Illuminator of the blind: what healing, Expectation, finality?

(Mt 9:27-31)

The encyclical Brothers All invites us to a perspective that provokes decision and action: a new eye, filled with Hope.

It "speaks to us of a reality that is rooted in the depths of the human being, regardless of the concrete circumstances and historical conditioning in which he lives. It speaks to us of a thirst, of an aspiration, of a yearning for fullness, for a fulfilled life, of a measuring oneself against what is great, against what fills the heart and lifts the spirit towards great things, such as truth, goodness and beauty, justice and love. [...] Hope is audacious, it knows how to look beyond personal comfort, the small securities and compensations that narrow the horizon, to open up to great ideals that make life more beautiful and dignified" [n.55; from a Greeting to young people in Havana, September 2015].

Yet the experts - self-confident - do not grasp the (inverted) dignity of the Mystery of God and humanity.

They know ambitions, the law, the dictates of others, fashions, or their own ideas; not the upheavals of the soul and life.

So they keep us as if in an icy forest dedicated to the strong, sterilised or imaginative but paradoxically wild.

Competition is not lacking, indeed it will be an even more insidious consequence, as in the case of the claims (really!) of a pair of eminent apostles.

These are the two sons of Zebedee, who - like the others - aspire to primacy [Mt 20:20-28; Mk 10:35-45 and parallels Lk 22:24-27; Jn 12:26; 13:3-17].

The healing of those with failing eyesight was one of the goods brought by the expected Messiah (Is 29:18; 35:5).

Everything would be transformed for the better.

But in his encounters, Jesus works spiritual healing, not partial or frivolous and external healing.

Fatal misunderstanding was to see him as the doer of amazing things (v.31).

The divine work in man is prodigious, but in the sense that it goes much deeper than a physical healing.

The action of arousing Faith and a new acumen of the soul enable one to grasp the Lord's plan itself.

This makes us docile to let God himself realise it in us.

The allusion is to the House [Church] into which all the characters enter as if it were normal and in a non-polemical context (v.28).

The reference to the fact that those in need of enlightenment gather there also leads one to read in the watermark the echo of ancient baptismal liturgies.

Around Jesus, the overall meaning of Christ's encounter with believers is illustrated.

The teaching to which we too, always defective in sight, are introduced by the contact with the Master in the gathered community is expressed in the passage from the title son of David (v.27) to that of Lord (v.28).

The blind whose myopia is corrected are the leaders and catechumens, now believers. 

In their experience of Faith they pass from the idea of the glorious Messiah - resembling a ruler - to that of the close Friend, Brother of each, Next and eminent in the same way [two blind men].

That is why his Person opens wide to perception an alternative panorama of the mind and heart.

In this way, Mt gives the personality traits of the successful man according to God, as well as the most intimate figure of the community.

The change of the normal viewpoint triggers another life.

It is not an accessory gift, but an essential one. Essential not only for personal fulfilment, but also for Communion [Mt 20:24; Mk 10:41; Lk 9:46. 22:24; Jn 13:12-17. 20:4. 21:20-22].

Here too, in order to extract pearls, it is appropriate to go beyond the conformist and 'proper' - Babelic, fashionable or herd - and banal perspective.

We must learn to better fathom our Calling and what it brings, for there is another balance of things - perhaps yet to be explored.

Higher harmony that lies within life... but beneath the facades: one must dig into every relationship, affair or feeling; examine it better.

And become aware of what is emerging.

Watch out: even and especially in the shaking of storms.

Sometimes it is necessary to take a leap into the dark, to contact one's vocational Seed; to heal the gaze of the soul, and recognise oneself; to blossom.

Discomforts come as a warning: we are moving away from ourselves.

Dark bitternesses here become opportunities to break away from conformist backgrounds and representations.

Commonplaces have been inoculated into us (drop by drop) from petty glimpses, into which perhaps we are already introduced. And perhaps we interpret with a sense of permanence.

Having acquired another angle, we will be glad to realise what we are freed from and what different configurations await the growth of our own innate resources.

The tormented existence is often as if intoxicated, but only when it neither investigates nor notices different solutions to the idea of e.g. of having to enrich oneself with material goods, make a career, having to assert oneself immediately and strike back blow after blow, be respected, appear at any cost - why not, using church life.

This will not be our fulfilment and tranquillity; far from it. Rather, the cravings, intimacies, and other situations we know, are but an escape from our own essence.

Our inner core takes breath and momentum - it is activated - paradoxically by traumas and shadow sides.

All this happens by following the signals of natural Providence.

This vital wave expresses itself in 'words' or glimpses (precisely) of the unconscious that expresses itself, challenging us.

The reason for the outer darkness is here the ideology of power that draws its social realisation from the real darkness.

It must disappear in the consideration and universe of the disciples.

This is the reason for the so-called messianic silence (v.30) imposed by Jesus - although not infrequently the followers of all times later fall back on this and announce the Son of God in reverse (v.31).

In the Message of the "enlightened" family members, the wisdom of the new heart bursts forth as regeneration, rebirth and overturning of the values on the basis of which practical life is invested.

Now, however, let us not proclaim Christ like madmen (v.27), for our "saying" is all "from" another, penetrating gaze.

The witnesses whose vision, reading of things, and dreams have been corrected, are not called upon to violently enter and re-proclaim the old little world of histrionic fashions, of procured mists, or ambiguous misappropriations, of unradiant aggressiveness, and devious anxieties.

Rather, they correct mistakes and try to open pertuosities to dispel the darkness, making breaches and widening fissures of light.

Not because we have a 'positive' attitude - as we say today - but because we understand ourselves: because we grasp the meaning of things in the furrows of history, and by Grace we are enabled to read the sign of the times.

Breaking out of conventional patterns and mechanisms will enable us to correct beliefs, to make an Exodus from surface bitterness.

Not by pretending nothing, but by regenerating together with them - from within.

That is why in the Faith we avoid getting carried away by useless, harmful tensions, because they deviate from our Vocation.

But we penetrate these eccentricities, so that from them other Dreams, different Expectations, unique Images (really close to us) may depart.

This is the Coming that reveals the essential, and overcomes the void.

Presence that helps us give an eccentricity of Ray - and space that is also disharmonious. Without the usual reservoir of conformist, idolatrous, personal, or club fixations [that make horizons pale].

Such is the definitive intervention of God in time, which elevates vision and spirit, and thereby activates paths we do not know.

A new maturity is coming.

To internalise and live the message:

During the Advent season, what do you expect from the divine Coming, and what 'definitive' intervention do you desire?

The Church itself always needs to be evangelised

MUTUAL LINKS BETWEEN THE CHURCH AND EVANGELISATION

15. Whoever rereads, in the New Testament, the origins of the Church, following its history step by step and considering it in its living and acting, sees that it is linked to evangelisation by what is most intimate to it: - The Church is born from the evangelising action of Jesus and the Twelve. It is its normal, desired, most immediate and most visible fruit: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations". Now, "those who accepted his word were baptised and about three thousand joined them . . . And the Lord daily added to the community those who were saved".

- Born, consequently, of mission, the Church is, in turn, sent by Jesus. The Church remains in the world while the Lord of glory returns to the Father. It remains as a sign at once opaque and luminous of a new presence of Jesus, of his departure and of his permanence. It prolongs and continues it. And it is precisely his mission and his condition as evangeliser that, above all, it is called to continue. In fact, the community of Christians is never closed in on itself. In it, the intimate life - the life of prayer, listening to the Word and the teaching of the Apostles, the fraternal charity lived, the broken bread - does not acquire all its meaning except when it becomes a testimony, provokes admiration and conversion, becomes preaching and proclamation of the Good News. Thus the whole Church receives the mission to evangelise, and the work of each is important to the whole.

- Evangelising, the Church begins by evangelising itself. A community of believers, a community of lived and shared hope, a community of fraternal love, she needs to hear again and again what she has to believe, the reasons for her hope, the new commandment of love. As the people of God immersed in the world, and often tempted by idols, it always needs to hear the proclamation of 'the great works of God', which have converted it to the Lord, and to be summoned and reunited again by him. This means, in a word, that it always needs to be evangelised if it is to retain freshness, momentum and strength to proclaim the Gospel. The Second Vatican Council recalled and the 1974 Synod strongly took up this theme of the Church evangelising itself through constant conversion and renewal, in order to evangelise the world with credibility.

- The Church is the repository of the Good News that must be proclaimed. The promises of the New Covenant in Jesus Christ, the teaching of the Lord and the Apostles, the Word of Life, the sources of God's grace and kindness, the path of salvation: all this has been entrusted to her. The content of the Gospel, and therefore of evangelisation, she keeps as a living and precious deposit, not to keep it hidden, but to communicate it.

Sent and evangelised, the Church, in turn, sends evangelisers. She puts into their mouths the Word that saves, she explains to them the message of which she herself is the depository, she gives them the mandate that she herself has received, and she sends them out to preach: but not to preach their own persons or their personal ideas, but a Gospel of which neither they nor she are absolute masters and owners to dispose of at their will, but ministers to transmit it with extreme fidelity.

[Pope Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi].