“Are you envious because I am generous?” Literally in Greek this sentence from Jesus’ parable is rendered, “Is your eye evil because I am good?” Jesus warned of the dangers of having an evil eye, “The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness.” (Matthew 6:22-23) Our eyes are a window into our souls. When we look deeply into someone’s eyes we either see love, acceptance, joy – light or we see avoidance. I
“Are you envious because I am generous?”
Literally in Greek this sentence from Jesus’ parable is rendered, “Is your eye evil because I am good?”
Jesus warned of the dangers of having an evil eye, “The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness.” (Matthew 6:22-23)
Our eyes are a window into our souls. When we look deeply into someone’s eyes we either see love, acceptance, joy – light or we see avoidance. In the worst of cases, for instance with psychopaths you would find a disassociated gaze, a look that seems empty of emotion, awareness, warmth, or moral presence, even soulless indifference.
What people see in our eyes is beyond what they see externally. It is difficult to pretend with our eyes. There’s a lot we can feign with our voice, our body and gestures, our expressions. But the eyes? That’s harder. Maybe impossible. We look down, look away. There’s a reason when eye contact is avoided.
That avoidance is an attempt to hide, a person saying, ‘don’t look here.’ Openness in our eyes is inviting or at least wishes others would see who you are, all you offer.
When we get the chance to look into the eyes of God what will we see of His heart, His very being? According to Jesus’ parable we will see generosity. Sheer generosity.
For some, that look will be welcome, for others it will be horror. For the worthy, love will make them overpowerfully whole. For the evil it is only disgrace, shame, and a recognition that they are empty.
The first hired did not like what they saw in the eyes of the Landowner. His sheer generosity, unexplainable, unfathomable, generosity, giving for no reason at all did not match the way they thought things should work. Isn’t giving conditional? They could not get their heads around that. They gave him the evil eye.
While we want to believe in generosity, what it is and what it represents, we can’t. We are awkward or even suspicious of real generosity. We feel unworthy of it. We don’t even know how to respond to generosity. “Really? Me? Why? For no reason? Are you sure? What did I do?”
The fact is that for God there is no doing that merits His generosity. The key is that generosity is not something to be understood or calculated. Real generosity is not measurable, accountable, or calculable.
That is the point of the parable, God is about unreckonable grace.
Can we be the same way? Do I have the capacity for God’s kind of generosity? Can I? Likely not, at least right now, but I must constantly pray for it and work at it.
