10th Week in Ord. Time, Friday – 13th June 2025 – 2 Cor 4,7-15; Mt 5,27-32
Guard your Eyes
Concerning the purity of heart, Jesus takes this demand for purity a step further than the Old Testament. He teaches that to even look at a woman with lust in your heart, seeing her as merely an object to satisfy your lustful desires, is seriously sinful. Being led by our urges, rather than keeping our desires under control, is a path to destruction. Jesus is making an important point about how dangerous our thoughts and desires can be. He does not say that it is sinful to simply recognize a woman as beautiful, or a woman recognizing a man as handsome. It is when we see the other as an object and have impure thoughts about them that we give into sin. In other words, the temptation itself is not a sin; it is when we accept that temptation into our hearts and give it a home by willfully playing with it in our mind that we step over the line. In that vein, He says that it’s worth losing an eye rather than letting that eye drag someone into sin, and by extension into hell. However, God’s will for His people is that they do not engage in lust.
