October 29, 2006
Sermon Title: Let Me See Again!
I wondered how to begin this sermon this week, and my instinct about
mid-way through this past week was to call up my friend Ed, who is
visiting from Dallas this weekend in order to give the installation sermon
this afternoon, I thought about calling Ed, and seeing if he might be
willing to give not just one, but two sermons this Sunday. But, I thought
better of it, and so I found myself digging deeper and deeper into this
deceptively simple text—and, of course, its not so simple—it is not just a
story about another healing, another moment when Jesus gets to display
his miraculous power so as to prove that he has the divine stamp of
approval, which is sometimes the tendency of some of these miracle
stories. But there is usually a deeper edge to these kinds of stories, and
there is most certainly a depth here that we can miss, if we miss the
larger context in which we find this story of blind Bartimaeus, this once
blind man who becomes a disciple of Jesus.
You see, this story, like most stories found in Scripture, and, of course,
like every story we live and tell about our own lives, this story has an
underlying meaning to it: it doesn’t just tell the story about a sick man
made well, a blind man made sighted—it tells the story of what it means
to answer the question that Jesus asks both his disciples in the verses
right before this story and blind Bart and , and what he asks both of
James and John and Bartimaeus is this: “what do you want me to do for
you?” That question asked of Bart is the same one that Jesus asks of
two of his own disciples in the story right before our text today, and
James and John answer the question, but, unlike Bartimaeus, they asked
for the wrong thing: they asked for power, they asked Jesus for the right
to be at his right and left hands, the places of power, in what they
believed to be Jesus’ coming glory, to be at Jesus’ sides right at that
moment in which they believed Christ would end the Roman’s humiliating
occupation of Israel and become the Messiah he was destined to be.
The same question is asked of blind Bartimaeus but he answers
differently—he answers the way I think Christ would have liked his own
closest disciples to have answered: “let me see again!” Bartimaeus
asks. You see, James and John ask for power but Bartimaeus asks for
the gift of sight, to be able to see again.
But of course, this isn’t just about seeing again, about Bartimaeus
wanting to have his sight back again; this story is about asking to see the
world the way it is, in all of its beauty and horror, its about asking to see
the world the way God sees it. And its also about knowing that if we are
given that gift of sight, it might cost us something and it certainly won’t
put us on top of the heap, like James and John want to be. The thing
about this passage is that it is the last miracle story in the book of Mark—
this is it, at least when it comes to the showy miracles and the next thing
that happens is Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, is his entry into that time of
passion when Christ will teach in the temple, when the jealousy of the
religious powers within that same Temple will come to a head, a time
when the calculation is made that it is better for one man to die than to
have a whole nation destroyed, and it is the time when the political
machinery of death and crucifixion become greased with the blood of
those who are understood to expendable in order to keep the peace.
The very last story told by Mark, in this the earliest of the written
Gospels, before the coming drama of Jesus’ crucifixion, is this story of
blind Bartimaeus who comes to receive his sight back. Blindness is not
something all that uncommon in the ancient world—the reality is a lot of
people lost their ability to see in Jesus’ day. Remember, Bartimaeus has
lost his sight, and he wants it back again, meaning that he once had the
ability to see. In the ancient world, one of the most common reasons for
losing one’s sight was because of a highly contagious disease that was
spread through flies, and that would cause an inflammation of the
eyelids, causing the eyes and eyelids to enlarge and in the end, cause
permanent damage. And, of course, there are the other reasons that
people became blind, and if the blind person was lucky, they would be
given permission to try to support themselves by begging for a living.
Some people even think that the cloak Bartimaeus is wearing and which
he throws off when he is called forward to meet Jesus, some think that
cloak is a traditional garment meant to designate him as a blind man who
has been given permission to publicly beg for a living. But before that
moment, our friend Bartimaeus is loud and persistent—he is not willing to
be told “no” and so when the crowd following Jesus makes a commotion
through the town, when he hears that Jesus, this miracle worker is
passing by, he calls out to him, this Son of David—‘have mercy on me!”
Have mercy on me—the great kyrie eleison that has so resonated in the
liturgy of the church that it has become a part of our worship, a part of
the early Latin mass and that even we Protestant use it in some of our
own confessional liturgy. It’s interesting that here you find kyrie eleison
being used not to confess sin, but as a way of attracting the attention of
the Holy One who walks past, this one who possibly can give this man
back his sight.
Nonetheless, Bartimaeus is loud, and his loudness, and its increasing
volume is not making him any friends, and they, the crowds around him,
they want him to shut up, they want him to be quiet—you know, they’ve
got a celebrity in their midst and they don’t want to make him angry or
anything like that. The reality is that Bartimaeus is low on the totem pole
of people that matter in this world, but even that stark reality won’t shut
him up, and his cries for mercy grow louder and louder until the
Bartimaeus’ screams stop Jesus in his tracks—“he stood still” the texts
says—something about the desperation and the volume made him stop
in his tracks and listen to the cried of blind Bartimaeus. Jesus asks his
disciples to “call him here.” And now, instead of people telling blind Bart
to be quiet, they tell him to take heart, and to get up because “he is
calling for you.” That’s the moment the cloak goes flying off his
shoulders and the hands and fingers of the people who were moments
ago trying to shut him up, those same hands and fingers are now guiding
him to this Jesus.
And then the question comes, the already familiar question to the
readers of Mark’s Gospel, “what do you want me to do for you?” And
unlike James and John, who want to be the top dogs in the coming world
order, this blind man just wants to see: “let me see again!” And unlike
the other miracles around sight that Jesus tends to perform in Mark, this
one does not even require a touch from Jesus—there will be no healing
balm made from Jesus’ spit and placed on the eyes—and I think that is
because he is not just asking for just his sight back, for just the ability to
have his vision restored, for just the ability to see the world again—no,
he is asking for a different kind of sight, for a kind of sight that the soul
needs in order to live well and to live deeply in this world. Yes, yes, he
gets his ocular sight back, and his faith has made him well, but that faith
is what makes him “get it” in ways that Jesus’ other disciples never do.
Its almost as if Jesus finally finds a disciple that now fully understands
what he is asking—and its interesting that the text says that Bartimaeus
“followed Jesus on the way” and that way that Mark speaks of is towards
Jerusalem, it is towards a unknown future, it is towards the possibility of
the cross, and humiliation, of being decidedly not a person of power or in
power—there will be no positions on the left and right hand of Jesus to
argue about, to fight over, by the time the coming events in Jerusalem
finally unfold.
And that is problem for them and for us, is that we sometimes really think
that life should be what James and John hope will be in their future,
because, you see, they look towards Jerusalem, and what they see is
resurrection—they see glory, they see power; what they see is the end
of this horrendous, humiliating occupation by the Romans, and the
restoration of Israel to its rightful place as a kingdom under kingship of
Jesus, God’s Messiah, David’s heir. And yet when Jesus looks towards
Jerusalem, he sees his worst fears being played out, his own anxieties
being realized. And we will be witness to all of it in the Garden of
Gethsemane when Jesus, like Bartimaeus, will does his own shouting
and pleading and begging with God for mercy, for sweet, tender mercy—
“let this cup pass from me, please, spare me!” The disciples look past
the cross, and they only see what they want to see, and that is the
ending, the resurrection, the feel-good ending that we hope ends every
good story. And its interesting that Bartimaeus asks for sight, and I
suspect that what he sees as he follows Jesus into Jerusalem is far more
than what the other disciples see, and that is probably simply because,
unlike the other disciples who asked for power, he asked to see, he
asked to see, to see the world as it really was, and, unlike the disciples,
he probably saw BOTH the cross and the resurrection, the two sides of
every coin that form the human story and the divine story. But, of
course, Bart has already been through a crucifixion of sorts, he knows
what it means to be the lowest of the lows, to be at the bottom of the
barrel, to be a nobody in a world that prizes only “some bodies”, that
prizes the bodies on the right and left hand sides of power.
This disciple, this new disciple Bartimaeus, goes on the way towards
Jerusalem, following after Jesus, knowing a lot more than the other
disciples, who never quite seem to know the right answers to the
questions Jesus is asking.
I just think there is something to be learned here, something important
for us to sit with while we do our own following “on the way” after this
Jesus. And I think one of the lessons to be learned here is that the way
Jesus points to includes the cross, includes seeing the difficult things in
this world. The disciples refused to see, refused to see the world the
way it is, and the way the world is, is sometimes difficult, and it may
include a cross instead of a throne. And what I mean by “seeing the
world the way it is” is the act on our part to intentionally look into the dark
corners of our world and see the cross, to see the places like Darfur in
Sudan where people are wiping each other off the face of the earth, it
means seeing the places in our lives and in the larger world where our
lust for more and more things, more stuff to consume and consume, robs
other people in this world of the very basics on which they need to live.
To see the world the way it is, to see what Bartimaeus sees, is to be able
to look towards Jerusalem and remember that this holy city is both a
place of crucifixion and resurrection. And unlike James and John, who
believe it is only a place of coming resurrection, who believe that
Jerusalem is only a place of victory, Jesus and Bartimaeus see it for what
is, a place that includes the possibility of the cross as well. We tend to
want to look away from some of the horrors of it all, away from the cross,
away from the dark places in this world, to look away as the disciples did,
which, in the end, denies the very possibility that Jerusalem might
include great loss as well as great gain, for themselves, for others, for
the whole world: they didn’t want to see the world way it is really is, a
world as complex and complicated as they are, and sometimes a world
as ambiguous as we all are.
And yet, I don’t want to overemphasis this point, because I’ve often said
to people that I think we Christians have sometimes stopped at the cross,
and we’ve failed to remember that the ending of the story, of this story,
and hopefully every story, is resurrection. So much of Christian art
focuses exclusively on the cross, as if that was the whole story, as if that
was the end of the story, but it isn’t. And knowing that truth about
resurrection is what makes life livable, makes life doable for us, and it
makes the possibility of looking, of really seeing what is happening in
Darfur, and seeing what is happening in that widening gap between rich
and poor in this country, and seeing the injustices in our own lives and in
our community, of looking and seeing what is happening in all those
shadow places in this world and NOT LOSING HOPE because that cross,
that horror, that inhumanity, that bloody and cynical political machinery
isn’t the end of the story—it wasn’t in Jesus’ day and it isn’t now. But the
only way to Jerusalem, the only way home is to see the world the way
Jesus sees it, and the way he and Bartimaeus see it is the way it really is,
and what it is, is a world that includes great shadows that can be
lessened if we are willing to bring our own light and God’s light into those
shadows. The disciples don’t want the shadows, and who can blame
them, but when they keep denying that shadows exist, when they deny
Jesus’ own predictions that he will be crucified in Jerusalem, they are, in
essence, denying the real world that Christ came to redeem, the real
world Jesus came to make new, and came to brighten with that powerful
and beautiful light that God placed within him and that illuminated the
darkness that was in danger of swallowing us all up. The choice for us is
to follow this Jesus “on the way,” to follow him the whole way, all the way,
through the horror and despair of the cross and up through the ground
towards resurrection, towards hope and newness. You and I, we can’t
skip either one, cross or resurrection, because to do so is not to
complete the journey, is not to go with our Christ “on the way” towards
Jerusalem, to those places that hold our own crosses that must be
barred on our own shoulders and to those places that also hold the
promise of personal resurrection, of hope coming out of hopelessness.
It is the great story lived out by the divine one, the Christ, and in whose
footsteps we follow, knowing that this is way has been trodden, this road
has been taken, and this way is the way home, which is back into the
heart of God. May the mercy and goodness of God take us all of the
way home. Amen
