You don’t have to be blind to be blind. Instead of looking at the sins of others, we need to start looking in the mirror. Unfortunately, we are blind to our sins, but insist on watching others. In the Gospel of Luke 18.35-43, we see a blind man who could see God. The crowd that was walking with Christ was blind to God’s love. The time has come for us to blind to the sins of others and look in the mirror to see our sins and commit to be better.

Transcript:

My brothers and sisters in this morning’s gospel, we encounter a blind man sitting on the side of the road and when he finds out that Jesus is passing by, he calls out to him, “Son of David, have mercy on me.” And over and over he’s calling to Jesus, “Son of David, have mercy on me.” And the crowd is trying to shut him up. “Don’t you understand? Don’t bother him. He’s an important man. Leave him be.” And this gets him even more passionate for Christ. “Son of David, have mercy on me.” So finally, Christ stops. He says, “What do you want me to do for you?” “I want to be able to see. I want my eyesight.” Christ says, “Fine. You have your eyesight because your faith has made you well. Your faith has saved you.”

You see my brothers and sisters, it doesn’t require physical sight to see God. In fact, it is a blessing to see him with our eyes, but we have to learn to see him with our hearts. We have to learn to see the love and compassion and grace of God. The crowd in this morning’s gospel, they could see Jesus, they knew who it was. But they couldn’t see his love. If they could see his love, they would not have stopped the man from asking for help. If they could see his love, they would have went and brought the man to Jesus instead of trying to shut him down. And the man knew exactly who Jesus was because he could see God with his heart.

Unfortunately, my brothers and sisters, we are the blind ones. We have our eyesight, most of us, we have our eyesight but we go through life blind because we do not recognize the grace of God in front of us. And what do I mean? Because we pay more attention to the sins of other people than to our own. When we should be blind to their sins and look at our sins, we close our eyes to our own and they look at theirs. “Oh, he did this.” “Oh, she did that.” “Oh, can you believe what is going on?” As if we have no sin.

This is why I wrote in the bulletin. You don’t have to be blind to be blind. We, my brothers and sisters, have to stop looking at the sins of others and start looking in the mirror. Start realizing that we are the ones who have to change. We are the ones who are not living as God wants us to live. We are the blind ones. We are the ones who should be calling out to God have mercy on me. Instead, we spend our time calling God’s vengeance upon other people. God’s going to get them. My brothers and sisters, we are blind. This is our opportunity to open our eyes to God.

We’re almost halfway through the nativity fast. I acknowledge it is a fast that many people over the years have not paid attention to. It is one of the more, shall we say, casual, loose fasts. We call it λευκή νηστεία. It’s a white fast, it’s not as strict, and some people ignore it altogether. I was commenting the other day, now we all know I talk about fasting and I talk about prayer and I talk about all the time and I had to remind somebody not fasting is not a sin. You don’t have to come to confession and say, “I missed the fasting days.” Fasting, not fasting, is not about sin. It’s about exercising our soul and our bodies. If we skip the fast, may it be blessed, but we don’t get any benefit from it. However, if we fast and then we look at the sins of others, “Can you believe they’re not fasting?” “Can you believe they had Turkey on Thanksgiving?” Then we lose all benefit for our fasting because we’re blind to God’s grace.

Yes, I want you to fast. No, I don’t want you to be paying attention to other people’s fasting and their sins and their life choices. Look in the mirror every morning and say, “God, thank you for another opportunity to get it right.” And then when you go to bed, “God, I screwed it up again today.” And if we don’t say that every day, then we are blind to our own sins because every single one of us will go through the day, whether it already happened this morning, whether it’s going to happen in the middle of liturgy, whether it’s going to happen in the drive home because somebody cuts us off. If we don’t go to bed every night asking for God’s mercy because of our sin, then we are the blind ones. But God wants us to see, he wants us to see his love and his grace.

So that’s our challenge. My brothers and sisters be blind to others and open our eyes to ourselves so we can truly live a life worthy of God’s blessings and his grace. Glory to God for all things.