Matthew 6:19-24

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth"



This seems to be a transitional or link passage between the previous stuff on rightly-motivated piety and what fallows on wealth. The link word is 'treasure'. In following the previous piety-paragraphs the treasures on earth would be most naturally interpreted as the admiration or respect of others -which, as we know in a culture which builds up its 'stars' in order to later find their clay feet and topple them, is so easily lost or stolen.



For me 'where your treasure is there your heart will be also' is one of the most resonant phrases in the gospels. The heart should be understood here in line with biblical bodily metaphoric usage as the seat of decision-making and willing. So 'whatever you treasure is what will determine the course of your life', more, I suspect: 'whatever directs your lifecourse is what you treasure'. This is a call, in effect, to examine our values and decisions in the light of what our way of living really says about them and to re-establish all of our living in the treasuring of God-in Christ. All to often we say we value the things of God, but our lifestyale says we value respectability or wealth or power or ... well you supply the rest in the light of your own self-examination.



What about all this 'eye' stuff, then? Probably best to think about it in terms of what we might term 'vision'. Our vision directs our way through life. If our life's-vision is a good one then our life will be full of 'light', if our life's-vision is impaired, then our lifecourse will be one of darkness. It's no good trying to split our vision between two ultimate loyalties; the nature of who we are and the nature of Godliness make it impossible to do that: it's like saying that you can have a black white. It's simply a logical contradiction. Either we live our lives in a way in which God is the integrating vision or we live our lives in a way in which something or someone else is the integrating factor. Like Tinkerbelle who was too small to have more than one emotion at once, we are cosmically too small to serve more than one ultimate loyalty at once.



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