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If your eye is single/generous/healthy…
I read Luke 11:33-36 today about inner and outer illumination:
“No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a basket, but on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness. If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright, as when a lamp with its rays gives you light.” [ESV]
I remember this from college, but also in the King James:
The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness. [KJV]
I remember Dr. Bruce Terry saying that the “eye is single” was talking about being generous, which I think was following a idiom from Hebrew and the OT:
A parallel idiom is found in the Old Testament: “He who is generous (Hebrew tov ayin, good eye) will be blessed, for he gives some of his food to the poor” (Proverbs 22:9; see also 11:25). — Gary Manning Jr. “Good Eye / Bad Eye” The Good Book Blog: Talbot School of Theology Faculty Blog, Biola University, 2/04/2011, https://www.biola.edu/blogs/good-book-blog/2011/good-eye-bad-eye.
The KJV on this captures my attention. Perhaps because I’ve been feeling that there is a close connection to unity of spirit and generosity, among other behaviors that a pro- common good. (Indeed there’s research to back this up.)
So why does the KJV translate this as “single” while the ESV says “healthy”? It has to do with the Greek origin of the word in question — ἁπλοῦς haplous — itself:
Probably from ἄλφα (G1) (as a particle of union) and the base of πλέκω (G4120) – BlueLetterBible https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/g573/kjv/tr/0-1/
The parts of the word haplous would lend to a meaning akin to “braided into one” or “braided into a unity”. (This tells us more about the origin of the word-concept then the meaning in the text because connotation over time does not have to follow the origin [see history of “bully”]. Even so, I really like this picture.)
It makes me think of the eye in the text as a lens. A good lens “weaves together” the rays of light passing through to a single focus point it to produce a clear image. But a bad lens directs rays in different directions, leading to a blurred or unclear image: a problem called Spherical abberation (see attached image).
This seems useful to me: for me to consider if my perception of myself and the word around me has a unity of focus that produces a confidence in grace, which in turn produces an inner calm, that can then escape scarcity thinking and its inevitable evil towards others and self, and instead see the world through a generous lens. For this, my unit of focus must be Jesus who is the image of one so connected to the divine and himself as to have no limits to his generosity: not the protection of his own life, and apparently not even the rules of physics.
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