The Courage to See

Pentecost 22, Year B

Mark 10:46-52
Almighty and everlasting God, increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and charity; and, that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

A little girl nervously chews the collar of her school uniform and taps the eraser of her pencil on her desk. Brows furrowed, heart thumping, she tries to work out the math problem in her book. She doesn’t want to ask for help. She doesn’t want to admit to the teacher that she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t understand these crazy fractions at all. There seems to be some kind of system to these numbers. There seems to be something significant about the patterns, but she can’t quite grasp it. Erasing, re-erasing, scratching wildly with her pencil all over the paper, she finally makes the numbers work. “Oh, yes, I SEE!” she thinks with relief, as her body relaxes and a smile spreads over her face. “Now I SEE.” The patterns make sense. The pieces fit into their fraction of the whole. “Seeing!” What a relief! What a marvel!

          Years later, this little girl, now a young woman, sits beside the bed of her critically ill child. She frantically chews her fingernails and weeps silently at the doctor’s incomprehensible diagnosis. Her world is dark and foggy. Nothing makes sense anymore. How can this be happening? Where is God? How has life become this chaos, this problem with no acceptable solution? “Jesus, have mercy on my baby!” she shouts in her heart, over and over again. Or is she squawking her desperation out loud? Nurses are rushing over to her, telling her to hush and to calm down, offering to call someone to take her home to rest. But her legs won’t work. Her mind won’t work. For goodness’ sake, the universe itself no longer works. She can’t see her way forward. She can’t see anything. “Jesus, have mercy!” is the only thing she has left in the darkness.

          Seeing is so much more than merely the seeing that we do with our eyes, isn’t it? When we “see” something, we understand it. We grasp it. If only all of life were as easy to see as a math problem or a word puzzle! If only all frustrations could be reasoned out and all inconsistencies smoothed away with a well-placed answer. Sometimes we pretend that our own mental gymnastics or right actions can bring us the understanding that we seek. But blindness always lurks in the corners and beside the way.

Professor Gordon Lathrop presents an interesting take on this problem in his interpretation of today’s Gospel. Lathrop reminds us that the Timaeus is the Greek philosopher Plato’s most famous dialogue. Interestingly, it too features a blind man. The Timaeus is about the cosmos and the mathematical beauty and wholeness of the universe—the perfect pattern of all things. The blind man in Plato’s work is left out of that wholeness, unimportant and cast aside in his imperfection. Lathrop believes that the blind beggar in Mark’s Gospel, given the specific name, “Son of Timaeus,” is a direct contrast to Plato’s blind man. Lathrop believes that Mark is poking a deep hole in Plato’s perfect universe. Where the suffering have no place in Plato’s harmonious system, the suffering are directly engaged in Mark’s Gospel. God pierces the heavens and comes down to earth in the form of Jesus: Jesus who dives down into suffering with a love that leads to his own crucifixion.[1] In the Christian Gospel, the “perfect sphere [of the cosmos] is torn as the Triune mercy of God is made known on the earth.”[2]

In Mark, Bartimaeus, the Son of Timaeus sits beside the Way, a beggar rejected by a society that won’t even abide his cries for help. But Bartimaeus is courageous enough to risk the taunts and jeers of those who exclude him. In complete humility, he cries out to a savior that he cannot see, a savior who rips open the heavens and comes to him in his small dark corner of the world.

“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks Bartimaeus—using the exact same words that he offers James and John in our Gospel two weeks ago. In that exchange, James and John are still trying to figure out how God works. They think that life has an answer that will lead them straight to a place at Jesus’ right hand in glory. Bartimaeus, however, asks only to see. His suffering has taught him that the way to eternal life lies on the way that Jesus is walking, on the perilous road to Jerusalem. He asks to see a road that the disciples are still too blind to grasp. As soon as Jesus heals him and gives him sight, Bartimaeus takes off to follow Jesus, on the Way—no longer beside it—on the way that leads to the Cross. Given sight, what Bartimaeus sees is not the cosmic mystery. He doesn’t learn why he was born blind. He doesn’t find out the answers to all of our curious questions about God and the universe. He doesn’t look down to find his beggar’s cloak turned into a king’s crimson robe. All he sees … is Jesus. When the light enters his eyes, he looks straight into the face of Jesus, crucified Son of David, living Son of God.

And that’s not all. Mark tells us that this encounter takes place in Jericho. Just as Mark’s readers knew the Greek story of the Timaeus, they also knew the Hebrew story of Joshua. We know it, too, in all of its shocking violence. Joshua fights the battle of Jericho, and those walls come tumbling down. The Hebrew armies parade around the walled city of Jericho during their terrible conquest of the Promised Land, shouting at the top of their lungs and beating their drums. God causes the walls to fall so that the soldiers can enter. They kill the Canaanites inside and claim the Land that God is giving them. Some scholars believe that Mark is turning this violent story inside out, too, just as he turned the story of the Timaeus on its head. Writes Scott Hoezee, “After all, here is Jesus—the new Joshua--outside the walls of Jericho… Bartimaeus shouts in Jericho, but this time the result of all the shouting is not bloody battle and loss of life but a restoration of [peace/] shalom. Salvation happens this time. A man is restored and joins Jesus’ larger band of followers. [As it says in the well-known hymn, ‘For not with swords’ loud clashing, nor roll of stirring drums, with deeds of love and mercy, the heavenly kingdom comes.’”[3] Jesus is always taking our stories and turning them inside out. Every time we think we have life and the universe figured out, he turns our solid answers into a vulnerable, loving face. Every time we think that we are peering into certainty, he presents a picture of mercy, instead.

Once I was troubled by a recurring image that frustrated me to no end. I saw myself alone and unhappy in a desert, standing beside a winding path. I could see buildings and people on the left, and I could see life-giving water and green trees behind me. Ahead, I only saw the path, stretching into the horizon. But I couldn’t move forward or even step sideways onto the path, because on the right, I was blind. I couldn’t see anything to the right of the path, no matter how hard I stared. It was as blank as an empty page. Like the little girl trying to solve the math problem alone, I was distraught. For the life of me, I couldn’t see “what was right.”

“Maybe you are afraid to see it,” suggested my spiritual director. “Maybe you don’t want to know what is right, because it is difficult.” Yes, she spoke the truth. After reading today’s Gospel, I think that I could have stopped straining to make sense of my dream. I could have stopped trying to write my own story.  Instead, if I had cried out to Jesus, for all that I was worth: “Lord, have mercy on me!” Jesus might have immediately bestowed on me the healing gift of courage. The courage to see what is right: the self-giving love that leads to eternal life, the sacrifice that leads to peace, the healing joy that comes only in the morning. 

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[1] Gordon Lathrop, Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2003), 33.

                [2] Ibid., 35.

[3]Scott Hoezee, “The Lectionary Gospel,” found at http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/sermon-starters/proper-25b/?type=the_lectionary_gospel