Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do.
Those who know they are not well can receive the physician's help. Those who know they are blind can receive healing.
Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains (see John 9:40-41).
What we see is that a fundamental problem preventing people from receiving healing was the lack of awareness of their disease. No doubt after living with sin and sickness for so long it was easier to make up a story convincing themselves of their self-sufficiency than to seek a seemingly impossible cure.
He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God (see John 1:11-12)
We too would usually prefer not to see ourselves as broken and in need of healing. On the one hand we do well to avoid self-deprecation, self-pity, or self-hatred that is motivated by supposed piety. This isn't what Jesus desires from us. Rather, he wants us to be aware enough of our dissatisfaction, or desire for more, to be able to stand up from our customs post and follow him. He wants us to recognize our sickness, not in order to wallow in it and beat ourselves up about it, but in order that when he calls us on we might leave it behind and receive the healing he offers.
As Jesus passed by,
he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the customs post.
He said to him, “Follow me.”
And he got up and followed him.
If our self-awareness is only generating misery and paralysis it is not the Godly sorrow that leads to repentance but worldly sorrow that leads to death (see Second Corinthians 7:10). The sort of awareness of ourselves as sinners, as broken and in need of healing, need not be bitter at all. We can learn from Therese of Lisieux who said, "How happy I am to see myself imperfect and be in need of God's mercy at the moment of my death." Even in her last moments, after what by all accounts was a holy life, she still recognized her desperate need for the mercy of God. But this did not cause her to despair. Rather, she was delighted that there was still more that God could do in her because she was confident that he would do it.
Once Jesus calls us to follow him from the tax collector's post we must be careful not to re-entangle ourselves in old ways. Just as Abraham was determined that Isaac find a wife who was of his own people and, therefore, a worshipper of the one true God, so too must we guard ourselves against the illusion that the world apart from God, still stuck in the blindness of the illusion of self-sufficiency, can bring us peace or lasting joy. We must guard carefully, for this is a promise the world is constantly making, although it is one that it can never keep. It is one thing to have friends and acquaintances in that world. It is another to give our heart to that world.
Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? (see James 4:4).
There is true joy to be found when we are willing to leave our pride behind and seek and cultivate fidelity to God, in our relationships with others, and in our own relationship to him as members of his pure and spotless bride.
In his love for her, Isaac found solace
after the death of his mother Sarah.
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