Year B
Mark 10:46-52
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
Serve as Beggars of Christ
I don’t believe we can be a spiritual human being created by God and not have asked “How can I know God?” “Does God hear me, see me, or know me?” “Does God love me?” We all fear the unknown, which causes most of us to want to know our creator and to understand how we can gain God’s favor. Every religion has a formula but in Christianity we learn that we need do nothing but trust the God Jesus represents. Jesus helps us to see God and to see what the Kingdom of God is all about. Jesus helps us remember how we can know God, and that God does know us, sees us, and hear us. Each of our texts today speaks to our coming to God with our needs and questions and of God’s gracious response.
Job, the psalmist, and Bartimaeus show us how God deeply knows us, loves us and attends to the cries of people and to anyone who comes to God. Our words are never wasted on God. God it seems is the ultimate listener and responder. God heard Job’s cries and today’s text is the climax of the story of Job. He has been humbled by God’s response and offers to “repent in dust and ashes” for having felt abandoned by God. From the start of the book, Job is a sinless character, “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.” That means that all the catastrophes that befall the innocent Job come upon him “for no reason.”
He suffers the loss of his property, his children, and his health. He loses the support of his friends and above all, he loses the comfort of what he believed about God. But in the face of the collapse of his life, his dearly held understanding of God proves lacking. It is not true that good things always come to good people, but it is true, as Job discovers, that new experiences of life require new ways of understanding and speaking of God. He admits that he cannot know all that God knows and must therefore simply trust in God’s power. He prays for his friends who had spoken foolishly about God, and God accepts Job’s prayer and restores his fortunes two fold. The result of Job’s experiences of God has transformed him.
He says, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.” This deep theological awakening or eye opening to God leads him to humility. When we hear God with our minds and hearts, we see what God has done for us. When we seek the Lord, as the psalmist tells us, the Lord delivers us from our fears and opens our eyes to God’s goodness. “O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him. God is near, and indeed “saves, rescues, keeps and redeems. God is the one we turn to in need and Jesus our great high priest will intercede and save those who approach through him. The Hebrews text tells us we have the perfect priest and the perfect sacrifice and as a result we have perfect access to God. Our perfect perpetual priest is able to bring our human situations into the very heart of God, overcomeing sin and death and reconciling us to God.
This is what Jesus does for us and In our gospel reading today we encounter Jesus, the compassionate high priest like Melchizedek, who is about to enter Jerusalem, the ancient site of Melchizedek’s city. The healing of the blind beggar Bartimaeus occurs as Jesus is leaving Jericho to go up to Jerusalem. Before our text today, Jesus has offered the third prediction of his passion and the disciples immediately start to argue about who gets to sit at the right hand of Jesus in the kingdom of God. This is the third time that his disciples have responded inappropriately to his predictions. Bartimaeus, the blind beggar, is sitting along the roadside on their way out of Jericho.
Jesus hears and sees Bartimaeus and offers words of healing, commendation, and commissioning of a disciple, “Go, your faith has made you well.” The fully-sighted Bartimaeus now “followed Jesus on the way.” Here just before the passion narrative begins, Mark pauses to tell us about the miracle of the blind man who now sees. The disciples themselves are still blind to the truth of the suffering of Jesus despite his repeated efforts. They are blind; Bartimaeus now sees and believes. And like Jesus who stopped and saw Bartimaeus, we are invited by Mark to stop and look at Bartimaeus as well. Together with Jesus, Mark offers us a contrast to the nastiness of the crowds. This isn’t just a poor beggar on the side of the road, it is a person with a name and Jesus has compassion on him.
The healing of Bartimaeus embodies the reach of God’s grace and the radical nature of God’s hospitality. God saw Bartimaeus and Bartimaeus saw God and followed on the way. You may remember that “the way” mentioned by Mark expands in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles to include the life of discipleship and one’s place in the growing community of faith-the early church. We may wish for more information about the conclusion to Bartimaeus’ story but the intention is clear, the story concludes in his life of following Jesus. Will this be the conclusion of our story? Bartimaeus can clearly see what others fail to see—Jesus the Son of David, the king promised who will reign forever; who can save, redeem, see, and know us. And we have access to that King!
In Christ, our great high priest, the awesome power of God bends toward humanity. Jesus brings us into the very heart of God who listens to our cries for healing; and through the power of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection we are restored to new life. Our healing becomes complete. And so, as we are nearing the end of another liturgical year, with Advent just four weeks away, what have we learned in our journey with Jesus this past year. I hope what we have learned is that in the end it all comes down to this: it all depends on Jesus. Without Jesus, we cannot fully see or know God. Without Jesus, Job’s story is merely a nice tale in which “they lived happily ever after” but we don’t. Without Jesus, Bartimaeus remains blind and unfortunately his sighted neighbors and the disciples do also.
Yet, with Jesus our eyes are opened to the powerful alternative he offers, by attending especially to those whom the crowd ignores or silences. As Christ’s body, the church is called to embody Christ, to follow and serve Christ as beggars, ever dependent on God’s provision with new “resurrection sight. And we can do this, because God is the ultimate listener and responder to the cries of all God’s people, therefore, we can listen and see others more completely and fully, and respond. And because God sees us through Christ, God will empower us to watch for and expect God’s coming while we attend to those on the edges of society. We have been entrusted with Jesus’ legacy to bring good news to the suffering, and healing to individuals and the world.
Take heart. Get up. Jesus is calling you. The Son of David, the one who reigns forever, who changes lives, upturns our expectations, and heals us of our blindness, is calling us. “I sought the Lord, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears. This poor soul cried and was heard by the Lord…O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him.”