SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS
Monday of the Thirty-Third Week in Ordinary Time
My dear encountered couples:
Why doesn’t everybody follow Christ? After nearly two thousand years of Christianity, why isn’t everybody in the world Christian? Maybe blindness has something to do with it.
The man in our gospel story was blind. Jesus cured him, and he could see. What did he do? “He began to follow Jesus.” Is the reason more people in the world are not followers of Christ a simple matter of blindness, spiritual blindness on their part?
Maybe it is not only non-Christians who are blind; it could also be us Christians. If Catholics, if Protestants, if anybody who claims to be a follower of Christ has not been able to lead the whole world to conversion after all these centuries, maybe it is because we ourselves don’t clearly see the value of the product we possess.
Are we convinced of the importance, or rather, the necessity of Christ in the lives of everybody? Do we really believe that without Christ we are lost? If we are so convinced, if we really do believe, then why is it that most of us never try to influence not only strangers, but those closest to us?
Many people among our own relatives and friends who die without visibly accepting Christ might quite possibly do so because we haven’t mentioned his name to them. For some reason or other many of us hesitate to talk about and share Christ with others, especially with those closest to us. Why is that?
Maybe we should pray over that question and give it serious thought. The man’s eyes were opened. He probably not only accepted and loved Christ for the rest of his life. I’ll bet he also tried to encourage everybody he met to do the same.
