Where the Heart Follows

Jesus is not scolding here. He is describing how a person actually works. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Read that slowly, because the order is surprising. We assume the heart leads and the treasure follows. We will get our money and time and attention in line, we think, once our heart is finally in the right place. Jesus reverses it. Put your treasure somewhere and your heart migrates there to join it. Your heart follows your spending, your calendar, your attention. It always has. So the question stops being how do I feel about God and becomes something more honest and harder to dodge: where am I actually storing things up. Moth and rust and thieves are his way of pointing out that most of what we hoard is already quietly disappearing. It was never going to last. Then he adds the line about the eye being the lamp of the body. What you fix your gaze on fills you, with light or with darkness. There is no neutral looking. Attention is not passive. It pours something into you, and it drags your heart along behind it. Both images say the same thing from different angles. You are not as free or as fixed as you think. You are being formed, every day, by what you treasure and what you look at. The good news buried in the warning is that you get a say in both.