Do You Judge by Cover or Contents? . . . Fourth Sunday of Lent
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Fourth Sunday of Lent - March 19th, 2023 (Click Here for Readings)
God can transform the least likely person in our eyes to the greatest person in his eyes. We are vastly limited in our visions of others in the same way that Jesse’s vision of his own son, David, was limited.
We live in a world of “many sons” from whom we can pick and choose based on our own self-centered opinions. Whether it’s with celebrities and sports icons we idolize or others we’re impressed with face to face, our fleeting judgements of them can often result in disappointments when we don’t include God in our discernments.
At social gatherings of attractive and engaging people, how do we pick our “David”? If the outcomes of our choices are important, these are the times when we need to pray for the gift of vision that Samuel had in order to know God’s choices.
David didn’t even make the final eight. He wasn’t even invited to the ceremony and was the last candidate for the people’s new king that any normal worldly person at the time would have chosen.
Eliab, the first candidate Samuel saw, had it all on the surface, and even though Samuel was a good judge, it was God’s choice to transform the “sheep tender” David into the greatest king of Israel who ever lived.
So let us learn . . .
. . . to better sense the qualities of others with our hearts instead of our heads. Let us continually improve our spiritual eyesight and see as God sees, not as man sees. God has his way of manifesting one’s greatness from the least of what we often see in others.
Who would have known that a person we judged wrongly in the past, turned out to be the best choice we’d ever make today? How many of our past judgements on others have been flawed by our darker feelings of pride, superiority or exclusivity?
Without Jesus at our side in these situations, we live in the dark. He is our only path to light and this Lent is the ideal opportunity to work on the areas of darkness in our judgements and transform them to light.
Still Time . . .
We are halfway through our Lenten period, but it’s never too late to make a list of our attitudes of darkness toward others and ask God to manifest his love and light into our hearts. So start striving right now to begin fresh enlightening relationships with those you’ve been judging in short-sighted ways. Better yet, pick one person you’ve been judging wrongly, ask God to help you cleanse your feelings about that person, and begin a new relationship with that person in Christ’s light.
When we only see the darkness instead of the light in a person that bothers us, lift it up to Jesus, ask him to help you purge yourself of those dark emotions and he’ll walk you through the darkness into the light of that person. The works and love of God can be made manifest in the least likely of us as it certainly was when the blind man gained his eyesight through Jesus’ healing.
We can all become blind to God’s ways, but be crystal-clear to the world’s ways. Our world blinds us to the truth of God’s ways and leads us toward slavery to its ways. May we never contact the blindness of the Pharisees that prevented them from believing on Jesus’ healing power.
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