In general relativity, the presence of matter (energy density) can curve spacetime, and the path of a light ray will be deflected as a result. This process is called gravitational lensing and in many cases can be described in analogy to the deflection of light by (e.g. glass) lenses in optics. Many useful results for cosmology have come out of using this property of matter and light.
For many of the cases of interest one does not need to fully solve the general relativistic equations of motion for the coupled spacetime and matter, because the bending of spacetime by matter is small. (Quantitatively the matter bending space is moving slowly relative to c, the speed of light and the "gravitational potential" Phi induced by the matter obeys |Phi|/c2 << 1 .)
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