October 29, 2006 At Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK
Jeremiah 31:7-9; Hebrews 5:1-6; Mark 10:46-52
This blind man is making a lot of noise. He is shouting loudly, and he says something that brings Jesus to halt. It is the only time in Mark’s Gospel when Jesus is called: “Son of David.” This is startling. It is the title of the Messiah. The blind man has just shouted out what Jesus has been telling people not to do. There has been a momentum building in Mark’s Gospel since chapter 8 when Jesus began his final journey to Jerusalem with the healing of a blind. That first healing story did not go very well. It took two tries on the part of Jesus to bring him to sight. In that story, some people brought the blind man to Jesus, and when it was over, the man, nameless simply disappears.
In the two chapters held together by these blind-man stories, Jesus has spoken of what will happen to him in Jerusalem. The disciples have not gotten the point. They slow and incomplete faith has not let them see what is unfolding in their lives and in the life of their teacher.
Now this blind man brings everything to halt. Mark tells us that Jesus stopped. Suddenly this momentum, this constant turmoil so characteristic of Mark’s Gospel is still. You can almost feel that sense of wonder: “What’s going to happen now?”
Many tried to shut the man up, but nothing will silence the cry of anyone who knows the presence of the Messiah. Nothing will keep him from crying out and bearing witness to his faith, because by that faith he can see, understand, and believe who it is that has come.
And then Jesus says what might seem like the most preposterous thing. He says to a blind man – to someone who can’t see: “Come here.” Think for a minute about that command. How is a blind man going to do that? He can’t see to walk, but this blind man who can perceive his salvation responds to what at first seems like an impossible command. And then the most dramatic gesture occurs. He throws off his cloak, the garment in which people would drop their alms. He abandons his old way of life at the invitation of Jesus because he has faith. Not until he rises up from his old ways, not until he throws aside his cloak, not until he comes to Jesus does anything happen to him. He could have shouted: “Can’t you understand, I’m blind?” Or “I can’t, I’m afraid to move around.” He could have said: “You come here and help me.? But he didn’t. He took the risk of getting up and going to Jesus, and when he did everything changed.
The biggest change of all however, is not the healing of his eyes. It is the change of his life. Unlike the blind man of chapter eight, this blind man, says Saint Mark began to follow the “way.” I don’t think he is speaking of a road. There is another more profound meaning to the following Jesus “on the way.”
Bartimaeus is our teacher today. A blind man leads us. He is driven by a desire to see and understand the revelation of the Son of David. This desire is not intellectual curiosity. It is a sense that salvation lies in greater and greater penetration of the mystery of God and humanity, and the mystery of the Divine and the Human.
For those of us who have assembled in this holy place, for those of us who got up today and came to Jesus in this Eucharist, there is a growing desire to understand and enter into the revelation of the Cross and Resurrection. Every day, we must beg the Father of Jesus to have mercy on our blindness. and every day we must throw aside the cloaks of our past, get up, stumble around if that’s what happens, and start begging for what matters, not money, gifts, and security, but begging for enough wisdom, sight, understanding and faith to take up the ways of Jesus and make them our own.