“Mr.
Timaeus’ Son”
Mark
10:46-52
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
October
25, 2009
One of the drawbacks
of selecting little portions of the gospels to read and preach on Sunday
mornings is that it is possible in doing so to miss the larger contexts in which
the passages are set. Reading the
gospel in little segments makes it harder to get the bigger picture, the broader
sweep, of what the writer is trying to say and convey with his gospel.
It is not unlike a jigsaw puzzle. If
you put on the table only a few pieces of it, unless you look at the picture on
the box you have no idea of what the completed puzzle looks like.
If you only read scattered paragraphs from a novel, you would be hard
pressed to understand the larger story. Reading
only snippets of the gospels here and there can skew their meaning and
intention.
The authors of the
gospels were not writing biographies of Jesus or simply chronicling his
ministry. They were trying to
recruit disciples and followers of Jesus. They
were trying to convince people that life as Jesus taught it and lived it is like
living water and bread of life and they wanted people to drink and eat of it.
They wanted to awaken faith. They
wanted to leaven the whole loaf of the world with people who live the good news
that Jesus came announcing. So, in
terms of interpreting the scripture, it might be possible to do a decent job of
exegeting and explaining a particular passage taken by itself and on its own
merits but miss altogether the author’s intention and purpose for including it
in his gospel in the first place.
To my mind, the gospel
writers were not trying to get us to stand back and be awed by Jesus and what he
did long ago. That would be little
more than reading a history book and, while interesting, perhaps, it would have
little point of contact with us in our day.
The gospel writers wrote their gospels to get us to respond to Jesus in
our own lives, to call us forth into the ministry of Jesus in our time, to set
before us the living Christ of God who by the power and mystery of
God’s Spirit is as present to us today as Jesus the Christ was to those
of the early first century. I love
the baptismal liturgy of the early church when, after immersing a person in the
baptismal water and raising him or her up out of it, the celebrant would call
out that person’s name and identify him or her as “a Christ.”
“Don, a Christ.” “Julie,
a Christ.” The gospel writers were
calling and training people to live into a Christ-ian life.
So our passage today
is about much more than the curing of Bartimaeus’ blindness.
Thank goodness for that because, as significant as that healing
undoubtedly was to Bartimaeus, what is the lesson in it for us who are not
physically blind? Even more, where
is the good news for those who are blind and whose physical sight is not restored?
This story of
Bartimaeus’ healing is considered to be authentic.
That is, biblical scholars believe there is a high probability that this
particular event really happened. It
was not a later embellishment forged by the gospel writers or the early church
to polish Jesus’ resume. It was
not literary license.
Now, a digression:
I happened upon a book in
We do not have time
for me to delve further into Capps’s contention today, though maybe in a
future adult education forum, but the reason I bring it up is to say that the
point of the Bartimaeus passage is not that Jesus had supernatural powers that
belonged to him alone and thus the passage begins and ends there.
That is not why Mark included this story in his gospel.
Jesus also invited his disciples to heal the sick and disabled, too, and
they did not have supernatural powers.
Mark included this
story because…well, here is where knowing the full sweep of the gospel is so
important. Three times prior to the
Bartimaeus story and subsequent to another
story about the healing of a blind man in
So, bookending this
trinity of foreshadowings of Jesus’ suffering and death that the disciples
could not understand because they did not yet “get” the nature of the gospel
and because they could not yet “see” the reversed glory and sacred manner of
the kingdom of God, are two passages of blind persons being healed.
Mark isn’t being too obvious here, is he?
In the first healing story, he is putting up a warning sign to his
readers, saying, “Danger
ahead. Blind disciples.”
And by putting the story of blind Bartimaeus after the disciples’
third strike, Mark is saying to his readers, “See
what I mean? Can you believe it?
Don’t YOU be blind like the disciples.
Wake up, look, see this new thing that Jesus is doing in the world!”
The important thing about the
There is more in the
way Mark tells the Bartimaeus story. Remember,
his purpose as a gospel writer is to get us to join the movement that Jesus
began, to live through our days with, in
Then, when Bartimaeus
heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth who was passing by, he shouted, “Jesus,
Son of David, have mercy on me!” But
the crowd, Mark says, ordered Bartimaeus to be quiet because it was a town’s
responsibility to provide for those who could not take care of themselves and
Bartimaeus, the blind beggar, asking for money as they thought he wanted to do
made the townspeople look bad. But
Bartimaeus shouted again for Jesus and Jesus said to the disciples, “Call
him here.” Hearing that, Mark
reports that Bartimaeus “sprang up and
came to Jesus.” Then Jesus
asked Bartimaeus, “What do you want me
to do for you?” And Bartimaeus
answered, “My teacher, let me SEE
again.” Then Bartimaeus
regained his sight. “Go,”
said Jesus, “your faith has made you
well.”
Do you see how Mark
uses the story? He is calling his
readers to faith in Jesus the Christ. He
is calling them to trust that the ways of Jesus are the ways of God even if they
appear to be contrary to the ways the world usually works, even if they seem
unsightly or strange by conventional standards and wisdom.
The coup de grace for Mark, the finishing stroke of the story, occurs
when, after Jesus said to Bartimaeus, “Go,
your faith has made you well,” Mark says, “Immediately Bartimaeus regained his sight and followed Jesus ON the
way.” No longer consigned to
the side of the road, no longer peripheral or marginal to the Jesus movement
that is a manifestation of the wind of God’s Spirit blowing justice, mercy,
compassion, hope, and life into and through the world, Bartimaeus is “on
the way,” “on the road.” Mark
wants the readers of his gospel to know that if they allow the Spirit of God to
work in them, their blindness to the ways of God will be lifted and they, too, you, too, will be “on the
way,” in the thick of what God is doing in the world, your life bestowed
with great meaning and purpose even if not, as Jesus’ was not, with ease and
safety. It is no coincidence that
the earliest Christians were known as “people of the Way” and that is who we
are called to be, still.
As I grow older, I am
finding that the prayer I am praying most is Bartimaeus’ prayer: “My teacher, let me see again.”
Sometimes I pray it because I have lost my way, gotten off track in
my life of discipleship, find myself on the side of the road rather than moving
onward in my call to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God,
and I need to see the way again. Sometimes
I pray it because I know that my thinking has to be converted, the way I look at
things…that theological and intellectual pride can blind me to deeper truth
and that sometimes the positions I stake out on an issue or a personal situation
have nothing to do with justice or love but only with perpetuating my own
comfort or privilege.
And so, in a similar
way to how Jesus told Nicodemus he had to be born again, born from above, born
anew, I find more often than I care to admit that, like the disciples in
Mark’s gospel, I have to learn to
see again, to see anew, to change my
thinking and my ways before I can take any further steps into a life of which I
can be proud and that in any way can be called Christian.
Bartimaeus could have
chosen to remain on the side of the road. The
community was obligated to take care of him, to provide for his basic needs.
He had his routine. Sort of
like the disciples who, Mark goes to great pains to point out, did not want to
be bothered by any inconvenient truth because they enjoyed their insider status
and did not want it to be disturbed by any newfangled ideas.
If Bartimaeus regained his sight, more would be expected of him.
But he wanted more for his life even if, in some ways, it would be
costlier and harder because he also knew that his life would become deeper and
fresher, livelier and larger. So,
when Jesus called to him, Bartimaeus “threw
off his cloak and sprang up…” And
when Bartimaeus was asked by Jesus what he wanted Jesus to do for him, Mr.
Timaeus’ son immediately said, “Let me
see again.” “Let me SEE.”
That is what Mark is
commending to us who read his gospel: A
sighted life. An insightful life.
An enlightened life. In his
gospel, John says that “the light has
come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light…”
They preferred not seeing to seeing, not being seen to being seen
because, John says, “their deeds were
evil” which is scripture’s way of saying “contrary to God’s ways.”
So, rather than being
an historical report about the healing of a single man a long time ago that
really doesn’t have a lot to do with our lives now, Mark uses the story of
Bartimaeus to speak directly to us
TODAY…forcing each of us to face squarely that squirm-worthy question
because to answer “yes” requires something of us, requires a lot of us:
Do YOU want to SEE?
Do you want to see the world and your life through gospel eyes and get
onto that path that may call you into service and suffering and grieving and
maybe draw you into places and circumstances beyond your comfort and where you
might never have thought you would go but that lead to life… or would you
rather remain oblivious and, in so far as what God is doing in the world, on the
side of the road?
In our call to worship
today, we said that this sanctuary is a place – full of music, words, and
prayer – yet also rife with danger for here we encounter a Wisdom that we do
not always understand, a Wisdom that might undo us and remake us.
Who could know of the peril in opening the pages of Mark’s gospel this
morning? But we have opened them and
what we have encountered there is Mark’s intended question that demands an
answer, a question from which we, you, and I cannot escape:
Do you want to see?
Amen