Blind Spot

Matthew 6:22-23, "The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. 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."

I have been reading a book called, "The Illness and Cure of the Soul in the Orthodox Tradition" by Archim. Hierotheos Vlachos and it has given me pause to think about Genesis 1-3 from a different perspective. 

First of all, the Orthodox Tradition has been in my heart and mind for the last four years. I have studied it personally and now professionally with a zeal to understand a faith that, quite frankly, I was never told about in all my years of education (now going on 185 or so it feels that way) and if any of their mysterious doctrines  came to the surface they were quickly dismissed or aligned with Roman Catholicism. I was never encouraged to examine them or to  investigate them lest I should be theologically swayed to heresy. But what I am finding out is that a church tradition that is linked to first century Christianity has a lot to teach me about my faith. While not embracing all of their theology, I am growing to appreciate much of it. It has opened up the Scriptures for me and given me a deeper understanding. 

I have always wondered what the above verse in Matthew was talking about. At best it was metaphorical. But the Church Fathers seem to indicate that the soul is made up of three parts:  the nous (mind), reason (understanding), and spirit (love). What I find interesting is that the mind is more of...as we would say idiomatically, the mind's eye. It is the ability or potentiality to "see" God. It is spiritual illumination. 

When Adam and Eve sinned we run to the legal aspects of this and say that they broke the law of God. God said don't do this and if you do then death will happen. It becomes what we call forensic or legal in nature. In fact, John in his epistle tells us that sin is a violation of the Law. However, that is not the only way of looking at what transpired. 

The Eastern Orthodox view this quite differently. Sin is a brokenness of spirit, a brokenness of relationships. The soul has become sick; it has become spiritually dark. And the cure is illumination of the soul again. It is to put man back into his proper relational place but even further, to move him to be divine. 

So when I read the words of Jesus they make sense to me now. If

my eye, my spiritual gate of illumination is good then my whole being will be good for it sees as God sees; it sees God and it sees what is not of God (in this context it is equated with greed). But if my eyes are bad, if they are blinded by the darkness of sin, then my whole being will reflect that darkness. 

Jesus, instead of being my cosmic Lawyer who stands before the Judge, is viewed as the divine Physician who brings the cure to my soul. He is the Light of the world and calls me out of a world of darkness. 

I still struggle with what this all means in my Protestant context. If I have embraced Jesus as my Savior and yet still struggle with an eye that seems to be dark in certain areas, have I truly applied the cure? Perhaps its as simply as this is a journey and not an event. I guess I'm not blind but for some  reason I haven't taken the sunglasses off. It takes a while to look directly at the son without going blind. Ironic isn't it.