December 07, 2018
Friday, 1st
Week of Advent
St. Ambrose 1st Reading:
Is 29:17–24Gospel: Mt 9:27–31
As Jesus moved on from Capernaum, two blind men followed him,shouting, “Son of David, help us!” When he was about to enter thehouse, the blind men caught up with him, and Jesus said to them, “Doyou believe that I am able to do what you want?” They answered, “Yes,sir!”Then Jesus touched their eyes and said, “As you have believed, solet it be.” And their eyes were opened. Then Jesus gave them a sternwarning, “Be careful and let no one know about this.” But as soon asthey went away, they spread the news about him through the whole area.
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
The gospel theme on blindness fits the advent season to a tee. Advent is a time to repent so that when the Lord will come this Christmas he will find us attuned to the things of the Spirit. But the glaring floodlights of materialism could make us blind to spiritual things. If so, Advent loses significance, and Christmas drifts by, leaving us financially drained and spiritually arid and dry. We need to recover our sight.
In this season of Advent let us ask the Lord for recovery of sight. But before we do so, let’s make sure there is faith in our hearts. Faith is a requisite for Jesus to restore our sight. Consider what he did in today’s Gospel reading. When a blind man came to him for healing his first question was about faith. He asked the blind man: “Do you believe that I am able to do what you want?” When we go to the Lord asking for restoration of sight, he will also look for traces of faith in our hearts. What if faith is also gone with the vision we have lost?When faith is lost, we won’t even see the need to go to Jesus to recover our sight. In the first place we will deny we are blind. Meanwhile our preoccupation would be the deeds of darkness, like pleasure -seeking and dangerous experiments of the flesh. Love is desecrated on the altars of indulgence. “Those who are faithless”, wrote Oscar Wilde in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, “know the pleasures of love; it is the faithful who know love’s tragedies.” With faith gone, our taste for love will be adjusted to the lower standard – the standard of the hedonists. God then becomes totally irrelevant and we won’t seek him out at all.
Let us seek the Lord while we still have the faith to do so. In thisseason of Advent, the Lord can remove the scales from our eyes thathave blinded us to the things of the Spirit. By scales we arereferring to sin. Advent is a time of repentance, a season to ‘preparethe way of the Lord’. – (Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM . Email: [email protected].
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