eyes

What we look at is harmless, right? It doesn’t really matter, so long as we don’t act.

That’s not what Jesus said. Look at this, from Luke 11:33-36: “‘No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness. Therefore, if your whole body is full of light, and no part of it dark, it will be just as full of light as when a lamp shines its light on you.’”

Did you know that, statistically, a large percentage of men in the church look at pornography? Did you know that that includes many pastors? Most Christians are OK with R-rated movies too, and these days more movies are rated R for violence, blood and gore than for sex.

Books are another thing. Fifty Shades of Grey and others like it simply are the culmination of a couple of decades of what we call bodice-rippers, those romances that venture ever deeper into the bedroom. And modern western and action literature is dripping with blood and violent sex. 

But we’re adults, right? We’re discerning. We can look at whatever we want, because we can separate out the bad stuff and only take in the good.

If only that were true. Jesus says that our eyes are key to our holiness. Jesus says that healthy eyes fill us with light, and unhealthy ones take in darkness. He’s not talking about cataracts here; Jesus is talking about the kinds of sights our eyes bring into our brains.

Can you look at a dismembered body without effect? Can you watch the most intimate acts of a marriage and not feel anything? What about depraved expressions of sex, the ones where one partner dominates and humiliates the other, and what God intended as a beautiful expression of love becomes a degrading display of power?

There’s a lot of bad stuff we can look at, and all of it will put poison in our minds. To even look is to acknowledge that there is a response to evil that is something other than abhorrence and avoidance.

Less obvious, though, are all the things that get us to accept a compromising message. When we take in literature that gets us to see affairs and unfaithfulness sympathetically, that’s as bad as porn. When we look at memes that dehumanize people who don’t agree with us, that’s bad too. Anything that gives us the idea we should use our physical strength or size to dominate, or violence to solve our problems, or power to defeat our enemies, or pain to punish, or shortcuts to build our wealth, or beauty to manipulate, are insidiously dangerous. There are so many subtle ways that the world gets us to laugh or mock or accept things that Jesus would weep over.

Jesus offers us life-saving wisdom: see that your eyes bring light into your soul, and not darkness. That’s hard to do in this world. But it’s critical if we want to be saved.