30th Sunday of the Year, B

            The story in today’s Gospel, the story of Jesus’ healing the blind man Bartimaeus, closes off a whole section of Mark’s gospel.  For the Gospel writer has been emphasizing a theme, a motif, the motif of Jesus’ slowly making His way to Jerusalem toward the end of His life.  And the writer began this section with the healing of the blind man in Bethsaida, and he closes it with the healing of Bartimaeus in Jericho.  Two healings, and more particularly, two healings of blind men.  This is Mark’s framework, and like a picture frame, it is his attempt to set off, to draw our attention to something within the frame. 

            What is it?  As I mentioned, Jesus is now turning toward Jerusalem for His last journey to that city.  And all along the way to the goal, beginning with the healing of the blind man in Bethsaida, He is trying to say something to His disciples.  On three different occasions, each occasion a little closer to Jerusalem, Jesus tries to tell them the meaning and goal of His life.  He tells them three times that He must go to the holy city so that He might be falsely accused, put on trial, that He might suffer great agonies and die.  And that on the third day that he might rise again from death.  And all three times the disciples fail to see.  First, Peter even rebukes Jesus for even hinting at such a fate for their Messiah.  Then the second time, when Jesus predicts His own death and resurrection, the disciples just did not understand and they were afraid to ask Him.  (Perhaps because they were afraid of the answer.)  And finally, on the third occasion, the disciples’ response is to ask for the places of honor in Jesus’ upcoming kingdom.  They just did not see.  They were blind to Jesus’ words and meaning.   

            And then in Jericho, as the crowd following Jesus toward Jerusalem parades through the street, a voice is heard, a single voice, reminding us how Jesus – so unlike the modern ecclesial approach – how He simply ignored the crowd most of the time, but was ready, ever eager, to hear a person’s cry for help:  “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!”  “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!”  Jesus turns to the blind man and asks, “What do you want me to do for you?”  “Rabboni,” he replied, “I want to see.” 

            The contrast could not be clearer.  If only the disciples would ask to see!  How easy it is to heal a blind man’s eyes, and how difficult to teach people to see, really see!  The disciples could not see the meaning of Jesus words because they already had the future figured out.  They had already decided on the meaning of Jesus’ life.  And they were wrong; they were blind.

            For Jesus would not have them see His work, mission and life as the beginning of a Kingdom of power in which they would have leading and prestigious roles.  Rather, He would have them begin to see themselves, their own lives, the whole world, through the lens of His own upcoming suffering, death, and resurrection.  Here is no kingdom of earthly dimensions; here is no perfect city of utopia, a place built with human hands and built for human glory.  No, here is Jerusalem, the old city that murdered the prophets and is now about to kill her own Messiah.  Here is the “hour of darkness,” as Jesus Himself called it, the hour of darkness extended all through time as this world’s hatred of the Church and Christ’s message that is her glory and mission.  But out of all that, through the suffering, the blood, the death -- out of all of that comes Easter morning.  A new kingdom, a new Jerusalem, a new creation, begun in Jesus, accomplished for us through His death and resurrection.

            For us.  For us if we have eyes to see it.  Because there is much that would blind us.  We can Sunday after Sunday see, hear and taste of Christ’s death and resurrection in the celebration of the most holy Eucharist, and yet, like the disciples, remain blind.  Not because we cannot see, but perhaps because we have our eyes fixed on something else.  Maybe we are not looking at ourselves, our lives, our world through the lens of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  For if we have our eyes fixed only on the here and now, this life apart from the meaning given to it in Christ, then we are blind; and we shall be bitterly disappointed. 

            Years ago I saw this so clearly illustrated.  I was standing in a hospital room talking to my mother about a week before she finally succumbed to leukemia.  She said, “It’s getting time to say goodbye.”  “Oh mom,” I protested, like St. Peter refusing to see the reality of Jesus’ words.  “No, son, it’s time to go,” she insisted.  After a pause, she sighed, “I’m so tired.”  I looked away and murmured, “Tired of living.”  But she touched my arm and protested, “No, no, son, I’m not tired of living; I’m tired of dying.” 

            Now her meaning is so clear.  Her journey to Jerusalem was drawing to a close.  She had learned to unite her life and her dying with Christ’s.  She went through it with Him.  The dying part, which we all must face, was coming to the end.  She was about to begin the journey on to the resurrection part:  from the old Jerusalem to the new; from time to eternity; from dying on to living...forever – death itself given a new meaning in the light of Christ’s own death... and resurrection.

            Strange thoughts and words to the modern ear.  And here is where I as your priest must warn you:  we are taught, trained, propagandized, daily influenced by a base and degenerating culture that would blind us.  No, not by injuring our physical eyes as was the case with Bartimaeus.  But by so filling our vision with everything under the sun except the message of Jesus on the road to Jerusalem:  “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles; and they will mock him, and spit upon him, and scourge him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise.” 

            There is a healing for blindness, that is, for the failure to see the true meaning and goal of life.  That cure is discovered on this road to Jerusalem.  And His name is Christ.  Through Him and His work, His death and resurrection, we see what God is up to; He is forming a whole new creation.  It begins, again and again, in each human heart that decides to walk with Christ through both joy and suffering, in those who place their sight and hope upon something infinitely more sure than this passing life.  Our Lord opened the eyes of the blind Bartimaeus as a reassuring sign that He can do an ever so much greater work in all of us:  He can open our eyes, the eyes of our hearts and minds, to see this new and eternal thing He has accomplished through His death and resurrection; and to not only see it, but join it, be a part of it, immerse oneself in it, and so walk the road to Jerusalem with Him, dying to self and the false dreams of a merely earthly happiness and rising with Him, every day and at the end of our days, to an eternal newness that will never pass away.