Sunday 27th October 2024
Mark 10:46-end
If you pick a story from the Bible it is a remarkable reality that the more you live with the story, the more you pray with it, the more depths of meaning are uncovered. It is easy to get caught, stuck, on the surface. The problem with this is you don’t then find the buried treasure. There is no buried treasure on the surface. And so you dig.
Blind Bartimaeus sitting by the roadside. Remember, no detail in a Biblical story is to be ignored. There is always that buried treasure under the surface. The unusual name means “Son of Timaeus”. Some have said the name has a special significance as the philosopher Plato wrote a dialogue where a character Timaeus delivers a profound meditation on sight as the bedrock of knowledge. Just an indication of how philosophy is often woven through the gospel stories. Buried philosophical treasure beneath a name.
Bartimaeus is at the side, ignored, lonely, unloved. You know what it is like when you feel abandoned, unheard and unseen. Blind Bartimaeus is fundamentally unseen by those around him. And we pass Bartimaeus by as well. This is not an exercise in guilt from the pulpit. There is nothing worse frankly. It is just true. Our vision tends to be narrow, fixed ahead. The person we do not see. The person we choose to ignore. It can be someone in our life rather than a stranger. We stop seeing them. We are blind to them emotionally. We do not hear them or see them.
‘When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!’ When we are on the outside, and everything is passing us by, when we are on the edge of things, we may realise, I am not fully alive. I am not in relationship. And when we get a sense, when we get a whisper, of new richness, of a depth which we somehow know is there but we cannot access, like buried treasure, we can become bold and brave and something in us calls out, reaches out, for that connection. Bartimaeus’s great cry of prayer. ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!’
‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.’ The Jesus prayer, one of the treasures of Eastern Orthodox spirituality. This is its fullest formulation, there are many variations. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ Holy women and holy men have sat in caves, in cells, on buses, on planes, on boats, on beaches, at roadsides, down the ages and silently, inwardly repeated what has been called the prayer of the heart. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ People shaped the prayer from various gospel stories and this is one of them. As a tedious liberal I used to blanch fastidiously at that last bit, a sinner. Liberals, and I speak as one, are always interested in turning things into their own image. But now the Jesus prayer in its full formulation, including the acknowledgement of our sin, seems to me to simply acknowledge the depth and suffering of our human condition. We love God. We need God. We are lonely without God and we sit in a world alienated by hard-heartedness and suffering. We cry out, silently, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
What happens if we practice this inner prayer which is Bartimaeus’ gift to us from across time? This is from St. Hesychios the priest, a monk who wrote on the Jesus Prayer. ‘A heart that has been completely emptied of mental images gives birth to divine, mysterious intuitions that sport within it like fish and dolphins in a calm sea. The sea is fanned by a soft wind, the heart’s depth by the Holy Spirit.’ That is from Volume One of The Philokalia (that means love of the beautiful), a treasure trove of spiritual wisdom where inner prayer is the unifying thread of what is shared.
‘Many sternly ordered Bartimaeus to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’ Notice here the coldness, the indifference, the aggression of the crowd. Angrily ordering this nobody, this beggar, to shut up. Notice the moral blindness at work here. And it remains the case. If some people notice someone else reaching out for the divine mercy, the divine mystery, they quite deeply want to stop it, to supress it, to smother our natural yearnings for the transcendent. Get back in your box, the voice of the world says to the hungry soul, get back in your box and shut up, you nobody, by the side of the road. But Bartimaeus is brave and he cries out even more loudly, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’
‘Jesus stood still and said, ‘Call him here.’ And they called the blind man, saying to him, ‘Take heart; get up, he is calling you.’ So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus.’
Jesus stands still. That stillness lives at the centre of who Christ is. That stillness, which is the depth of God, is the stillness which hears the cry of the other. Bartimaeus throws off his cloak and springs up. The power of his life-force, the energy of his movement towards higher, deeper life. Again no detail is too small. Bartimaeus throws off his cloak. When we are moving towards the source of deeper life, deeper vision, we have to learn to throw things off. Our sense of status. Our self-importance. Our judgements of others. Our pride. Our theories about the world. We throw them off (they come back again but we can then throw them off again and again).
‘Then Jesus said to him, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ The blind man said to him, ‘My teacher, let me see again.’
Jesus always gives people the full depth of his divine love and attention. That divine attention, which arises out of the divine stillness at Jesus’ heart, is how he heard the cry of Bartimaeus. When Bartimaeus comes to Jesus, Jesus actually sees him, which means he knows him and loves him. There is never the sense with Jesus, when he met people, that he was thinking about what he might eat and drink later that day, or how was this new form of religious teaching going down with people, or how tired he felt at the moment. No, he gave people the full depth of his divine love and attention. Which is why we come to him and spend time with him. Jesus doesn’t stand or sit with us with one eye on his watch or one eye looking over our shoulder to the other situation which needs his attention over there. God loves us and delights in us and we are the apple of his eye. And out of this loves he asks Bartimaeus what he actually wants. Jesus gives Bartimaeus the space to speak in a world which has told him to shut up. Bartimaeus calls Jesus my Rabbouni, my teacher. Bartimaeus is open to receive what Jesus can give him, remember he has thrown off his cloak.
‘Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your faith has made you well.’ Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.’ The King James translation is more profound here. Jesus says, ‘Go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole.’
This story is not saying that those who are blind or partially sighted are somehow in a state of sin. Remember the many levels of how we read scripture. Jesus healed people. He healed the outer person but, more importantly, he healed the inner person. And when we read or hear this story we understand it both as a healing of the outer Bartimaeus and the inner Bartimaeus. We are, a lot of the time, spiritually and morally deaf and blind. And I use these conditions symbolically. We do not hear the cry of suffering which rises from Gaza. We do not hear the cry of the Israeli hostage. We do not hear the cry that comes to us from our own family member or friend. This is not about guilt. We have grown busy and sad and tired and our hearts are cold and we cannot hear and see because we have lost our way.
But we can cry out, from the edges of our lives, to a divine compassion, a divine attention, which will hear and us and see us. ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!’ We can throw off and spring up. And we can be given a deeper vision, a wider vision, our cold hearts will bud again, and we are drawn into that life of divine compassion and we follow on the way.
The Reverend Ben Brown. 2024
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