In today’s Gospel (Mark 8:22-26), people brought him a blind man, begging that He lay his hands upon him that he might regain his sight.  After Jesus performs the miracle of restoring this man’s sight, Mark tells us: his sight was restored and he could see everything distinctly.

Surely, many people today stand in need of physical healing.  Providentially, many professionals serve the physical, medical needs of great numbers of people in the world today.  They are no doubt the hands through which Jesus continues to bring such attention and care to so many today.  Many others provide the critical role of ‘care-taker’ in homes, nursing homes, and hospitals to assure the sick that they are not alone, that they are loved, and someone, including God, does care.

Such personal encounters are important.  Such personal engagement with the sick is just part of the Gospel mission we share.  It is also a part of our journey to what is even more important than the physical healings of Jesus, and that is the interior healing, the ‘integral whole of the person.’ 

Jesus standing before the blind man, was no doubt the ‘first person’ the newly restored vision allowed the man to ‘see’.  This is a helpful ‘image’ for us today, to realize that for us ‘to see everything distinctly’, we must first see Jesus.  We must first see our self in relationship to and with Jesus.

One of the greatest challenges before us today is a proper understanding of the human person.  A critical ‘cure’ for the challenges of the aggressive secularism that surrounds us  is to not only ‘see’ Jesus as the proper ‘lense’ for understanding ‘self’, but to also ‘see’ every human person in the same ‘light of Christ’.  To properly understand the human person, is to acknowledge the Creator, and that each person finds his or her ‘fullness’ only in relationship to God, the Creator.

In a world so focused on ‘individual freedoms’, our theology tells us that any effort to define and understand individual freedom, separated from the moral truths that flow from the Creator, is bound to fall short.  It is only in relationship to Christ that we truly discover ‘self’.  It is only through the ‘lens’ of the moral truths revealed in Christ and preached in the Gospel of Life that true freedom is discovered, and the grace to live in such freedom is found.

 

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