Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost Proper 25 Oct 24 2021

Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost Proper 25 Oct 24 2021

Job 42:1-6, 10-17, Psalm 34:1-8, (19-22), Hebrews 7:23-28, Mark 10:46-52

 

We take up with the gospel of Mark again in the shadow of Jerusalem, on the way to the cross. We've been on this road for a while now, partners with those in the story who are also on the way. Before the followers of Jesus were called Christians, they were, as we are, people of the way. This story of the blind Bartimaeus is the last story of Jesus’ ministry before the cross, the passion, and resurrection. I think this story of Bartimaeus is in stark contrast to the story that we heard last week, the story about James and John. James and John ask Jesus for power and status, Bartimaeus asks Jesus for healing. God lavishes love on them all, Jesus calls them as followers, and yet each of them must let go of something they’ve been holding on to live fully free, fully alive.

 

"What do you want me to do for you?" Jesus asks Bartimaeus, it’s the same question that Jesus asked James and John only a moment ago in the story, and that we talked about last Sunday. But the gulf between the request that James and John make, and the request Bartimaeus makes is cavernous. James and John were somewhat confused, remember, they ask Jesus for power, they think the kingdom is about a seating chart at a party. But Bartimaeus, Bartimaeus asks to see. Nothing like the power and status, the place at the table that James and John were all about, and what’s more is that Bartimaeus wasn’t even officially a disciple.

 

Imagine Bartimaeus, sitting in the road, probably at the main gate of Jericho, day after day, all day, in the hot sun, begging. But Bartimaeus knows who Jesus is, he’s listened to the talk, he calls out to Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. Let me see.

 

Two things here that are so unlike the James and John story, or the story of the earnest young man, which we also heard a couple weeks ago. First, the request, have mercy on me, heal me. Second, the ramifications of that healing, what it means to follow Jesus.

 

Have mercy on me, Bartimaeus asked, mercy. You know what mercy means? A heart for other people’s troubles. Bartimaeus was asking Jesus to have a heart for his troubles. That’s all, hear me, see me, and if you’ve got it in you, heal me. And that’s what Jesus did, Jesus heard him, Jesus saw him, and having a heart for his trouble, Jesus healed Bartimaeus.

 

So once Bartimaeus is healed, what does he do? Bartimaeus’ profession is begging. Once he is healed, his life is changed, he can’t go on begging anymore, so he follows Jesus. Just like the others, he gets up and follows. Bartimaeus exchanges a life of begging, a life of blindness, a life of being on the margins, for this life of following Jesus. And you and I know where that’s going, straight to the cross.

 

No matter how much we think we have, no matter our wealth, our status, our power; or no matter what we think we don’t have, our lack of health, our lack of wealth, our lack of support, we leave it all behind when we follow Jesus, none of that matters. We get so wrapped up in our own shortcomings, or we spend so much time valuing our worth by what others think is important, that we forget that we are God’s beloveds, and we forget to have mercy, a heart for other people’s troubles.

 

Jesus calls us to follow, Jesus calls us to surrender things that poison us, or things that keep us from seeing what is around us, Jesus calls us to be merciful, to have a heart for other people’s troubles. Jesus' call to us, the call to be followers, is to open ourselves up, to surrender the stuff that insulates us from our neighbors, to let Love win. Being healed isn't easy for us. Anne Lamott, in her book, Almost Everything, Notes on hope, writes, ”Being healed is finally recognizing your loveliness in Jesus’ eyes and finally letting yourself be loved, and finally letting go whatever it is you’re sick and tired of, because you can’t control it anyway.”

 

That is the risk in being healed. We can’t control it. That is the risk in letting Jesus change you, you can’t control it. Life will never, can never be the same. But out of what seems like death, and letting go is a death of something, comes resurrection. 

 

We cling so desperately to that which we believe is our identity, no matter how healthy or unhealthy; it's nearly impossible to give that up to an identity as beloved of God. Letting go of what we believe defines us to take on our true identity as God’s beloved, is hard. But unless and until we let die what is killing us, we can never be healed, we will never be transformed into the new person in Christ. The Good News is that when we make room for Love to interrupt our precisely organized patterns, we make room for Love to change our path; we make room to go home by a different way. And there will be new life in ways we can hardly begin to imagine.

 

As we listen to this story of Bartimaeus, there is another hard truth to listen to. Healing doesn’t look like what we expect it to look like. In the pages we hold between our hands, we read of the ones whose diseases were cured, because what fun is it to write about the ones who were not. But the truth is healing cannot be controlled. Not all are healed of their obvious or maybe not so obvious disease. Most of us are in that group, most of us cannot tell a story about a personal miraculous healing, some of you can, but not most of us. Most of us tell stories about the pain and difficulty of disease that is our own or our loved ones. Most of us live with chronic pain and addiction. Most of us live with broken bodies and broken hearts. This is what it means to be human. So the hard truth is that we are God’s beloveds. 

 

You see, I believe the healing in Bartimaeus’ story is not so much regaining sight, but in being restored to the community. In every one of the healing stories, that is the point. Jesus calls us from the margins back into the community. Bartimaeus is called, and healed, and follows Jesus. We are called, healed in obvious ways and not so obvious ways, and we follow Jesus. Not in a transactional sense, but in a deepening sense. The journey to the cross is as difficult as it is exhilarating; following Jesus is not for the faint of heart. But the good news is that we are all in this life together. When we are in this life together, the burden of a broken heart and a broken body becomes a bit lighter. Hope is born in and among us, Jesus is born in and among us. 

 

And that is where mercy and love grow. Mercy and love and compassion grow out of the broken places. It’s like when you are hiking on the granite rocks of Lake Superior, and in the middle of all that hard rock, there is a fissure, a crack, and out of the crack there is a tree. The good news is seeing, seeing, the grace, the joy, the wonder, in all that life throws at us. And unlike Bartimaeus and the others, we know the end of the story. We know that resurrection happens. We know that life always wins over death. We know that we are part of resurrection. There is hope.