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In the Name of the Father, the Son and
the Holy Ghost.
As in the days of the ministry of Christ
on earth, Saint John the Baptist had been preaching the Gospel of
repentance, the good news that repentance, turning to God, always brings
us face to face with Him in reconciliation, so does also the Church now,
before Lent, face us with weeks of preparation, weeks during which we
look at ourselves as deeply as we can, as honestly as we can, before we
are confronted with deeds of God, with His power and with the example of
those who had truly turned away from evil, given themselves to God, and
have found fulfilment and salvation.
And before these weeks begin to prepare
us even to this, we remember, as we do today, Bartimaeus, the blind man
of Jericho, a reminder that we all are blind, that we all have forgotten
how to see the reality of things. He was blinded by illness; we are
blinded by the visible; the invisible becomes invisible to us because
all that catches our eye prevents us from looking deep, looking into the
depth.
The message which is brought to us today
is this: we are all blind, and we must learn to see. To see ourselves as
we are, both what is evil, imperfect, distorted to us, and also the
beauty of the image of God which nothing can erase, nothing can destroy,
which may be covered up as an icon may be covered up by dust, but which
remain glorious within us. And we must learn to look at ourselves, and
discern both good and evil: not only evil, but also that good which can
inspire us to struggle, to fight and to overcome all that is unworthy of
God.
But we must also learn in these weeks to
look at everyone around us and see God’s image in him or in her, forget
those imperfections which blind us to the beauty of every person, look
deep into each one who is our neighbour, and worshipfully, reverently
discover the divine presence, the divine likeness in him or in her.
Only then we will be able to move on to the weeks of
preparation which will confront us one after the other with our most
common and most destructive imperfections. If we try to look at
ourselves, we often feel that we don’t have eyes to see, we have no
terms of reference: how can we see? There is a mirror in which we can
see both good and evil. Let us, in the course of these days, read with
an open mind and open heart, with veneration the Gospel. We will see in
Christ what a true human being is; we will see in His teaching what we
are called to be and to become; we will see in His apostles, in those
who surrounded Him the struggle for perfection. Let us look into the
Gospel as one looks into a mirror, compare ourselves with what we see,
and we will then discover not only evil but glory. And let us, inspired
by it, move on, as Paul says, from glory to glory, turning away from
past and rushing towards the fulfilment of our vocation. Amen. |
