And they came to Jericho; and as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a great multitude, Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the roadside. And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent; but he cried out all the more, "Son of David, have mercy on me!" And Jesus stopped and said, "Call him." And they called the blind man, saying to him, "Take heart; rise, he is calling you." And throwing off his cloak he sprang up and came to Jesus. And Jesus said to him, "What do you want me to do for you?" And the blind man said to him, "Master, let me receive my sight." And Jesus said to him, "Go on your way; your faith has made you well." And immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way. Mark 10: 46-52
Today we hear about Jesus healing blind Bartimaeus Bartimaeus calls out, “Jesus, son
of David, have mercy on me,” receives the healing of Jesus, and then rises to
follow Jesus “on the way.”
We find Jesus healing diseases throughout the Gospels. The performance of miraculous cures
goes a long way to explaining the large crowds that followed him throughout his
ministry, and for that reason I have no doubt these are real cures. But what also interests me is the
symbolic value of the diseases he cures, in this case blindness. This is one of a few instances recorded
in the Gospels where Jesus cures a blind man. Another is found elsewhere in Mark’s Gospel where Jesus
takes the blind man out of the village where he find him, out to the
“wilderness” where he heals him in, but in stages. The first healing is incomplete. After this healing the blind man says that he sees people,
but says they look like trees walking.
He sees them poorly, as objects, one might say.
I have encountered cable TV documentaries where a Bible
“expert” explains this as showing a weak Jesus, one who needs two attempts to
pull off the miracle. This misses
the point entirely. This healing
shows a kind of progress, first from blindness to seeing poorly, then from
seeing poorly to seeing fully.
This is clearly a symbolic representation of moral progress of spiritual
conversion. All too often our
behavior betrays the fact that we see other persons as objects. I recall one cultural critic lamenting
the fact that civilizations tend to set up divisions between those persons who
have rights, those who are treated with dignity and respect, and others who are
treated as “two legged beasts” for the benefit of the privileged. I think this image of a human reduced
to the status of a two legged beast is has a strong kinship with the image of
the “walking trees” from Mark’s Gospel.
To progress in conversion is to see and treat persons fully as persons,
as ends in themselves, worthy of the same treatment we would have for
ourselves, and to acknowledge this not just abstractly in thought, but in our
behavior, in fact, in the words we say to others and in the way we treat
them.
So this physical blindness is a figure for spiritual
blindness. But there is an
important difference between physical blindness and spiritual blindness. The physically blind can see, as it
were, their blindness. And seeing
their lack of sight they take precautions against their own blindness; they use
canes and seeing-eye dogs. The man
healed in stages is also able to see his own blindness. He knows that trees do not walk so he
is able to realize that they are actually people. His understanding compensates for his faulty senses.
The spiritually blind all too often are only dimly aware or
not aware at all of their blindness.
We are blind to our blindness.
We think we see fine, until something shameful happens that forces us to
acknowledge our blindness and then in hindsight we recognize our myopia. We see that we have trampled on others’
feelings, excusing our own abuse of others by imagining ourselves to be acting
for the sake of pure and lofty motives.
In one of his poems T.S. Eliot refers to “the rending
reenactment of all you have done and been, the shame of motives late revealed,
the awareness of things ill done and done to others’ harm, which once you took
for exercise of virtue.” We have
all experienced this. To be driven
by selfishness and is to live in the delusion of an ego that bends and distorts
the truth to selfish aims. A
satisfying image of our selves is preserved by excusing our own faults while
holding other fully accountable.
There was a philosopher from the 20th century
named Max Scheler who described what he called “the organic falsehood.” It is a selfish principle, some
self-concern or some notion of what is true that is clung to in such a way that
it distorts the ability to see anything else clearly. Scheler says that this delusion can become so strong that
the affected person affected no longer needs to lie. Reality is twisted right at the level of perception such
that one see what one wants to see and hears what one wants to hear.
Whether Scheler realized it or not he was describing what
Christianity describes as effect of Original Sin. We are all affected by our selfishness, and it acts in
exactly the way Scheler describes, distorting our vision, falsifying our
perceptions of other persons and what we owe to them. Unless we have the humility and the courage to stand up
against this twisted and twisting part of ourselves it will have a corrosive
effect on all we say and do, every relationship we try to enter into. Living sinfully is like going through
life with dirty hands, where everything we touch becomes soiled and
sullied.
The way out of the distortions associated with sinfulness is
pointed to in our Gospel by the indication of Bartimaeus’ reaction to his
healing. St. Mark tells us that he
rose and followed Jesus “on the way.”
The “way” that Bartimaeus is called to is the way of the Cross of
Christ. Jesus encounters
Bartimaeus just as he is about to enter Jerusalem, just as he is about to
suffer and die. There Jesus shows
the way to be fidelity to his Father’s will against every inclination to
abandon it. In his betrayal by his
disciples, in his unjust arrest, in his suffering and death he receives
invitations to resentment and hate, and responds instead with forgiveness and
love. There he returns
curses with blessings.
At the center of this is the humility of God, the cure for
all self-deception and self-delusion. To be humble is to live in the truth. Bartimaeus embraces the call of Christ
to renounce oneself, to take up the cross, and to follow the Lord. This is the way of seeing.
This is the way that Bartimaeus embarks upon in order
receive the full healing Christ wishes to impart, and still imparts through the
agency of the Church. In its first
days, “the Way” was the name given to Christianity. St. Luke notes the first time the follower of Christ came to
be known as Christians. Prior to
this Christianity was simply known as “the Way.” For us, embracing the cross and following after the Lord
means to go the way of prayer, the sacraments, examinations of conscience, of
conversion whereby we learn more and more to put away our egos, our narcissism,
our self seeking, in order that we may see.
