Luke Chapter 11 verse 34 Holy Bible

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerses 34, 35. - The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness. Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness. He goes on, though, with his solemn warning words. Plainly visible though the sign would be - shining bright as a lighted lamp set on high - still it, too, was possible to miss seeing it. If the eye, the organ of the body which perceives the light, be sound and healthy, then the illumination given by the lamp is seen, and the whole body, so to speak, is full of light; but if the eye was diseased, purblind, no bright shining light would be seen - the body then would be full of darkness. The word rendered "single" denotes the eye in its natural healthy state; that translated "evil" speaks of the eye as diseased, as incapable of perceiving the rays of light. The imagery to those Orientals, accustomed to parable and allegory in the stories and poems they had listened to from their childhood, was easily translated into the language of everyday life. If they gave way to passion, jealousy, prejudice, impurity, lawlessness in its hundred forms, then for them the spiritual eye of the soul would become diseased, and therefore incapable of rightly discerning any heavenly sign. It was this danger that the Master was pointing out to the crowd. "Ah!" he seems to say, "you ask a heavenly sign which will substantiate my lofty claims; that sign, in a grander and more stately form than ever you have dreamed of, shall, indeed, be given you. Have no fear on that score; rather dread that blindness, the punishment of a hard and evil heart, will come upon you, and render you incapable of seeing the sign you ask for, and which I mean to give you." He was speaking still of his resurrection. Alas, for them! the blindness of which he warned them was the unhappy lot, we know, of very many of those listening then.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(34) The light of the body is the eye.--See Note on Matthew 6:22. In some respects the sequence of thought in St. Luke differs from that in St. Matthew, and seems somewhat closer. In the Sermon on the Mount, the company of Christ's disciples are the light, and each of them is as the lamp on its proper stand, and the teaching as to the "light of the body," and the corresponding "'eye" of the soul, is separated from that illustration by our Lord's comment on the corrupt traditional interpretations of the scribes. Here the two thoughts are brought into close proximity. The moral sense, the "vision and the faculty divine" that has its intuitions of eternal truths, this is the light which is so set that those who "are entering in" (this feature, as in Luke 8:16, is peculiar to St. Luke)--the seekers and inquirers who are drawn to look in, as it were, upon the house of Christ's Church, the "unlearned" or "unbelievers" of 1Corinthians 14:23--may see the light and turn to it.