The Saturday after the Seventh Sunday after Trinity Sunday
Posted on August 9, 2025 by under
Scripture: St. Luke 11:34-36 (NKJV)
11:34 “The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore, when your eye is good, your whole body also is full of light. But when your eye is bad, your body also is full of darkness. 35 Therefore take heed that the light which is in you is not darkness. 36 If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, the whole body will be full of light, as when the bright shining of a lamp gives you light.”
Devotion
Once again, the Lord teaches His Church by an analogy with an aspect of His creation, which we do well to heed with proper understanding. Light comes to us from outside; the eye does not have its source of illumination within it (obviously—despite imagination of some thinkers in the ancient world), but must be illuminated from outside. If there is no light, we would remain in darkness.
It is the same with the Light of the divine Word: Where the Lord illuminates, there is light. But there are men who close their eyes and refuse the light. They would rather close their eyes and say, in essence, “There is nothing but darkness,” while the Lord’s saints keep saying to them, “Open your eyes.”
The eyes should be dedicated to that which is true and beautiful and brought into service of good works which benefit the neighbor. As we confess in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession: “And God, at the same time, by the Word and by the rite, moves hearts to believe and conceive faith, just as Paul says, Rom. 10:17: Faith cometh by hearing. But just as the Word enters the ear in order to strike our heart, so the rite itself strikes the eye, in order to move the heart. The effect of the Word and of the rite is the same, as it has been well said by Augustine that a Sacrament is a visible word, because the rite is received by the eyes, and is, as it were, a picture of the Word, signifying the same thing as the Word. Therefore the effect of both is the same.” (Art. XIII)
Collect: O God, Whose never-failing Providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth: We humbly beseech Thee to put away from us all hurtful things, and to give us those things which be profitable for us; through Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever One God, world without end. Amen.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
