THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH Her Doctrine and Morals Quinquagesima Sunday 10 February 2013

The Sunday Sermon

Dear Friends,

Our Lord is preparing His disciples for His crucifixion and death in today’s Gospel, and so Our Holy Mother the Church is preparing us for the season of Lent. The Apostles did not comprehend what Our Lord was saying. It was inconceivable to them that Jesus should suffer and die. They have witnessed the many great and wondrous things that He has done. How could He die who is all powerful and can do all things? Sadly, even today, crosses, pain, and suffering remain a mystery to us even as they were to the Apostles. It was not until after Christ’s glorious Resurrection that they were able to understand. Perhaps the same is true with us – our understanding will only be complete when our faith is confirmed through some wondrous manifestation of Christ. Hopefully this will come to pass before it is too late for us to save our souls.

The blind man sitting by the wayside without seeing the wonders that Jesus had performed believed. It was his faith that made him whole. We too, are often like this poor blind man – we are blind and unable to see the true light of God. This blind man was forced by circumstance to be a beggar in order to live. Consequently he must beg for money, food, etc. – all worldly things. In our prayers to God we often resemble beggars – begging Him for material things. It is not the material things that are the problem; it is our disordered love of material things. Our love of these things blinds us to the True Light. We beg in our prayers but we beg for the wrong things. We do not know what it is that we should pray for. Is it any wonder that so often our prayers are not answered or are answered differently than we expected? Our faith is weak and so, our faith cannot make us whole. We must seek first the Kingdom of God.

Our prayers are often dark and cloudy. We pray but our minds and hearts are distracted; the sins that we have committed come back to haunt and disturb our prayers when we are desirous of speaking to God. The sight of Jesus is hidden from us by all these obstacles. Our worldly loves are all clamoring to silence us just as the crowd tried to silence the blind man. They keep getting in our way so our prayers often are silenced. The lesson that we are to learn from the blind man is that we must persevere unto the end. When the sins and love of material things attempt to stop our approaching Jesus we must redouble our efforts and cry out all the louder. We must cry out not to the world but to God. We must dominate the clamor of the crowd with ever greater determination, especially those that are trying to silence us.

If we cry out loud enough and perseveringly enough we will cause Jesus to stop and allow us to come near to Him. Then will come the all-important question: what will you have Me do for you? This is the moment that we must not falter. The beggar in us all is tempted to again ask for: money, power, prestige, etc. (worldly or material things). What we need to seek is not these things. God knows our material needs and wants. He supplies these material things easily. Of what use are material things if we do not have eyes or the light to see them? If we cannot see, we cannot truly appreciate their beauty and goodness. Without the Light of God we cannot advance in the spiritual life. Our faith must grow to the point that we consider all the material things as nothing if we lack supernatural life. We must value the Light more than the things that the light illuminates. We must love God the Creator more than any one or even all of His creatures combined. Our prayer then must be: “Lord that I may see.” We must put off the desire for temporal things so that we may see God. Once we have the light of God then we can truly see all the temporal things He has created and we can appreciate them appropriately. We will be drawn as St. Paul, to use the things of this world as if we used them not; to love and appreciate all these beautiful creatures: in God, for God, and through God. At this point the temporal world and all the material goods of this life will cease to be shadows hiding and darkening our clear vision of God. These material things will actually become lenses that will help give us clearer vision and clearer understanding of God. We will at that point truly see the world and all of God’s creation in a new light.

This season of Lent is where we begin this prayer as the blind man. In penance, we put aside these worldly things and focus our attention upon Jesus. Every day of this season we need to cry out louder and louder – silencing the cries of the world and our passions – begging God to give us that which we need most – Light for our souls so that we might see and come to eternal Life. For the rest of our days here on earth, may we never cease to cry out to God for this grace of spiritual Light. Let us never be deterred by others or by our own past sins, but seek Jesus with ever increasing fervor. As our fervor and love of God increases, the love of this world and sin will diminish.