The Road on which the Redeemed Walk

In today’s Gospel, Luke 5: 17-26, people from “every village in Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem,” were coming to Jesus.  “[T]he power of the Lord was with [Jesus] for healing,” Luke tells us.  The people seeking Jesus’ healing were in desperate need of such, as are we.  People came from all over seeking Jesus’ help and did whatever they needed to do to get close to Jesus, like lowing the stretcher of their paralyzed friend through the roof so the y could place him right in front of Jesus!  What are you and I willing to do for our friends and family members, for ourselves, in order to be healed by the Lord?

 In the first reading, Isaiah 35-1-10, the prophet proclaims the coming of our Savior: “Here is your God, he comes with vindication; with divine recompense he comes to save you.”  That means that there is something from which we desperately need to be saved! Is it our blindness, our deafness, our arrogance, our pride, our God substitutes, our divisiveness, our apathy, our greediness, our cynicism, that to which we are enslaved and which keeps us from being responsible, loving, caring, forgiving individuals?  When you and I truly encounter the Lord, when we welcome God into our lives on a daily basis, when we recognize our need to be vindicated by the Lord (that is what Good Friday was and is all about)  then , Isaiah prophesies, our sight will be restored, our deafness cleared, our paralysis healed.  Embracing our salvation and our need to be saved, we will walk on “the holy way,” on the “highway” on which “the redeemed will walk.” We will then be among [t]hose whom the Lord has ransomed,” who are enter[ing] Zion singing, crowned with everlasting joy; [we] will meet with joy and gladness, sorrow and mourning will flee,” says the prophet Isaiah.

Oh, happy day for which I long!  How about you? What are your longings?