Weekday

SEE YOUR FAITH HAS SAVED YOU
From a homily by St Gregory the Great 2
◊◊◊
And it came to pass, as Jesus was approaching Jericho, that a blind man was
sitting by the roadside and begging… Jesus, stopping, asked him “What do you
want me to do for you?” He answered, “Lord, let me see!”…

But let us listen to what happened while the blind man shouted, “Those who
walked before reprimanded him to silence him.” What do those who precede the
arrival of Jesus represent, if not the crowd of carnal desires and the tempest of
vices, who, before the coming of Jesus in our heart, dispel our thoughts by their
assaults and hinder the calls of our prayer? Often, indeed, when we want to return
to the Lord after sinning, and strive to overcome…the vices of which we have been
guilty, the images of our past faults are pressed into our hearts; they blunt the tip
of our mind, disturb our soul and stifle the voice of our prayer. Yes, “those who
walked before reprimanded him to silence him,” since before the coming of Jesus
into our hearts, our past faults, whose memory strikes our thought, throw us into
trouble in the midst of our prayer.

Let’s hear what the blind man did then, before finding the light again… “He
cried out,” Son of David, have mercy on me!” See, he whom the crowd reprimands
in order to silence him cries again and again; it is thus that the more the storm of
carnal thoughts torments us, the more we must intensify our prayer… The crowd
wants to prevent us from shouting, since we often suffer even in prayer the
harassing memory of our sins. But it is necessary that the voice of our heart
persists with all the more force that the resistance which it meets is harder, in
order to control the storm of our guilty thoughts, and to touch, by the very excess
of its importunity, the merciful ears of the Lord… When we turn our minds from
this world to turn to God, and apply ourselves to prayer… we endure prayer as an
unwelcome and painful thing, the very thing we had done with delight…

But if we persevere insistently in our prayer, we stop in our soul Jesus who
passes… Indeed, as long as the crowds of images oppress us in prayer, we have the
impression that Jesus is passing; but when we persevere insistently in our prayer,
Jesus stops to give us light, since God is fixed in our heart, and the lost light is
restored to us…

Let us also notice what he says to the blind man who approaches: “What do
you want me to do for you?”… He wants us to ask for things, although in advance
he knows we will ask for them and he will give them to us. He exhorts us to pray
to the point of being unwelcome, who says, however, “Your heavenly Father knows
what you need before you ask him”… So the blind man immediately adds, “Lord,
let me see!” What the blind man asks of the Lord is not gold, but light. He does not
care to ask anything other than light, for even if it is possible for a blind man to
possess something, he cannot, without light, see what he has.

Let us imitate, dear brothers, this man… Let us not ask the Lord for deceitful
riches, earthly gifts, nor transient honors, but light; not the light circumscribed by
space, limited by time, interrupted by night… but let us ask for this light …which
does not begin with any beginning and is bounded by no end. But the way to reach
this light is faith. It is therefore with reason that the Lord responds immediately to
the blind man to whom he will give light: “See! Your faith saved you. “…

2 Accessed online: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/.