Saturday, October 27, 2018

Begging to See


Mark 10:46-52
October 28, 2018
William G. Carter

They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then 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.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.


A number of folks in our church family have been reading the Bible as part of our Immerse program. It’s a wonderful addition to our education program. The participants read large sections of the Bible and then gather in reading groups to talk about what they have read. They tell me this is an enriching approach. They are getting a lot out of it. Our plan is to keep at it! If anybody would like to take part, we would love to have you join.

I like that they are reading pages rather than paragraphs. When we hear the Bible in a worship service, we usually hear it in paragraphs. But when we sweep through a wider section of scripture, we see more than if we selected a single verse or two.

This story of Bartimaeus, for instance. It sounds like any number of healing stories in the New Testament. The plot is fairly standard. There is a person who has an illness or disability. Jesus becomes aware of this person. After a brief conversation, Jesus heals the person. That’s the standard plot: problem-brief conversation-healing. But if you read more of the Gospel of Mark, you see a lot more.

Bartimaeus is the second sightless person to be healed in this Gospel. The first was in the village of Bethsaida, up north near the Sea of Galilee. They lead this man to the Lord. Jesus takes him by the hand and leads him out of the village. He applies the standard healing practice of the day, and asks, “What do you see?” The patient says, “I see people, but not too clearly; they look like trees walking.” So Jesus has to touch him a second time, give him a second dose, and then the man can see (8:22-26).

It’s a curious story because Jesus has to give him a second attempt, a second whammy. It’s not to suggest that Jesus isn’t strong enough to heal him the first time. Rather it seems to suggest that some kinds of blindness are persistent. They linger. They are difficult to heal. That story is back in chapter eight.

By contrast, the healing of Bartimaeus is at the end of chapter ten. This time, the sightless person has a name. He lives in Jericho, the oasis city down south, where he begs for a living. This time, the people in the crowd don’t lead him by the hand to encounter the Christ. Rather, the people in the crowd tell him to be quiet, to shut up, to keep still.

The blind beggar is sitting there, crying out to Jesus at the top of his lungs. With Roman soldiers all around, Bartimaeus is calling out for the “Son of David.” That’s revolutionary talk, Messiah talk. There’s a good chance the Jericho folk don’t want any trouble. They tell him to hush. And Jesus heals his sight, this time on the first attempt.

This is what we see if we read the full sweep of this section of Mark’s Gospel. Two blind men are healed. The first led by the crowd, the second hushed by the crowd. The first needs extra help, the second needs no help and springs up to leave his beggar’s cloak behind. As Jesus moved from success in Galilee to the cross in Jerusalem, a good part of his ministry is equipping people to see.

There is a healing of a blind person in chapter eight. There is a healing of a blind person in chapter ten. The most curious thing is that between the healing of a blind person and the other healing of a blind person, the twelve disciples of Jesus do not see a thing. It’s painfully obvious if we read between the parentheses.

Immediately after the first blind man is healed, Jesus says to the twelve, “I’m going to Jerusalem, where I will be arrested, suffer, and be killed.” The disciples say, “No, not you. That’s never going to happen to you.” From then, it goes downhill from there.

·         They stammer when Jesus is transfigured on the mountain, then say the wrong thing.
·         They are inept when they have the opportunity to do a healing on their own.
·         They argue about which one of them is the greatest.
·         They try to stop somebody who is doing Christ’s work but is not part of their little group.
·         They try to chase away the children that Jesus is blessing.
·         They hold on to the notion that earthly riches will save your soul.
·         They push and shove to get to the head of the line.
·         They argue about privilege.

In paragraph after paragraph, the followers of Jesus don’t see a thing. He says, “I am going to Jerusalem to give my life.” In the grand sweep of things, they don’t get it. Do you think this is true?

Somebody was telling me about going out to dinner with her husband on a Saturday night. It was a special celebration. They dressed up, went to a fancy place. Wine, appetizers, the whole thing. The evening was ruined, however, by an obnoxious woman at the bar. She was loud, she was rude. When the couple quietly complained, she heard about it from the waitress, and started yelling obscenities. The couple decided to leave after the woman fell off her barstool and needed to be helped back up. That was Saturday night.

Imagine their surprise when they go to church on Sunday, open the hymnal to sing the first song, look across the aisle, and there she is, singing at full voice. At the door, they recounted the story, shook their heads, and said, “Some people don’t get it.”

Some of you know I spent last week with a group of mid-career clergy. As part of my responsibility to the wider church, I serve two weeks a year as a faculty member for a church conference on wellness. We delve into all the dimensions of what makes us human: spiritual, physical, emotional, financial, vocational. It’s a great program. But after attending the conference as a participant six years ago, and now serving as staff for six conferences, do you know why the emphasis is on wellness? Because so many of us are not well.  

The faculty at that conference has seen it all: fractured relationships, estranged children, teenagers with drug problems, college students with eating disorders, spending out of control, going into debt, emotions spiraling in every direction, serious obesity, anger management issues, loss of faith. And that’s just with the clergy. As one of my colleagues says, “Just like the congregations we serve.” All of us have wounds and scar tissue.

The thing that’s so fascinating is the level of denial, the inability to see. Ask the woman whose credit score is shredded, and she says, “I guess I should have paid more of my bills.” Ask the man with hypertension and diabetes who carries an extra two hundred pounds, and he replies, “I really don’t have a weight problem.” It’s astonishing what blind spots some people can have.

The only thing more astonishing is how easy it is to see the blind spots of others when we can’t see our own.

Jesus says, “What do you want, Bartimaeus? What can I do for you?” The blind man says, “I want to see.” It is a remarkable request. He has been sitting on that street corner for a long, long time. Every day he parks himself in a high traffic location. He rolls out the cloak to catch whatever donations people will give out of pity. He cries out for help whenever anyone passes by.

He says, “I want to see.” He doesn’t say, “I want your money.” He doesn’t say, “I want your pity.” He doesn’t say, “Give me a little something so you can assuage your guilt, hurry by, and put me out of your sight.” He says he wants to see, and Jesus honors that request.

Unlike the sightless person in chapter eight, we are never told that Jesus touches him. That’s interesting. It seems to suggest that the desire to see is the first step to seeing. No more denial. No more begging. No more pathetic ignorance. With complete trust, with determined clarity to stop living as he has, he throws off the cloak that captures the pity-donations and goes face to face with Jesus. Then he says, “I want to see.”

Anybody here want to see? Good question. The problem with seeing is you can’t pretend you didn’t. As one of my Christian Education professors once said, “Once you wise up, you can’t wise down.”

Just picture the husband who decides to see that his wife is drinking too much. He’s had enough of embarrassment at parties, or the legal bills at his wife’s DUI arrests. He doesn’t like that the kids hide from their mother, or that she shrugs off or argues about his concerns. He has decided to see it – to really see it. Now the question is, will he have the clarity and courage to take necessary steps to improve the situation, however he can? Come what may?

Or the school nurse, who sees evidence of neglect or abuse? Or the accountant who has a client with dark secrets? Or the Christian who is weary of words of defamation, acts of violence, and a hundred ways that the Christian faith is twisted out of shape by people who don’t look a thing like Jesus?

We live in odd times. Clear vision is a rare gift, and we need one another to keep our vision from going out of focus. One of my teachers is a Presbyterian minister who died last Monday. You have heard me speak of Eugene Peterson before, and you will hear me speak of him again and again. He is the mentor who taught that megachurches worship size and manufactured experience, rather than the Jesus who gives his life on the cross. Gene also said, “A pastor should never serve a congregation that is so big that he or she doesn’t know the names and stories of his people.” Good advice, Christ-centered advice.

In his obituary in the New York Times, he also had this to say: “American culture is probably the least Christian culture that we’ve ever had, because it’s so materialistic and it’s so full of lies. The whole advertising world is just intertwined with lies, appealing to the worst instincts we have. The problem is, people have been treated as consumers for so long they don’t know any other way to live.”[1]

What he’s talking about is seeing people as children of God, and not as commodities to be plundered. What he’s talking about is loving every neighbor, not pushing them away. What he’s talking about is treasuring this wonderful gift of life and not cheapening it in any way. What he’s talking about is seeing ourselves as Jesus sees us.

Bartimaeus asks to see, to truly see. As somebody notes, right before this paragraph, two of Jesus’ own disciples “wished for status and privilege; Bartimaeus simply asks for ‘his vision.’ The one Jesus cannot grant, the other he can. It is Bartimaeus who is told to ‘take courage.’”[2] Courage is exactly what he needs – and what we need. For if his eyes are opened, he will see Jesus. And if he sees Jesus, he will need courage to follow him.

Remember how the story ends? Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately Bartimaeus regained his sight and followed Jesus on the way.  He followed Jesus all the way to the cross…because he could see him.


(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.


[2] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1988) 282.

No comments:

Post a Comment