21st Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture Readings:
Hebrew Scriptures – Isaiah 59: 9-141
9Therefore justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us; we wait for light, and lo! there is darkness; and for brightness, but we walk in gloom. 10We grope like the blind along a wall, groping like those who have no eyes; we stumble at noon as in the twilight, among the vigorous as though we were dead. 11We all growl like bears; like doves we moan mournfully.
We wait for justice, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far from us. 12 For our transgressions before you are many, and our sins testify against us. Our transgressions indeed are with us, and we know our iniquities: 13transgressing, and denying the LORD, and turning away from following our God, talking oppression and revolt, conceiving lying words and uttering them from the heart. 14Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands at a distance; for truth stumbles in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter.
Gospel Lesson – Mark 10: 46-522
46They came to Jericho. As [Jesus] and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. 47When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” 50So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” 52Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
“What Do You Want Me to Do for You?"
Bartimaeus sounds a lot like the sort of poor person that we, who are in the business of dispensing charity, don’t like to see coming through our front door. He’s full of self-pity and he wants others to pay attention to his misery. He’s pushy and demanding about getting what he feels that he needs. He gets upset easily and always seems to be making a scene about something. He doesn’t respond to demands that he behave himself. He’s even the sort of homeless person who’d probably get kicked out of most shelters for the homeless!
Like so many street people, Bartimaeus seems to be the kind of a guy who has such a tenuous hold on his own identity that he’s got to grab every remote possibility for affirmation and hold on for dear life. Unfortunately this kind of behavior rarely works, because loud demands for pity like his – that are intended to evoke some kind of empathy – usually just lead to people turning away in disgust. Any attempt to get others to understand by dramatic and aggressive insistence on one’s “rights” is more likely to lead to outright resistance. People start crossing the street or leaving the room just as soon as they see somebody like Bartimaeus coming.
The vicious circle that traps such people as this “blind beggar” is that the constant rejection that their behavior causes just throws more fuel on the fire of their panic of having no identity at all. They end up living in a constant state of near chaos, feeling from one moment to the next that they’re on the verge of a complete breakdown and total psychosis. The very abnormality, manipulativeness and wild swings of emotion from people like Bartimaeus, are actually frantic attempts to maintain at least some hold on reality by getting other people’s attention – at any cost. Sadly, sometimes, such people simply can’t take it anymore, as happened to a homeless man here in Napa named Anthony Christie who hung himself from a tree last month near the Third Street bridge.
I’m still haunted by such a man that I encountered on the streets of New York City many, many years ago. It was in a section of the city where the sidewalks are wide and always packed with bustling humanity. In the midst of it all was this, dirty, disheveled and wild-eyed guy who was purposely stepping in front of people who were walking toward him. Most people of course (including me) just quickly stepped around him. A virtual sea of humanity simply parted on its way by. None of us dared make eye contact with this guy. It was as if he weren’t even there. Much later it occurred to me that that may have been, in fact, all that he ever wanted: for somebody to recognize him – to act as if at least one person really did see him – to just affirm his existence.
Michael Harrington, in his classic text The Other America: Poverty in the United States, writes:
The millions who are poor in the United States tend to become increasingly invisible. Here is a great mass of people, yet it takes an effort of the intellect and will even to see them.3
These words were written in 1962. The poor have certainly become more visible since then…haven’t they?
While most people only saw in Bartimaeus the troublemaker that he’d always been – somebody to be avoided, somebody to be silenced – Jesus, on the other hand saw the truth. He saw a man who was fervently, and with all of the energy that he could muster, pursuing life’s highest good: to be loved and to love others in return. In Bartimaeus Jesus, at least, saw a man who had more potential for becoming a disciple than did most members of that disparaging crowd.
Bartimaeus wasn’t interested at this point in pushing his way into Jesus’ inner circle of friends. He simply was crying out for healing of that seemingly irremediable defect which from his earliest days had excluded him from the easy and comfortable ways in which other human beings interacted. He begged for release from the vicious circle of a handicapping condition that led to rejection, that led to a deeper handicapping condition, and to even deeper rejection.
Jesus was able to free Bartimaeus from that vicious circle because he, at least, was someone who looked at him and listened without rejecting him. He saw Bartimaeus for who he was: a human being begging with his whole body and soul for a new identity. Tradition tells us that Jesus simply said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well,” and he was healed. The message to us might be that if we would put our whole body and soul into our lives, we too would be affirmed. It’s just those who are halfhearted about life, who find only half of its blessings. Bartimaeus, it was said – healed now at the deepest level of his being – began to follow Jesus “on the way.” In other words he too became a disciple, part of the Body of Christ, one who would now encounter others with the same kind of welcoming heart as he had experienced in Jesus.
Jesus’ healing of Bartimaeus was much more than just an isolated interaction with one man. It is a concrete example of the existential drama of every human being drawn, by sheer grace, into communion with God, with other human beings, and finally with creation itself. Experiencing shalom – in being made whole – Bartimaeus found himself reunited with his very humanity and commissioned to become a minister to others. That is the potential of those most difficult people in our midst – the people that we least like to serve.
On rare occasions the human community as a whole is cured of its blindness: witness the end of slavery, the recent recognition and response to the crimes of child abuse and crimes of violence against women, and the acceptance of people without regard to their sexual orientation. But we have still much to see and far to go before all of God’s people feel welcomed and included.
A blind beggar, one Bar-Timaeus – son of Timaeus – sat outside the gates of the city. His cry for vision and healing doesn’t come from the great centers of urban life: from the Temple, or from within the gathering of the scribes and Pharisees, instead it comes from outside the gate, outside the usual structures of life and order. Do you and I dare to listen to the voices that still speak to us from “outside the gates?” Such prophets of contemporary literature and art are often lampooned – voices that cry out for peace with justice in today’s world, all too often go unheard. The weak and the broken who annoy us with their constant pleas for ministry are expected to be caught in society’s “safety net” – but not ours. Until our own eyes are opened, our minds and hearts will be forever closed to new visions of hope and life – not only for the human condition, but for creation itself.
The words and images in today’s readings vividly portray the vulnerability of that human condition. They’re filled with elements of our own experience that we often prefer to keep hidden from the light of day, from the eyes of probing friends, from the stares of curious strangers, even from our own conscious and prayerful reflection. At the same time, though, these readings invite us to ponder the reasons for spiritual weakness and physical afflictions; they urge us to live without illusion, and so unmask ourselves before God. The many prophets named “Bartimaeus” embarrass us because they force us to confront our own blindness and lameness, our own sinfulness and suffering, our own need for deliverance.
In a variety of ways, then, these scripture readings today address the themes of restoration and healing, of deliverance and salvation. Quite paradoxically they are the good news for today: you and I will not experience the goodness and grace of God without first acknowledging our need for it – and sometimes our need (as with Bartimaeus) is desperate. We’re invited today to live without pretense and without illusion about our self-worth or about all of the good things that we’ve done in our lifetimes. Our blessed, but human, nature still has an enormous capacity for self-deception and evil, for indifference and infidelity, in its relationship with others and with God. And yet, living in such a truth we might still come to see that in spite of (or maybe even because of) our blindness, we are loved and given grace upon grace beyond anything we could ever ask for or imagine!
The United Nations has been in the news a lot lately. Let me read to you from the preamble to its Charter; it begins:
We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.... And for these ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors.... Have resolved to combine these efforts to accomplish our aims.4
Wars have come and gone since this was written in the year of my birth, 1945, and some currently in power still believe that armed conflict is the way to settle disputes between countries and their people. But oppression and torture continue to this very day all over the world. And I find it tragically ironic that the death of innocent people killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past five years, long ago exceeded the number of those who lost their lives in this country on September 11, 2001. Even if our blindness – personal or collective – were to be cured in the very next moment, there’s still trouble ahead. If we will choose to see, though, we will open ourselves to possibilities that we’ve been blind to for a long, long time.
And miracles are happening, every single day, right before our eyes! Bartimaeus ignores the crowd and calls out to Jesus. Jesus, in turn, ignores the taunts and shouts of the crowd and reaches out to Bartimaeus. A miracle happens. And the crowd doesn’t even notice. They’re looking for...,well, something else: a more dramatic miracle, a final solution to the problem of homelessness, a way to forcefully deal with Roman oppression,…a different kind of savior. And so the crowd breaks up, goes back to the routines of their homes and their jobs, upset that this Jesus has turned out to be such a disappointment and wondering if God ever will send them the promised Messiah.
* * *
1 Ironically enough, in some ways this reading from the Book of Isaiah could describe the current state of political affairs in our own country – at a time when we’re fast approaching yet another national election.
These verses, then, speak of God’s absence from a suffering people who have turned away from God – words meant for the Judean community who has returned from Exile in Babylon, and yet still feel lost. With scripture readings this morning, both of which speak of more than one kind of blindness, this one is particularly powerful, as well as timely.
2 This version of the Jesus-event portrays him as just having passed through Jericho, about 15 miles from Jerusalem, when a blind man calls out to him, addressing him as “Son of David” – up to this point Mark’s Gospel has never used this other way of speaking of the Messiah and pointedly conferring that title upon Jesus.
It’s worth noting that the Book of Leviticus not only prohibits blind Levites from serving in the Temple, but it also forbids the offering of blind, lame or deformed animals for sacrifice. In the view of this “Priest’s Manual” (literally Torat Kohanim, which was the earlier name for Leviticus), only that which appears perfect is worthy to be in the presence of the Holy One. It’s no surprise, then, that in Jesus’ time many still believed that blindness or infirmities of any kind were a punishment from God for sins – that those afflicted surely were either sinners themselves or the descendants of sinners, so should be shunned.
It’s also worth noting, however, that it’s a blind man who first “sees” Jesus as the Messiah, when even his own disciples can’t yet seem to be able to make up their minds who he really is for them. At least Bartimaeus knew in what ways he was blind. Do we…?
3 Michael Harrington, The Other America, Rev. Ed., (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p.2.
4 From the “Charter of the United Nations” (June 1945 Preamble) in Yearbook of the United Nations (New York: Office of Public Information, United Nations, 1968), P1039.