Friday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time
Love changes the way that a person sees the world. Love shapes a person’s ability to perceive what is before them; it transforms their vision. We see this in Jesus’s encounter with the Pharisees and scholars of the law in today’s Gospel. When the man with dropsy comes before Jesus, the Pharisees see an opportunity to accuse Jesus of breaking the sabbath; they see an occasion for judgment. Jesus, however, looks at the man with love, and so he sees an opportunity to heal. And furthermore, Jesus sees that this healing does not at all break the law of the sabbath, a point which his adversaries—who are filled with love neither for the man with dropsy nor for Jesus—fail to grasp.
Our perception, our understanding of the world, is also changed by love. To see someone with eyes of love—be that person a homeless man or woman, a migrant at the border, a political opponent, even a criminal behind bars—changes our stance toward them and opens up new and different ways of responding to their needs. Love, to borrow the words of Saint Paul in today’s first reading, enables us to “increase ever more and more in knowledge and every kind of perception, to discern what is of value, so that [we] may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ.”
Today, let us ask that the Spirit fill our hearts with this love today, so that we may see the world in a new way, in a way that God invites us to see.