Running to Meet Our Light, Strength and Salvation, First Friday of Advent, December 4, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the First Week of Advent
Memorial of St. John Damascene
December 4, 2020
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 and be so transformed by him that we will follow him thereafter.
• Today Christ was passing by two blind men who had gone out to meet him, crying out, “Son of David, have mercy on us!” But then Jesus had them journey to encounter him physically. It would have been easy for Jesus just to go to them where they were — like he stopped for the woman with the hemorrhage elsewhere in the Gospel — and work the miracle there. But he 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 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 and 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. The Season of Advent can be encapsulated by God’s desire to give us the vision to walk by the light of faith. 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 few 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 also about ourselves. He said that 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 may 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 as he comes, but we need to learn from the blind men how to cry out for mercy and long to see with the eyes of faith Jesus whenever, wherever and however he comes.
• 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, 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. In the Opening Prayer of today’s Mass for the Feast of St. John of Damascus (675-749), we asked the Lord to grant us through St. John’s prayers “that the true faith, which he excelled in teaching, may always be our light and our strength.” The Lord is coming to us as our light and salvation and the way we’re called to go out to meet him is with a faith that likewise receives and reflects his light and is strengthened in response to Jesus’ salvation. St. John’s whole life radiated the light of the teaching of the true faith. He was a monk when the iconoclastic heresy of the 8th century erupted destroying icons and other holy images from a literalistic misinterpretation of the commandment not to make graven images. What God was forbidding was making images like the golden calf and then worshipping them; he wasn’t forbidding the use of images representing God, because God made himself such an image at the incarnation. Christ is the “image of the invisible God” and so therefore if God allowed himself to be depicted by taking on human flesh then it’s possible for us to try to continue touching God with our hands, seeing him with our eyes, and continuing in some way a representation of his presence. That’s what John fought for and what was eventually enshrined in the decrees of the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. We are called to look on our light, our strength and our salvation.
• The Lord comes to us today to illumine, strengthen and save us 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 knew about what he did for them, he tells us to go and tell the whole world. Illumined by his word, strengthened by our communion, and grateful for this downpayment on salvation, let us, like St. John Damascene, seek to bring his radiant light and gift of salvation to each person we meet today.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel MT 9:27-31

As Jesus passed by, two blind men followed him, crying out,
“Son of David, have pity on us!”
When he entered the house,
the blind men approached him and Jesus said to them,
“Do you believe that I can do this?”
“Yes, Lord,” they said to him.
Then he touched their eyes and said,
“Let it be done for you according to your faith.”
And their eyes were opened.
Jesus warned them sternly,
“See that no one knows about this.”
But they went out and spread word of him through all that land.

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