Caring for the Purity of the Soul
3rd Sunday after Pentecost
Romans 5:1-10; Matthew 6:22-33
“The eye is a lamp for the body. Therefore, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be bright. But if your eye were evil, your whole body would be dark.”
(Matthew 6:22-23)
Christ uses the concept of "eye" here only for comparison, so that people can understand the truth, because it is clear to everyone that if the eye is defective, with flaws, then everything seen seems to be untrue, distorted or indistinct to a person, as in fog or at night.
In reality, as is evident from the content of the Gospel story, Christ is not talking about the bodily eye, but about the human soul, and the eye here means the human soul. -- If the human soul is light, clear, and pure, then a person perceives the environment around him truthfully and joyfully, and among his neighbors he sees first of all the positive, the good things that they show.
But if the human soul is impure, full of hatred, envy, and self-love, then that person perceives the world and his environment negatively: he sees no beauty in nature, only the bad, all kinds of impurity, and people around him seem to be only thieves, deceivers who are trying to do him harm.
There is a legend, a story, that in an ancient kingdom, the king chose a very good, virtuous man and sent him to find a completely bad man in the country.
The king also chose an angry man among his subjects and told him to find a very good man.
The good man searched and searched for a very bad man and did not find him, because although he found people who were not very good, he noticed that they had some good qualities. And the angry man could not find a good person among all the people of the state, because all people had some defects, flaws.
Perhaps this is just a legend, a fiction, but it reflects the truth. We humans tend to see and hear things not as they really are, but rather, how our soul feels, how we feel inwardly.
Two people look out the same window, ask one what he saw and he will answer that he saw mud, garbage, dirt, and the other will say that the view is beautiful -- a tree on a hill, grass around, and beautiful flowers blooming among the rocks and the fallen branches of a tree.
After the service, one parishioner came and told the priest that he had vocalized out of tune five times throughout the service, another counted seven grammatical errors in the priest's sermon, and a third came to thank the priest for the sermon:
“Today I understood the will of God and now I feel light and joyful in my heart.”
All three were at the same service, listening to the same sermon, but what three different impressions, three different achievements they took away! For one is only interested in music, the other looks for grammatical errors in others, listens attentively to how one speaks, and the third comes to the service to feel, to unite with God in prayer, and to know God's will in order to fulfill it. And everyone got what they came for, saw and heard what their souls longed for.
That is why it is necessary that every person take care of the purity and health of the soul, so that our souls are light and clean, so that a person can see and hear impartially in purity and truth, so that he or she can learn about the world around him or her and learn.
It has become our custom to speak and pray for the soul most often when it is past the time when it can be corrected, purified, or enlightened--when a person dies and the soul leaves the body. We also talk about the need to care for the purity of the soul on the occasion of Great Lent.
This is necessary, but we might refer to that as the so-called general cleansing, once a year. A person, a Christian, has to take care of his soul -- his spiritual eyes and ears -- every day, just as we wash ourselves and wash our eyes every day. Every day, a person must find time, at least a few minutes, to pray and reflect: whether we have done something well or not, how to free ourselves of prejudice, hatred against our neighbour, how to get rid of self-love and pride, so that we can see everything in the light of God.
What would happen if we only remembered to cleanse our bodies once a year and wash our eyes once a year?
“Eyes and ears are bad witnesses for someone who has a barbaric soul,”
said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 530-470 BC), 500 years before the birth of Jesus Christ.
A person with a darkened, unclean soul cannot, not only, truly feel and see the world around him or her, his or her neighbours, but cannot feel and know the Creator of the world, God. The Lord Jesus Christ said:
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).
As in the case of the eyes, so in the case of the heart, Jesus Christ is referring to the state of mind. People with a “pure heart” -- with bright spiritual eyes, that is, with a bright soul -- will feel God spiritually, will see their neighbour in the positive.
Such people are able to lay up treasures in heaven while living on earth.
And “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” said the Lord.
(Matthew 6:21)
And life convinces us that this is true. A person who considers the manifestation of virtue in this life to be the main meaning of life is really laying up treasures for eternity. Such a person will never despair in the face of material losses. Their greatest treasures are acts of kindness, which are indestructible, “neither moth nor rust will destroy them,” and thieves will never steal them (Mark 6:20) -- they are in heaven. Even if people forget acts of kindness, God will never forget.
Amen.
Very Rev. Fr. Taras Slavchenko
Taras Slavchenko was born on March 8, 1918 in Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk region in Ukraine. After graduating from school and the Pedagogical College, he entered the language and literature faculty of the Scientific Pedagogical Institute. Having successfully completed it in 1938, he served as a teacher in a secondary school.
