December 5, 2025
First Friday of Advent
Fr. Alessandro Cavicchia
The Lord give you peace! I am Fr. Alessandro Cavicchia, a Franciscan friar serving in the Custody of the Holy Land and lecturer in NT at the Franciscan Biblical Studium.
This passage invites us to reflect on ourselves, on our human and existential condition. It then invites us to reflect on our relationship with the Lord Jesus, which can remain alive only through deep faith. It also questions our fidelity and our perseverance in nurturing our relationship with Him. Finally, it helps us to enjoy the wonderful fruits that come from the encounter with Jesus.
Dear brothers and sisters, we notice that the two men who place themselves behind Jesus are blind. They live with a serious physical limitation due to the lack of sight and bear the weight of such a deprivation: lack of self-sufficiency in the simplest tasks of daily life; they experience social difficulties, perhaps being excluded from many activities and possibilities; perhaps they are forced to live on alms. The difficulties of life and their condition have deeply humbled them.
Compared to many, however, perhaps even compared to ourselves, despite their physical blindness, they are able to see and recognize in Jesus someone truly extraordinary. They believe that He has the power to heal them. For this reason they place themselves behind Jesus, bind themselves to Him, and even if it seems at first that He does not pay attention to them, they continue to trust.
All this means for us that we need to become aware of our limits. Perhaps we do not live with physical blindness, but the forms of intellectual or spiritual blindness can indeed be many.
Many forms of blurred vision, in fact, have nothing to do with the eyes of the body, but with our freedom and our willingness to know and make our own a deeper truth, perhaps uncomfortable, yet precious. Above all, these two men have that particular capacity of the gaze of faith: they know how to recognize Jesus as the Son of God and therefore as the Messiah, the Savior, and it is the deep and persevering relationship with Him that allows them to regain their sight.
Dear brothers and sisters, these two men show us the importance of being inwardly united within ourselves and deeply aware of our human reality, which helps us to open ourselves to meaningful relationships and above all to the relationship of faith with the Lord Jesus, in an inner and communal dialogue that nourishes our prayer.
In the relationship with Him and living in His love, our life and each of our limitations finds a new meaning, leading us to rejoice in the new horizons that open before us: the newness of the relationship with ourselves, inwardly reconciled; the relationship with God and with our neighbors; and—why not?—also the hope that the grace of God may heal us of our infirmities, or at least grant us to bear them with the serenity and joy of those who have experienced a love that does not fear our limitations and welcomes us in our deepest reality.
Peace and all good from the Holy Land.
