OH DARK DARK DARK

Ho luchnos tou sōmatos estin ho ophthalmos, ean oun èi ho ophthalmos sou haplous, holon to sōma sou phōteinon estai; ean de ho ophthalmos sou ponèros èi, holon to sōma sou skoteinon estai. Ei oun to phōs to en soi skotos estin, to skotos poson.

²² `The lamp of the body is the eye, if, therefore, your eye is plain/simple/pure, all your body shall be bright,

²³ but if your eye is bad, all your body shall be dark; if, therefore, the light that [is] in you is darkness -- the darkness, how great?

 

This is a curious little interlude in the Sermon, not often paid attention to, but worth examining. First comes the premise: the eye is the lamp of the body. Luchnos here is simply a lamp: what would have come to the mind of the audience is a small lamp with a wick in a little bowl of oil. It is the thing that gives light in darkness. Interestingly, here, the eye is a lamp. We might say a “window”, but of course in Yeshua’s Middle East windows had no glass. Here, the eye is a lamp that lights what’s behind and below it: the body’s interior, imagined as a dark space like a dwelling unlit. And for that space to be properly lit, the eye has to be haplous, a word with many meanings but mainly “clean, unsullied, pure”. If the lamp is in good condition, the wick trimmed, the oil fresh and sufficient, it can light the whole of the body. However, if the lamp is ponèros --- We remember ponèros from the Lord’s Prayer: it was what we pray to be delivered from. And the fact that a lamp too can be ponèros reminds us that we are not necessarily dealing with metaphysical “evil” (though it may mean that in the prayer): here it just means that the lamp’s wick is untrimmed, that the oil is sparse and rancid, and that it smokes. So if your eye is ponèros, the body isn’t lit by it as it is meant to be.

            So if your eye is ponèros, what does that mean? The last sentence tells us, not the manner but the result. It drops the element of the eye and goes straight to a much greater metaphor. “The light that is in you” – right, now we begin to get it. In the terms of Yeshua’s discourse, we can sense what that light is that is in us. It is the light of the Spirit, or rather, of our spirit enlightened in its turn by the hagion pneuma, the Holy Spirit. If our spirit is not so enlightened, if it has refused the light that is offered to it, if it ends up being, not just “dark” but darkness itself --  how great, how impenetrable, such a darkness! It reminds me of a passage in a novel of Charles Morgan’s: Comment vous défendez-vous contre la solitude ? Monsieur, je suis devenue la solitude même. And at that point, the simple ponèros’s deeper and more frightening meaning rushes back. If we refuse the light that the new, completed Torah offers us, not only will we be lightless, we risk becoming Darkness itself – and we know who is the Prince thereof. 

DARK, BUT ?

Three candles: the light is growing, however slowly, however modestly, however vulnerable to the winds of change and the rain of disappointment. Which might make us reflect on the curious virtue of hope.

In common parlance it refers to the thought of something that may occur and that would please us if it did. I hope it’ll be sunny tomorrow for the school picnic. Such hope is natural, but it’s hard to think of it as a virtue. Hope as a virtue is something much tougher, more like the weed that grows through the almost invisible crack in the tarmac of a parking-lot. It is that in us which allows us – urges us, compels us – not to give up. To fall down, to get up and to go at it again. To fall down again, to get up again, to go on again.

So if we apply this to the three candles, the trinity of theological virtues – Faith, Hope, and Charity – we see that Hope is a central religious virtue. Not (just) in the sense that we “hope for the Second Coming”, but in the sense that the falling down, the getting up and the going on apply a fortiori to our relation with God. We should like to be better at it than we are. We aren’t happy with the way we live it from day to day. And so?

Hope is not a wish, not even a confident wish: it’s a determination, and a rueful recognition that the more we fall down, the more we will realize that if we manage nevertheless to get up and go on, it’s not our doing but that of Him Who loves us. As such, Hope is a gift from Him to us, and one that we return. Without it, we would long ago have given up; we would have given in to despair. With it, what it hopes for, the causa finalis or “ending end” as Sidney called it, is in fact being created, is happening, in and through the process itself. In the same way as a good marriage – something many of us hope will happen to us – in fact is created, happens, in and through the daily humdrumlies, falling down but getting up again and going on. So is a true friendship. So is good parenthood. And as God’s love for us has something of all those three things, if we stubbornly return it day by day, refusing to be terminally discouraged, it becomes reciprocal, and a thing of beauty. Through Hope.