self-assessment

Increasingly across the world State Taxation Authorities are introducing or extending self-assessment. Of course, this has its dangers. Recently, people have accused one another of being “less than candid”, “insincere”, even “disingenuous”. That’s the problem with self-assessments in general. Lies.

But self-assessment does have one major advantage – apart from the obvious one of saving government money by employing fewer civil servants. What is this major advantage? It’s that people are assessing themselves are forced (as it were) to make up their own minds as to their own honesty – their own candidness, sincerity, and genuineness – to themselves.

 

Jesus constantly asked his hearers to self-assess. An example of that is in bold red above. It’s in four parts.

First: No one igniting a candle puts it in a cellar or under a bowl, but on a lamp-stand, so that those moving near may see the light. I take this to mean that, when a person decides to become a follower of Jesus, that person is igniting a candle and every lit candle is there for others to see the light.

Second: Your own eye is the candle of the body. As long as your eye may be single your whole body is full of light. This extends the metaphor a bit by identifying the candle in a person with that person’s eye. Pause for thought. I don’t think that Jesus was referring to physical eyes or physical sight. Rather, I think he was saying that what a person focuses upon in life is that person’s “candle” – is what gives light to that person.

If that is the case then a person who resolves to follow Jesus – a person igniting a candle – will have decided to have Jesus as the focus of life. In that sense, that person’s focus will have become “single”. When Jesus was asked which commandment was greatest in the law, he replied, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ Then, Jesus said, “your whole body will be full of light”.

Third: But when it may be bad and your body dark, then take heed that the light in you is not the darkness. The self-assessment becomes very serious. Without the “single eye” the person is asked to make a careful assessment as to whether, in the ensuing dark, it is the darkness which has become that person’s light. 

 

These days one can see the darkness in others who are focused only on self-interest. Every day that explanation is the reason for hurt, pain and catastrophe in the world. If the light in them is darkness, is there light in me?

Fourth: It follows that your body, complete, full of light and having no dark part, will be complete and full of light as long as the candle, in its shining brightness, may give light to you. How very encouraging. 

The candle ignited by a person, set up so as to give light to others, has become the eye of the person. Not only has that eye made that person “full of light”, but also that person will remain “full of light” and “complete” and will have within and outside “light in its shining brightness”.

Self-assessment is necessary for that to take place. Jesus wasn’t asking for obedience, for church-going, or for religious good deeds. He was asking people to self-assess.