Keep Your Eyes Only on Jesus

8 August 2025  Matthew 16:24-28

“For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” Matthew 16:25

St. Therese of Lisieux said, at the end of her short life (she died of tuberculosis in 1897 at the age of 24) that she was no longer interested in her own justice, or her own righteousness. They were all tainted, she said – stained with sin, ignorance, neglect, self-interest. She was only interested in the justice and righteousness of Jesus: “I wish then to be clothed in Your own Justice, and to receive from Your Love the eternal possession of Yourself. I want no other Throne, no other Crown but You, my Beloved.”

Therese had figured out at 24 what it takes most of us whole lifetimes to figure out. Our own virtue, our own righteousness, at the end of the day is useless. Only the righteousness of Jesus matters.

The Old Testament says in many places that no one can see God and live: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5). As years pass by, and God gets bigger as we get smaller, weaker, nothing about us appears adequate to appear before God. Our time, even many years of it, seems wasted, opportunities for greater witness, wisdom, and virtue passed by long ago, and our strength is no longer adequate to do anything about it.

Of course, our strength was never adequate to do anything about it, not in our youth, not in our prime. That is what Therese figured out. Only the righteousness of Jesus matters.

So, if only the righteousness of Jesus matters, that is the only thing we should be thinking about. And if it is the only thing we are thinking about, if we learn to regard everything, as it were, through the lens of Jesus, we find the perfect version of ourselves. Our best self is what we look like in Jesus.It is what He meant when He said, “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

This may sound as if the only way peace is available is to seek mystic experiences, direct encounters with the divine presence. Therese figured that out, too. She had no interest in visions, or ecstasies, or extraordinary graces, and never wrote about them. She didn’t want experiences of God – that was just another way of being preoccupied with self, like the person who says, “I want to be the kind of person who has visions of God.” She just wanted God, and her short life became one of growing abandonment to God’s love in the pure faith that that was enough. Louis Bouyer once wrote that being a mystic is not a matter of visions and ecstatic experiences: “The main thing is to be fully convinced that Christ is living in us, and especially to act accordingly, not to experience more or less directly the feeling that this is so.”

Feelings, in the end, don’t matter. Feelings come and go, variably and unpredictably. Only Jesus matters. He is the lens that clarifies all, and He gives Himself to us, daily if we want, so that we can see.

So, keep your glasses on. That is the one and only, truly indispensable thing. Keep your eyes on Jesus, your vision through Jesus. In the end, that is all that matters.