...you are what you look at...

“Jesus said, 33 ‘No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar, but on the lamp stand so that those who enter may see the light. 34 Your eye is the lamp of your body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light;    but if it is not healthy, your body is full of darkness. 35 Therefore consider whether the light in you is not darkness. 36 If then your whole body is full of light, with no part of it in darkness, it will be as full of light as when a lamp gives you light with its rays’” Luke 11:33-36.

I invite you to do a little exercise today. Write down, every hour or at least three times a day, the main things you have looked at, or allowed your eyes to rest on during the day.

Quite telling, isn’t it? For some of us, like me, I have been looking at a computer screen – but the question would then be, ‘What’s on the screen?’ What images and messages are getting beamed into your whole mind, your whole person, by the searchlight that Jesus is talking about?

Listening to what Jesus says here, we may find it puzzling. We think of a lamp as something that shines outwards – like a miner wearing a hat with a lamp on it so he can see underground. But Jesus seems to be using the picture the other way round. The inner depths of our personality (the word ‘body’ here really means ‘the whole person’) are in darkness, and need to be illuminated. And, Jesus is saying, what lights you up in your life, what light guides your life, is the thing at which you are looking.

So take the test a step further. When you think about the things you’ve looked at today, or in the last few days, how have they affected the person you are? Have you allowed your eye to rest on, and feast on, genuine beauty?

Have you allowed your eye to rest on, to concern itself with, the injustices of the world, the places where people cry out to God for hope and help because they are being trampled underfoot by careless and arrogant people and systems? Or are you allowing yourself to be a mere spectator, looking on as though with a bird’s-eye view but without any real engagement with what’s happening?

Lent leads us to the foot of the cross. So, have you looked at the World of God today? Two millennia of Christians have found gazing at the cross of Jesus, however it is depicted, to be both one of the most beautiful sights they can imagine and one of the most impassioned pleas for justice. In the late 1990s the Philadelphia Museum of Art put on an exhibition consisting mostly of images of the crucifixion. My graduate school class went downtown to see the exhibit. The newspapers dismissed the exhibit, finding it unspectacular, but the public came by the thousands, and looked and looked. What I remember seeing is a small cross inserted upright into the top of a casket that came from the Sami People who were in the northern regions of Europe 1,500 before Christ! This was clear evidence that the Sami were involved in Christianity because this casket and cross dated to the time of Christ!

This words and images Jesus speaks of above are saying to us: We are what we look at! Pray, then, for the remaining days of Lent, especially today, that your eyes may look on things that speak to you of Jesus Christ! Be careful what you look at on your computer and iPhone. What you see is directly tied into your brain, into your mind and memory. What you see settles into your heart and defines who you are.

In the 17th century Rene Descartes created a foundational philosophical proposition: cogito ergo sum, which means, I think, therefore I am!

Today Jesus is telling us: Sumus quod spectamus, which means, We are what we look at!

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God,

have mercy on me a sinner!