Job 42:1-6, 10-17; Psalm 34:1-8
Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52
The Rev. Stephen Siptroth
October 27, 2024
In today’s Gospel, Jesus and his friends, and a large group of people were walking in Jericho when, all of a sudden, a blind person named Bartimaeus yells out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” People told him to be quiet, others probably ignored him, but her persisted: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me! Son of David, have mercy in me.”
Jesus beckoned him to come, and when he came Jesus asked Bartimaeus what he could do for him. “What do you want me to do for you,” Jesus asks. Bartimaeus responds, “let me see again.”
That we know anything about Bartimaeus is remarkable. That Jesus responded to him – a blind person wanting to see again – to see in all the meaning of that word – is not. And throughout the whole of this story, there are layers of meaning, pointing us to what Bartimaeus was really asking, and to what Jesus was really doing.
Some commentators have explained that, in Hebrew, the word Bar is the prefix meaning “son of.” So, as the text tells us, Son of Timaeus. Now, according to a couple of commentators, Timaeus could mean one of two things. In Greek, it’s close to a word meaning “highly prized.” But in Hebrew, the name is closer to a word that means unclean, or polluted. So it could be that the text is communicating something about the man’s chosen-ness, or about the man being unclean.
The people that saw Bartimaeus paid little attention to him, ridiculed him, and told him to keep silent, likely seeing him as a nothing and a nobody; certainly no one worthy of addressing this itinerant rabbi. And, so, for the crowds and the people in the city that encountered Bartimaeus each day, they probably saw a man physically blind and unclean – Bar, son of, Timaeus, the unclean. Son of the unclean. On one level, Bartimaeus’s name spoke about the physical reality that people saw each day and likely avoided: a poor, blind man on the side of the road. Easily overlooked, easily avoided, easily passed by. What good is he?
But Jesus saw something else. Jesus saw chosen-ness. When the world saw a “Bar” Son of “Timaeus” unclean – Son of the unclean, Jesus saw a “Bar” Son of, “Timaeus” the chosen or highly prized. Bartimaeus called to Jesus, Jesus focused in to see the whole of the person that the rest of the world ignored – a person disappeared from the views of the rest of the world, but who became the central focus of Jesus’s attention. And when Bartimaeus became the focus of Jesus, when Jesus focused on the needs of this man on the margins, the margins immediately shifted.
Jesus told him to come closer. When most wrote him off and paid no attention to him, because of his uncleanliness, Jesus treated the man as a highly prized child of God. Jesus asks Bartimaeus: what do you want me to do for you? I want to see.
While, on one level, the story of Bartimaeus is a story about Jesus healing the man’s physical blindness, it also is more than that. The Gospel tells us that Bartimaeus is blind, but the Greek word tupholos that is used to refer to the blindness can mean idolatry, or oppression, as opposed to physical blindness only. So, while Jesus may have responded to what Bartimaeus asked for, that response was a complete and total healing of the whole person, his physical and his spiritual. While healing the physical blindness that affected the man, his livelihood, and his social location, simultaneously, Jesus also heals the spiritual dimension of the man, moving him from a place of both physical and spiritual blindness, toward a new reality in which the man can see physically, as well as spiritually.
The physical and material in the Gospels are always connected to something deeper – the spiritual. And the two are inseparable; the physical and material are woven together with the spiritual and they are inseparable. You cannot claim to heal one at the exclusion of the other.
We learned this week that Gustavo Gutierrez returned to the Lord at the age of 97. Gutierrez was an influential theologian who champion what would be called “liberation theology.” The whole and heart of the liberation theology Guitierrez championed is action to address the needs of the poor, and the marginalized, and those that society would have us forget and ignore – those people the Roman Church in Latin America ignored for too long. They were ignored by a church that focused so much on salvation in the age to come that they lost sight of the salvation that needed to happen in our own time.
According to the New York Times, “Gutiérrez argued that the salvation of the poor was not achievable only in an otherworldly afterlife, as the church had long taught, but could also be realized within history. To know God, he insisted, people must work to eliminate poverty and unjust conditions on earth. The church must concern itself with life in this world, not the next.” And the way we do that, according to Gutierrez: follow Jesus. Follow Jesus, walk with Jesus, in Jesus’s way of love.
What Jesus’s Way of Love, through the story of Bartimaeus, tells us is that real healing requires healing both the physical and the spiritual. You cannot heal the world spiritually if it remains broken in a physical and real sense; the human person cannot be healed spiritually unless they are healed in a real, tangible or perceptible sense. The people who have been forgotten, and neglected, and passed by, and disregarded – in order to bring real and lasting healing to peoples’ lives, both the material and the spiritual must be healed, together, through our concrete decisions and concrete actions to be co-creators of God’s kin-dom.
In this season of stewardship, as we consider how to follow in Jesus’ Way of Love, this notion of healing the material and the physical, together, is central to our invitation. We are invited how to commit our material gifts – the gifts of time, and talent, and treasure. And while these gifts are material, they are also spiritual. They speak to something deeper of each of us: our deep hopes, or deep longings, our deep desires. And our giving says something about our shared desire to bring healing and transformation in our neighborhood, in world our world, in such a way that it points to both the reality of God’s kin-dom here and now, and the fullness of the kin-dom yet to come, when all will be healed wholly and made one. Amen.
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