Thirtieth Sunday Cycle B
10/17/2021
Thirtieth Sunday Cycle B
October 24,2021
Are you Blind?
Spiritually Blind?
This Sunday gives us the Gospel story of a blind man, who is sitting by the roadside, begging, when Jesus passes by.
He recognizes knows that he is blind and has great hope that Jesus will cure his blindness.
As Jesus passes by he calls out, "Son of David; have pity on me."
Jesus stops and heals his blindness.
But what does that Gospel story have to do with us?
Often, we can be like the people found in the Hebrew Scriptures that are proclaimed in the first reading.
Remember that both the Northern and the Southern kingdom had abandoned God, and eventually, lost everything, and were taken into exile.
Jeremiah, rather than call them to conversion as he had done in the past, in this reading, he assures them that God will never abandon them.
Jeremiah tells them the reason for the exile is that they had abandoned God; that they were blind. Yet Jeremiah assures them that God does love them, and will care for them in spite of all the things that they had done in their abandonment of God.
That story is also good for us to hear, especially when we are in that moment of feeling in exile, blind, and so far away from God.
Will we be able to recognize our own blindness?
Will we recognize Jesus when He passes by in our lives?
Will we see the need for ourselves to call out for mercy?
Remember that it took generations for the people of the Old Testament to recognize their blindness.
Only then were they able to experience God's great love and mercy.
The same is true for us.
Often we don't recognize our own blindness until things really go downhill in our struggles; then we begin to see how spiritually blind we are at that moment.That certainly is the moment to cry out for mercy from God so we can be healed.
I suspect that for each of us, at one time or another, we have been able to see
just how spiritually blind we are.
The author of the letter that we hear from in the second reading today, reminds us that we have in Christ, the High Priest.
He is the Son of God who by his human nature has experienced the same struggles and difficulties that we have experienced.
He is the one who has offered his body and life and gained our salvation.
Whenever we call out for mercy, for healing,
But......
.
Are we willing to look at your spiritual blindness?
Are we willing to see that at moments we are all spiritually blind.
It can be those moments when we are called to have mercy, compassion, forgiveness, comfort, understanding, and we say...
No
At that moment we are blind.
We can give excuses and say that we are only human.
That is the moment we are spiritually blind and can't even recognize the blindness.
That can be God's gift to us when we see we are spiritually blind.
.
That is the moment to pray for our own conversion, so that we will be in a position to call out to the Lord for healing.
How many times will He passed by in our lives, giving us the opportunity to call out and ask for spiritual healing and we do not recognize Him?
How many times will we fail to look at our own blindness?
If today you are spiritually blind today, call out to Him.
Video Clip Franciscan Greg Friedman
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