Friday after Epiphany
“This is the one who came through water and Blood, Jesus Christ, … I write these things to you so that you may know that you have eternal life.” (1 Jn 5:6 and 13)
All during Advent, the Church prayed anew for the grace to become able to rejoice at the coming of Christ. Now we pray that the joy that Christ’s coming brings might sink more and more into our hearts. How can we allow this joy to take greater hold of us? By coming to know more and more the goodness of the One who has come, by knowing how fully He has come, and by knowing what His coming has offered to us. If we discern these things, then our adoration of God will be filled with joy.
John writes to the early Church so that they might know that the Lord comes to offer them eternal life, His own life! As one who has come to know Jesus Christ come in the flesh, John writes to the early Church to communicate to them that God indeed has come and dwelt among us with the same flesh and blood we possess. God has come to share everything we are, so that we might share everything that He is. Finally, the Gospel of today helps us to recognize more fully Jesus’ manifestation of God’s love.
The leper who approaches Jesus, does not simply ask to be healed, as if Jesus is some sort of impersonal force that simply makes bodies work correctly again. Rather, the person suffering from leprosy says to his Lord and ours, “Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean.” (Lk 5:12) It is as if this person is seeking the healing simply as a proof of something far greater: the desires of Jesus’ heart. And in every way, Jesus manifests to the leper His love, by reaching out and touching the leper, by speaking the words of assurance that He does will the leper’s wholeness, and by the sign of healing the person from leprosy. As we contemplate this miracle, let us allow the divine light that shines through it to illumine how we contemplate the newborn king adored by the Magi. They adored, and so should we, because of what is made manifest in that Child: the eternal desire of the heart of God for us to know how much He loves us.