Yesterday, per our Advent reading, a man blind from birth received his sight.
Today we are told that all flesh shall see the glory of the Lord.
For us, it isn’t a matter of which is more important to us, for we know it is better to enter into life lame and blind (Matthew 18:8.9) than to go with all your limbs and sight into eternal fire. Yet we remember the Lord’s miraculous healing of another fellow in Luke 5:23 …
Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’?
All flesh shall see the glory of the Lord? When? Where? How?
Not many of us have ever said to a blind man, “Receive your sight,” or to a cripple, “Rise and walk.” Would that we might.
We can say this … “I forgive you.”
Let’s say it today, as far and as wide as we are able. Perhaps from that saying there will come forth healing beyond anything we’ve known. What matters is that we enter into life, and bring with us as many as we can. Their offense may or may not have been against us – never mind. We have the message of forgiveness in our breast, and many need to hear it in theirs.
There are several historical persons listed in today’s reading. Several of them actually saw the Salvation of God, but the way was unprepared in them.
God grant us to make paths straight through our prayers, our kingdom perspectives, our forgiveness and the message of the Gospel in and through us. We have a part. It may seems small in relation to the billions of souls abiding in darkness, but it is enormous, for no one can do more than to prepare the way for another. Amen.
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiber’i-us Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Iturae’a and Trachoni’tis, and Lysa’ni-as tetrarch of Abile’ne,
in the high-priesthood of Annas and Ca’iaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechari’ah in the wilderness;
and he went into all the region about the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth;
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” (Luke 3:1-6)
View of earth from Apollo 8, December 24 – a sight unseen but for the last few seconds on history’s clock
(reading from the book of Genesis on that Eve, from space)
NASA photo
Marketplace Monastics 