Overcoming Spiritual Blindness in Advent, First Friday of Advent, December 7, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the First Week of Advent
December 7, 2018
Is 29:17-24, Ps 27, Mt 9:27-31

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• We encounter again today the double-dynamism of Lent: Christ’s coming in the past, present and future — history, mystery and majesty — and the way the Church has been teaching us how we’re called to go out to meet him in each of these three moments.
• Today Christ was coming past two blind men, who first went out to meet him intentionally, crying out, “Son of David, have mercy on us!” But then Jesus had them come to meet him physically. It would have been easy for him just to go to where they were at — like he stopped for the woman with the hemorrhage elsewhere in the Gospel — and work the miracle there, but he doesn’t. Jesus went into the city to make them make the effort to follow him. When they do, that’s when Jesus approaches and asks them the question of faith, “Do you believe that I can do this for you?” When they express their faith, Jesus helps them to see. This is a pattern we see throughout the Gospel. Jesus could have been born right next to the Shepherds, but instead he comes down from heaven to Bethlehem and has them move some distance to run by faith. Two days ago, we witnessed Jesus’ multiplying the loaves and fish, which began with his having all of the people bringing him the lame, the blind and those with illnesses have to climb a mountain before they received their miraculous cures. He comes, but he still makes us get up and go to meet him, to stoke our faith and our desire.
• This is a very important spiritual lesson both for Advent as well as for life. Jesus with his mercy comes to us in history, mystery and majesty but we have to recognize our need for it and be willing to make the effort to come to receive it. Like St. John the Baptist will announce this Sunday, we need to make straight the paths. Jesus’ messianic work can be summarized by healing our blindness. In the first reading, Isaiah tells us, “On that day … out of gloom and darkness, the eyes of the blind shall see,” and we need to see ourselves among the blind whom the Savior comes to heal. I remember one talk at the UN a couple of years ago during conversations on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. A former Ambassador, now disabled, spoke about how when we think about the disabled, we ought to be thinking not just about “others” but about each of us. He said if we live long enough, we’re going to start to have eye problems, need hearing aids, end up using canes and handicapped ramps and wheelchairs, and made likewise be dependent on so many things that today we take for granted. He said we need to remember that all of us will one day be handicapped. What is true at a physical level is certainly true spiritually. We’re all to some degree spiritually blind, incapable of seeing God where we ought. We’re deaf to his frequency with regard to many of the things he’s trying to say to us. Even though we can walk, fear cripples us from walking in certain directions. Jesus wants to address all of those at his coming, but we need to learn from the blind men how to cry out for mercy. And so today we need to ask the Lord Jesus to open us up to see the history of his birth, the mystery of his presence in the Sacraments, his word, in the Church and others, and in future majesty when he comes again with the eyes of faith.
• The Lord to whom we need to look, to whom we direct that prayer, the Messiah who will make the eyes of the blind see, is, as we pray today in the Responsorial Psalm, our “light and salvation.” He’s the one who saves our lives and illumines everything. And once we begin to see things in his light, four things happen, as we prayed later in the Psalm:
  • First, we’re filled with courage.  “Whom should I fear? … Of whom should I be afraid?,” we prayed. Because the Lord is illumining our path and nothing in all of creation can separate us from his love, we have every reason not to remain in the darkness of fear. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to do what we need to do despite our fear. When we see Christ with us, who triumphed even over death, how could we not have the courage of the martyrs?
  • Second, we’re enabled to see God’s sacredness all around us: “One thing I ask of the Lord; this I seek,” we prayed: “To dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, that I may gaze on the loveliness of the Lord and contemplate his temple.” When the Psalm was being written, the Temple was understood to be the Temple in Jerusalem built by Solomon. But we know that when Jesus came, he opened our eyes to see that he is the true Temple and that we become part of that temple through baptism. To contemplate his temple means to see that the whole world is charged with his grandeur. To dwell in the house of the Lord all our days means to dwell in him. That’s what he wants us to see!
  • Third, we’re filled with thanksgiving because we behold God’s generosity everywhere.  “I believe that I shall see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living,” we prayed together. The Lord gives abundantly and when we see with his light we begin to grasp just how generous he is, that he is constantly giving every meal we meet, every day we have, every friend we make, every prayer answered. And he even loves us enough to give us the Cross and some privations precisely so that he can fill us with even greater spiritual gifts.
  • Fourth, he we’re filled with faith and hope to live the Advent of life. We prayed, “Wait for the Lord with courage; be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord.” Because the Lord is our Light and Salvation, we are able audaciously to wait for him with strong hearts, with “proud” hearts that remember our dignity restored by the immensity of his life. Waiting for him courageously in that way is what Advent is about. We’re waiting for him to do for us something even greater than what he did for the men in today’s Gospel.
• Today the Church celebrates the feast of someone who lived this way, courageously seeking to align his life with the Lord as his light and salvation and to help others to do the same. He recognized that he was blind and needed help. In his young 30s, in the early 370s, the future St. Ambrose was prefect of Gaul — an enormous responsibility. He believed the Christian faith but he hadn’t yet been baptized. After the death of the Bishop of Milan, he went to where the election was to take place to make sure that there were no fights between the Orthodox Catholics of the time and the heretic Arians (who believed that Jesus was the greatest man who ever lived and chosen by God but not God). He gave a little speech reminding everyone of Christ’s teachings on peace and mutual love, at which point someone in the crowd began to shout “Ambrose, Bishop!” It soon started to be echoed by everyone, Catholics and Arians alike. He tried to run away from the responsibilities, but when the emperor Valentinian heard of the election, he consented to it, proud that he had chosen as Prefect someone with the virtues capable of serving as a Bishop. Eventually Ambrose was baptized, then ordained a deacon, a priest, and then, on this day in 374, a bishop. After his ordinations, he set himself to learning the Christian faith in such detail that he could really feed others with this nourishment — becoming eventually a doctor of the Church, one of the greatest teachers in the history of the faith. He knew how much he needed Christ’s light to illumine his mind in order to illumine others. He was already a superb administrator, but he needed to become a real man of God. This required a great deal of study under the tutelage of a priest, Simplicianus. He learned well enough that everyone since has been illumined by him. I’m indebted to him for the light he has given in three ways.
  • First, about the meaning of chastity, when in his treatise on virgins for the Feast of St. Agnes, he said, “Virginity is praiseworthy not because it is found in the virgin martyrs but because it makes the the virgin martyrs.” When we are pure of heart, chaste, truly loving, when we not only see Christ in others and situations but live in the light with him, choosing him over other loves, we gain the courage to remain faithful under duress.
  • Second, about the way to grow in the word of God. Jesus once said that those who hear his word and observe it are his “mother, and brother and sister,” and the way we become Jesus’ “mother” is through conceiving it, becoming impregnated, and letting that word grow until we can no longer keep it in and have to “give it to the light,” sharing it with others.
  • Third, about the power of God’s mercy. He taught that our state after having been forgiven by God is greater than the state we would have had we never sinned, because we now see God and his depth of his love far more clearly, and just like leper’s leprosy, blind men’s blindness, etc., were all relative goods because they brought them into a life-changing contact with Jesus Christ, so God can sometimes use our sins in that same way.
• The Lord is coming to us today as our light and salvation and the way we’re called to go out to meet him is with a faith like that of the blind men, following him here to Church, where after having taught us, he’s about to feed us with himself. Unlike the instructions Jesus gave to them to make sure no one knows about what he did for them, he tells us to go and tell the whole world. Illumined by his word and strengthened by our communion with him, let us, like St. Ambrose, seek to bring his radiant light to each person we meet today.

The readings for today’s Mass were: