This is a deceptively
complex episode—not because the action is complicated, because it isn’t. An
unsighted person, Bartimaeus by name, cries out to Jesus as he and his
entourage pass on their way out of Jericho, the city where the walls
came-a-tumbling down, and he cries out to Jesus to have mercy. When Jesus asks
him what he wants, he says he wants to see again, and Jesus restores his sight,
and the man follows him “on the way.” That’s it, a rather “unremarkable”
healing story, if any of Jesus’ healing stories can be called “unremarkable.”
But like a lot of
episodes in Jesus’ ministry, it’s deceptive in its depth, because of its
symbolism and its resonance with other passages of Scripture, and perhaps even
other literature
of the day. Take the name Bartimaeus: in Aramaic, Jesus’ mother tongue, it
means “son of Timaeus,” a fact which Mark emphasizes by repeating it in Greek:
saying “Bartimaeus son of Timaeus” is like saying “son of Timaeus son of
Timaeus,” so it’s a safe bet that Mark wants us to get it . . . and there are
several possibilities. First, Timaeus
is the title character in one of Plato’s dialogs, written several hundred years
before, in which Timaeus gives a impassioned ode to the faculty of sight: he
says that sight “is the source of the greatest benefit to us” and that God
gives us sight so that we might “behold he courses of intelligence in the
heaven”—in other words, so we might see the signs of God’s intelligence written
his creation. And thus, Bartimaeus is cut off from this aspect of the almighty,
cut off in a sense from God.
Another possibility is
that in Aramaic it sounds like a play on words for “unclean,” and that is
certainly what Bartimaeus is. He is squatting beside the road, covered against
the dust by his robe, when Jesus and his disciples and a large crowd—shades of
the time Jesus healed the hemorrhaging woman in a large crowd—and when he hears
who it is, that it’s Jesus of Nazareth, he begins to shout and carry on, saying
“Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” And many in the crowd try to shut him
up, because what he has said is very
political, and it could get them in a whole lot of trouble. Calling him “son of
David” in those days was tantamount to calling him a revolutionary, an usurper
of religious and civil authority, because a descendent of David was supposed to
rise up and restore Israel to its God-given place as a great and powerful
nation, throwing out the Romans and their puppets, who just happened to reside
in Jerusalem, just 20 miles away.
So this is one
politically-charged scene, and you can’t really blame folks for trying to shut
him up . . . you can just hear them saying “Shhhh . . . don’t say that, don’t you know
there are spies all around?” But this makes Bartimaeus shout out even more
loudly: “Son of David, have mercy
on me!” And in the midst of the crowd Jesus stops and stands still, just like he did when
the hemorrhaging woman touched him, and in fact Bartimaeus’ shout is very much
like her touching of his robe: it is a sign of faith, a sign of confidence in the power of Jesus Christ, Son of
Man, and it stops him in his tracks. And what does this faith look like? It’s
bold, it’s forward, it doesn’t care
what how it looks. “Son of David, have mercy
on me” . . . again, it’s like a hyper-version of the hemorrhaging woman, who
showed remarkable chutz-pah
just by touching Jesus’ cloak.
And speaking of cloaks,
Bartimaeus flings
his off as he springs up, providing another, verbal link to the earlier episode,
after Jesus tells his followers to call him . . . and they say “Take heart; get
up, he’s calling
you.” And the double repetition of the verb “to call” emphasizes that this is
more than a healing, more than a miracle, this is Jesus calling the beggar, every
bit as much as when he called bis first disciples. And by jumping up and
throwing off his cloak, throwing off his possessions, Bartimaeus answers that call, giving up
his worldly goods and following Jesus, which is something that the rich guy
from an earlier episode is unwilling to do.
And if you’re getting
the impression that this episode is kind of a summing up of themes from his
ministry, a symbolic greatest hits, if you will, you’re right. The restoration
of Bartimaeus’ sight, thereby making him ritually clean, is the final episode
in the central section of Mark, the section that describes his ministry. And it
comes right before
his triumphal entrance to Jerusalem, when his identity will be out of the
Messianic closet. And in fact, unlike many of the earlier healings, he doesn’t
warn Bartimaeus not to tell anyone. It’s like the cat is out of the bag,
already—he’s hiding his identity no more.
So, in this summary or
hinge episode, we see a lot of his ministry themes hinted at: the boldness and
necessity of faith: check. The giving-up of worldly goods: check. The necessity
of following him: check. And one more episode is echoed: instead of healing the
man right away, Jesus asks him: “What do you want me to do for you?” And it’s
the same, exact words he uses when he asks James and John, in the episode right
before this one, “What do you want me to do for you?” Only in this case,
Bartimaeus doesn’t ask for power and control like they do, he asks to see.
And I think the
“seeing” he asks for is a lot more than just physical sight; I know that Mark means it that
way. Sight is a metaphor for a certain species of knowing, a certain kind of perception. We call a person
with pre-cognitive abilities a seer,
or we say she has “the sight.”
When mystics are enlightened, it is said that they see the same world we see,
only differently,
with greater clarity, or with deeper insight. To the great Jesuit
scientist-priest Teilhard de Chardin it was all
about how and what one sees. “One could say,” he wrote, “that the whole of life
lies in seeing.” And by that, of course, he meant more than just photons
hitting our eyeballs.
And is that the same
for Bartimaeus? I think so . . . in fact, I think his “seeing,” his enlightenment, began well
before Jesus healed his physical sight. As he often does, Jesus says it at the
end: “your faith has made you well.” But Bartimaeus had faith before his physical sight
was restored. Where did it come from? Was it, as John Calvin thought, a gift
from the Holy Spirit? Did he come by it from hard experience, did he have some reason to have faith? In
Mark, we’re never told how he got
his faith, just that he has it, and it has made him well.
And that’s the way it is in the kingdom of God . .
. faith is a mysterious thing, at least as far as the gospels are concerned. As
in Mark, in Matthew and Luke Jesus either commends people for having it—“Your
faith has made you well”—or chastises them for not having it—“O ye of little faith.” In John,
the word “faith” is not even found,
but Jesus does
give a hint as to where it might come from. He says “Nobody can come to me
unless drawn by God.” And so the most we can say is that Bartimaeus was drawn,
or led, to approach Jesus by God’s own self. And in a way, an outcast beggar
without the sense of sight nevertheless sees more
than the rich young ruler, more
than James and John, more even than James and John’s mother.
And I wonder: where does our faith come from? Do
you remember how it was for you? Was there a time when you didn’t have it, and
the next moment did?
I can’t remember such a moment . . . like many of us, I think, my parents took
me to church from when I was little. I grew up
in the faith, as the saying goes. But where did my parents get their’s? Through other folks as well . . . and
you can go back and back, the faith being passed down through families, or
“sideways” by friends, and sometimes the media. It’s like the tale of the
student who asks a sage what holds up the world, and the sage replies “My son,
it rests on the back of a great tiger.” And the student asks “But master: what
holds the tiger
up?” And the sage says “My son, it stands on the back of a massive turtle,” and
when once again the student asks “But master: what holds the turtle up?” the sage looks
at him and says: “my son, it is turtles all the way down.”
It’s turtles all the
way down: no matter how far you go back, how you trace your faith development,
it ends up with a mystery, and we call that mystery “God.” Our capacity for
faith, and the faith to fill it, come from the same source: the all
encompassing, indwelling spirit of God. And when we realize that faith, when it
becomes evident in us, it’s like Jesus saying to us that our faith has made us well, and like
the formerly-blind Bartimaeus, throw off our cloaks and follow. Amen.
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