Blind
Mark 10:46-52
A man lives in darkness. Who knows how long he has been like this. Some people are born into darkness, with no memory, no inkling, no prior experience of the light. For them it isn’t even darkness, it’s just the way things have always been. They live in a darkness not of their own choosing. For others the darkness is something that comes upon them; sometimes slowly, other times rather suddenly and unexpectedly. For them it is a deficit, something that has been lost, a state of being that is informed by the memory of the way things used to be. It’s hard to say how a person ends up blind. It can happen in all sorts of ways. But either way, to see again, to be restored, to be saved from the dark is to see something more than the way things have always been, or the way things used to be. When a person regains their sight, one thing is for sure, nothing looks the same.
Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, becomes a disciple of Jesus, a follower on the way, as Jesus is leaving Jericho. It is the last stop before Jesus and his party will enter Jerusalem and what awaits him there. This entire tenth chapter of Mark’s gospel has been a kind of travel log for the journey that Jesus is making to Jerusalem. Along the way he is asked questions about divorce, questions about what one must do to inherit eternal life, questions about position and privilege and being great. By and large, the answers that Jesus gives to these inquiries challenge the people who ask them. Because he doesn’t necessarily say what they want to hear. In that sense they really aren’t honest questions. On the way to Jerusalem Jesus encounters person after person who comes to him with an agenda, a point of view they want him to confirm. They want to be justified in what they already think, and so the questions they bring don’t come from a place of honest inquiry, which is itself a kind of blindness.
The religious folks can’t see how their concern about what is lawful blinds them to the very unequal power dynamics created by Mosaic divorce decrees. The disciples who spoke sternly to the people bringing their children to Jesus cannot see those children as anything other than a nuisance. The rich young man cannot see how all the things that he lays claim to have laid claim to him, so that he is unable to enter into God’s claim upon this world. Peter cannot seem to see how predictions of Jesus’ death can be good news. James and John cannot see what Jesus’ baptism will look like, even though he has told them on three separate occasions that it looks an awful lot like rejection and death. And the twelve cannot see that greatness looks more like service and sacrifice than it does adulation and exceptionalism.
When it comes to stories about Jesus’ miraculous acts of healing, the malady in question- whether it’s a demon, or leprosy, or a withered hand, or paralysis- is always a way of pointing to some greater spiritual condition. The person who is possessed is at the mercy of something outside of themselves. The leper is considered untouchable, and thus isolated. The person with the withered hand is regarded as useless. And paralysis continues to plague all kinds of able-bodied people who don’t seem to be able to move, or take action in their lives. Bartimaeus sits at the roadside as a stand-in for all the other people Jesus has encountered who can not see what is right in front of them, who is right in front of them. They cannot see, because they know too well the way things have always been, or the way they used to be.
And yet this blind man. This man who literally lives in darkness, cries out when he hears that Jesus of Nazareth is passing by. But he doesn’t just cry out. He doesn’t just call his name, he calls him by his title. He calls him Son of David. Without eyes to see, he still recognizes Jesus as the source of a hope that extends well beyond that moment. To name Jesus as the Son of David is invoke a title that draws on the historic promise God made to King David never to abandon this people. There is weight to those words. He may not be able to see Jesus, but Bartimaeus recognizes that there is more to this Jesus than Nazareth. There is Spirit. There is the divine. There is the movement of God’s power even now to bring about something new, to restore what has been lost not just for this blind beggar, but for all of humanity. When Bartimaeus cries out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” He is unseating all other earthly power and naming this obscure rabbi from Nazareth as not just his hope, but the hope of the whole world.
No wonder so many sternly order him to be quiet. That isn’t the kind of stuff you shout out with Roman centurions listening. That isn’t something to be bandied about when you’ve got the threat of disturbing the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, hanging over your head. They sternly order him to be quiet because even though they are in, even though they themselves are following Jesus to see what he’ll do next, to hear what he’ll say next, to go wherever he goes next- they sternly order him to be quiet because they themselves don’t know what to think about what it might mean for them to go all the way there. They don’t want to hear this crazy man shouting about the Son of David, because that’s what we do when people say things we don’t want to hear. That is what we do when people cry out about things that might require us to re-evaluate this whole Jesus situation and who exactly it is that we are following. Better to shut him up than consider what it might mean if Jesus is the one sent by God to call into question the way things have always been and the way things used to be. And even though he cannot see in one manner of speaking, Bartimaeus sees more than those who would keep him quiet. So he cries out even more loudly. He will not be silenced. He will not be silenced because his need for healing is greater than their need to remain comfortable in what they think they know. His desire to see again is greater than their desire to remain in the dark.
So Jesus has them call the man to him. Once it becomes clear what Jesus wants, they change their tune. Take heart, they tell him, get up, he is calling to you. And if that isn’t good news I don’t know what is. If you are someone who is longing to see something new. If you are someone who will not be silenced because your need to see is greater than others need to remain comfortable, that may be the best news there is. Take heart; get up, he is calling to you. Don’t you just love the verb here. Bartimaeus sprang up and came to Jesus. It was like that was all that he needed to be released from that place on the side of the road where he had been stuck in the dark for God knows how long.
Jesus says to him, “what do you want me to do for you?” It is a question about desire. Not the cheap kind of desire. Not what a friend of mine calls 99 cent desire. You know the desires that we chase that are quick and easy, the ones that last about as long as the flavor in a stick of chewing gum. Jesus isn’t the genie in the bottle, he isn’t offering the man three wishes. No, Jesus asks perhaps the most clarifying question we can ask. What do you want me to do for you? What desire is so great in you that it won’t be silenced when you sense the Spirit of God is passing by and know that something big is at play? What is the deepest yearning of your heart, one that springs at the chance that it might be heard at last? What do you want me to do for you, Jesus asks the man. In less than a week, Jesus will be faced with his own fate, and he will pray, “not what I want, but what you want.” Too often as people of faith we let that example shout down the deep desires of our hearts. We’ve been told that asking for what we want is selfish, and self-serving. And when those desires are the cheap kind, of the 99 cent variety, that might be the case. But it isn’t always the case. It isn’t always the case because Jesus stands before this man, and he might as well be standing in front of you and he asks, “What is it that you want me to do for you?” He doesn’t presume to know. He doesn’t impose his own idea of what he thinks Bartimaeus needs on him. He asks him. And he asks us. He asks because if we don’t know, if we don’t really take the time to consider just what it is that we truly desire from God and from Jesus, it’s going to be hard for us to ever receive it.
He also asks because to be healed of our blindness, to be saved from the dark requires an act of imagination. That is, it requires the faith to trust that God can, and will indeed deliver on God’s promises. That to call Jesus the Son of David is to do more than traffic in religious lingo, it is to name him as the fulfillment of our historic hope for God’s Spirit to heal us and save us from what is ailing us- in body, mind and soul. Now that does not mean that if someone is sick and they pray and continue to be sick, then they just don’t have enough faith. That is a horrible and destructive reading of what happens when Jesus says, “your faith has made you well.” Another way of translating it is, “your faith has made you whole,” or even, “you faith has saved you.”
Saved from what? Saved from sin, saved from a bad afterlife. No, I don’t think so. What Bartimaeus is saved from is blindness, from the dark, from the way things have always been, or the way they used to be. Bartimaeus is saved from everything that blinds us to the Spirit of God that is passing by even now to put things right, to heal our sin-sick world, to connect us not only to God but to one another.
Sometimes faith is nothing more than a matter of answering Jesus’ question, “what do you want me to do for you,” what do you want, really? And then having our eyes opened to a whole new way of seeing what has been right in front of us all along.