16th Thursday in Ordinary Time
Lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and be converted and I heal them. Jesus is saying something very crucial to us about spiritual perception. How you live, is how you will see. Spiritual perception is really a moral activity. If we wish to be converted, we will see. If we do not wish to be converted, we will not see – at least the unconverted heart will contrive to be culpably ignorant.
Jesus is telling his listeners that there are things about His Person that they can see and that they can hear which are sufficient to convict their hearts – that He is not of this earth but comes from above. But those things must pass through an understanding heart which desires to know Him. Without this desire, they will see and hear and it will never penetrate the opaqueness of their hearts.
So it is for us, each day God testifies to Himself in a zillion ways. Unfortunately our demand for evidence is nothing more than putting God to the test because we want it on our own terms, in our own time and in our own manner. But unless we desire to be converted we will see and not see, we will hear and not hear. What is worse we will not even be aware we are missing out on something more. Such are the ways of the gross heart. It can make us believe that our own brand of unhappiness and quiet desperation is really happiness.
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