes, never to this adjective.
The undivided intention toward GodAugustine; John Wesley; Adam Clarke
Augustine's exposition of the Sermon reads the eye as the intention behind every work a person does.
“We know that all our works are pure and pleasing in the sight of God if they are performed with a single heart. This means that they are performed out of charity and with an intention that is fixed on heaven. For ‘love is the fulfillment of the law.’ Therefore in this passage we ought to understand the eye as the intention with which we perform all our actions. If this intention is pure and upright and directing its gaze where it ought to be directed, then unfailingly all our works are good works, because they are performed in accordance with that intention. And by the expression ‘whole body,’ Christ designated all those works that he reproves and that he commands us to put to death. For the apostle also designates certain works as our ‘members.’ ‘Therefore,’ Paul writes, ‘mortify your members which are on earth: fornication, uncleanness, covetousness,’ and all other such things.”
Augustine of Hippo · Sermon on the Mount 2.13.45 · on Matthew 6:22Patristic
John Wesley's Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755) make the same comparison: "what the eye is to the body, the intention is to the soul". The single eye, he wrote, is one "Singly fixed on God and heaven".
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1832) knew the older phrase: "An evil eye was a phrase in use, among the ancient Jews, to denote an envious, covetous man or disposition". He held that Jesus "extends and sublimes this meaning" to "simplicity of intention, and purity of affection".
The objection: the Law and Proverbs use the eye for giving and grudging, and this reading sets that background to one side.
A Lamp That Lets in Light
A lamp shows a room as it is. The saying asks each hearer where his own eye rests when he spends, gives or keeps his goods, and whether it still sees the poor brother of Deuteronomy 15:9.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- The tagged Hebrew and Greek text of the Bible, with Strong's numbers, morphology and glosses (STEP Bible, Tyndale House, Cambridge, CC BY 4.0)
- STEP Bible TBESG, the brief lexicon based on Abbott-Smith (1922), entries g573, g572, g4190 and g3788 (Tyndale House, Cambridge, CC BY 4.0)
- John Gill, Exposition of the New Testament (1746 to 1748), on Matthew 6:22 to 23.
- Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible (1832), on Matthew 6:22.
- John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, Homily 20, on Matthew 6:19 to 23.
- John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), on Matthew 6:22.
- Augustine of Hippo, Our Lord's Sermon on the Mount, book 2, chapter 13, section 45.
- Jerome, as quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea, on Matthew 6:22 to 23.
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