2025/03/02 SCRIPTURE REFLECTION
Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
- Jimmy White, Manager of Discipleship & Engagement
Just last weekend, I accompanied our students on retreat in preparation to receive the sacrament of Confirmation. To be “filled” with the Holy Spirit is to be sealed with proof of God’s love, not a feeling or sentiment but a sheerly generous and supremely transformative act of the will—a display of what God wants for each of us and, just as importantly, what we are to want for one another. Love is intentional, it is a choice, it is an action, and this is what makes it special.
Today’s Gospel reveals the secret to understanding what love is all about. Jesus nears the end of his Sermon on the Plain with a lesson for his disciples about the importance of seeing correctly: the blind cannot follow the blind; students resemble their teachers; if we are unaware of our own flaws, then we cannot help others deal with theirs; we know a tree by its fruit. These sayings reveal how deeply God sees into each of us—with our inadequacies and imperfections, amid feelings of judgment and shame, in spite of the expectations that we put on ourselves and others—and yet still loves us. It begins here, because love, if it is true, must look to the best interest of the other and not the self, showing us the sort of love that God has for each of us and, just as importantly, the love that we are to have for one another.
In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, a mystical, enigmatic, golden-haired child leaves his home planet (after being disappointed by the sole object of his care, a beautiful but proud rose) in search of friendship and understanding. Along the way, the little prince meets a fox and learns a very simple secret—the secret of seeing, and so loving, as we should: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” The heart is the place where we are seen as we are, where what matters most is cherished and protected.
This week, we enter the season of Lent, signed with ashes on our foreheads and back to the basic practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving—all this to teach us what is important and what is not. God’s vision is one such that He looks over our shoulder, reaches out to us by making Himself known to us in the Word and through the Spirit—making Himself visible in His love. Because God loves us enough to meet us where we are found, to see as we see, in our encounter with Christ, we are invited in turn to look over God’s shoulder, to see what He sees, to go where He goes. It is only when we choose to love, and continue to choose to love, that we will see rightly—to see as God sees. And, in the end, to see as God sees is to see God.