The 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time: B 23-24

Jeremiah 31:7-9 | Hebrews 5:1-6 | Mark 10:46-52

Almighty, everliving God, increase our faith, our hope, our charity.  Make us love what you command so that we may merit what you promise. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen. 

There’s an image in the response to our Psalm that I think is so beautiful, that implies that, when people are experiencing God moving in their life, they often find it’s somehow like a seed that’s planted.  And it just sits there for a while, and it’s not that powerful and not that important.  It’s just like the beginning of that song where it’s sort of soft, and then slowly it grows and becomes more full and more effective and more powerful in terms of changing the way we see the world and ourselves.  Anyway, I hope each time you hear it — it’s going to be done after each of the set of readings, and I just pray it’ll be part of our time together.  It’s not to be so much a time for meditating on what I said, but just let the music say what it says, which is really amazing to me. 

Last week, you might remember, we had an image in the gospel that was an image of the disciples coming up to Jesus and saying, “Hey, we’d like you to do something for us.”  Well, it was actually not all the disciples but just James and his brother John.  They just asked if God would give them a place of great authority and great power, and they just thought that was a really good idea.  And Jesus just looked at them and said, “You don’t even have any idea what you’re asking.”  So as Mark’s gospel continues then, we have another person that asks Jesus to do something in the gospel, in this set of readings, and it’s just exactly what God would like everyone to ask him.  “God, I want to see.  I want insight.  I want to know what this whole thing is about.  Show me.”  And so what we see in that story, a beautiful way in which it’s described by Mark, is that he’s sitting there, and he’s a beggar.  And that right away sets up something really wonderful, because people who are most likely to open their hearts to the mystical and the mysterious are people who feel that the practical world is not enough.  And so he cries out, “Help me.  Have pity on me.”  He must have heard about Jesus.  He knew that he was a miracle worker and probably said, “I just want to have my eyes back.”  But then there’s something so much deeper in it.   

If you think about these stories, they’re not just about the people who are in the story, but they’re about us, humanity, about all of us.  And so it’s so interesting that, in the time that Jesus walked the earth, there was an image of God is the source of everything.  So if you were doing exactly what God wanted, your life was rich and full, and you were very happy, and you had no disease, no problems.  But if you were blind or leprous or bad, that was because you sinned.  So anybody that was in need would not be responded to by the people who were believers, because they were considered being punished by God, so they were ignored.  

So here’s a man who’s probably sat there forever, people just passing him by and looking at him, saying, “He’s worthless.”  But he hears this voice, or maybe he just — you couldn’t say he saw Jesus, but he must have been able to hear his voice or know that people were yelling his name.  But he had a sense that he was there, and so he calls him Son of David.  So he knew the scriptures and stuff, and so he just called out and said, “Please, please have pity on me.”  And what’s so beautiful about Jesus in this story is that — let’s just say, there were other people shouting.  So why did he hear this one voice?  One voice, “Have pity on me.”  It’s like the woman that he bumped into in the crowd where he felt something going out of him and when he healed her.  But anyway, he turns around, and he calls the blind man.  And all of a sudden, he hears these words that are so beautiful, and we think, for anybody who’s on their own and wondering why I can’t figure things out, when he hears, not only is God answering my call, but he’s calling me.  Jesus is calling you.  God is calling you into a life with him.  God is asking you to open your heart and believe and see what he’s really about.  Take courage.  And then I love this.  

You know the word enthusiasm?  Enthusiasm is such a cool word.  I have an Oxford English Dictionary in my office, a great gift someone gave me, and I love looking at words.  And the word enthusiasm means entheos.  It means — actually the official translation is filled with God, filled with divinity, and so there’s something about divinity, truth living inside of you that just — it’s a lot of energy.  And so you see this man throwing aside his cloak, springing up.  I know it’s always interesting that blind people do have a sense of direction and where they’re going, whatever.  He knew where Jesus was, so he just runs over there, and when he stands there before him, he said, “Master, I just want to see,” because Jesus said, “What do you want me to do, give you authority and power like my other disciples?”  “No, I want to see.”  And he said, “Go.  You have it.  Your faith has saved you.  Your faith has saved you, not the state you’re in, not the sin that they claim you’ve committed or that your parents committed that put you in a place of punishment.  No, it’s your faith that has saved you.”  So in his blindness — this is what’s interesting.  Faith, in a way, is kind of blind, when you think about it.  You have a way of understanding or seeing something, and somebody says, “Well, show me.  Show me that — prove to me that God exists, or show me that the God that is often absent from people —”  

Like take the beginning.  The first reading is about this relationship God has with people.  It’s weird.  You want to say, “God, did you really want to have this kind of relationship with us,” where he’s absent, and then he’s present?  He’s absent, and he’s present.  Your life is going well, and it seems to be blessed.  And then all of a sudden, everything’s falling apart, and he’s gone.  And there’s this image in the Old Testament particularly, which is the great journey to freedom, from slavery to freedom.  You see this God always somehow saying, “Trust me.  Stay with me while things are not the way you want them to be.  See if you can trust me when I’m absent, because if you can’t trust me in my absence, then somehow you won’t have the relationship with me that I want, because I have to put you through times that are empty and dark.  And if you can’t endure those, if you think I’m only present when things are light and bright, then you won’t grow.”  There’s this mysterious thing about the pain and suffering, experiencing darkness in your life that is so crucial for you to live in the light, and so you have this difficulty, often, trusting in God.  And so faith is a belief that isn’t based solely on the experience of something that’s happening that proves to you right now that the thing that you want is there.  Faith is believing in it when it’s not there, believing in something that you can’t explain, that you can’t figure out.  And in those moments of darkness and weakness, you just sort of say, “All right, I’ve got two choices.  I can give up on this whole thing about God and divinity and all that, or I can stay with it and wait, because somehow, when I’m in that experience of having nothing or nothing around me has any light or I’m just staring into darkness,” and you still believe, that’s when it happens.  That’s when things change.  Amazing.  

And Jesus, when he was walking this earth, he was teaching that to people.  Accept the emptiness and the darkness as part of your life.  It’s just God’s plan, and so you have in Hebrews this strange reading, in a way, where it’s talking about Jesus, saying that Jesus had to make up for his sins.  Well, how do you do that?  What are the sins that Jesus would have committed?  It’s he had to do something to offer a sin offering for himself, and what it would mean is that Jesus, as a man, had to experience the same experiences we have in this world.  And when I think about Jesus being sinless as a man, and Mary also, being in our Catholic tradition Mary was without sin, did that mean they didn’t make mistakes, that they didn’t fail at something?  Did they do everything perfectly?  No, that couldn’t be possibly right.  No, what they didn’t ever do is doubt in their brokenness, in their inability, and when Jesus did some things that you could say objectively weren’t so wise — he yelled and ranted and raved at the leadership of the church.  Try that out even today.  Attack the leadership, and they’re going to, of course, listen and embrace you and say, “Oh, what a great new idea.  We hadn’t thought about that.”  No, they’re going to come back with vengeance.  In a way, you say Jesus was shooting himself in the foot, in a way, when he didn’t have more patience with the leadership of the church.  Well, that’s his humanity.  That beautiful thing about Jesus is he’s like us.  He loses it.  He gets upset.  He doesn’t want to do what his Father’s asking, and so he has to make up for that in a sense.  And how do you make up for that?  Well, I don’t think it’s something you have to do that’s good.  I think you make up for it by simply enduring it and not imagining that you are, you are the failure.  You’re not the failure.  Human nature fails us, in a sense, if we’re going to expect to be all that God wants us to be immediately.  Human nature is a process of growing, losing everything and then finding more and then losing it again and then finding even more.  It’s this dark and light, dark and light, emptiness, fullness.  

It’s why in the first reading you have this image of — there are moments in God’s relationship with his people when they have been gone, and they have gone in the wrong direction, and they’re blind, and they’re lame, and they’re wounded by their mistakes.  And yet he calls them back.  There’s this wonderful image of fullness out of emptiness.  So important for us to believe that’s the way it works.  It isn’t that we move from level one to level two to level three, level four, level five.  No, it goes level one and two, and then you go to zero and below zero and then back up.  It’s patience and understanding and compassion for our human nature that God wants us to see and believe in and believe that he, God, is always in charge.  He’s always able to be the one that enables us to go through the darkness and not lose hope — not lose hope, not lose faith, not lose trust.  

I don't know what Bartimaeus must have felt as he sat.  From the time, I guess, he was born, he was blind, but his whole life was being a blind beggar.  When you think of that, that’s not a bad image of some of us when we get to a certain place where we don’t see anything like the truth, and all the things that we choose to fill us with are emptiness, nothing but emptiness.  That’s a pretty good image of that experience.  So faith, faith, faith, when we’re in those moments, is what God will give us.  That’s his gift.  It’s not earned.  It’s a gift, but like anything that God gives, it is something that you can’t count on having an experience that proves that it’s there in this moment.  In fact, he almost on purpose — well, I say yes, on purpose, gives you a feeling that there’s nothing there for you, and yet you’re supposed to believe that that nothingness has a purpose, has meaning.  And you can’t miss that.  If you look at the Old Testament and New Testament, the way God works in human beings, it’s this constant cycle of death and rebirth and death and rebirth.  So whenever you’re in darkness, in the darkness of blindness and can’t see what God is really doing, remember this story of Bartimaeus, because in the midst of the darkness, God is calling you into the light.  You just have to see — you have to be in the darkness before the light can become as strong and as bright and as life-giving as it really is.  Grey is the worse place to live, but fullness and emptiness is the cycle.  And when you embrace it, believe in it and trust in it, there’s nothing that sort of like is hopeless, it’s all dark, it’s all black.  You’re free of that forever when you have faith and trust in the one who’s guiding you.

Father, you are, in a way, a taskmaster. You’re not easy to be with. You’re not easy to work with, in the sense that you really do put us through test after test but always with a heart filled with love for us, knowing that these tests and this darkness bring such light and such growth and such truth. Help the part of us that’s like Bartimaeus to reach out and trust in you, call on you, and when we do, help us to recognize how much the truth is that you’re calling us always, through our faith, into new life. And we ask this in Jesus’ name.