Year B
Jeremiah 31:7-9
Psalm 126
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

Do you remember in English class…  ever having to do an assignment called Compare and Contrast…  where you’d take two paragraphs…  or poems…  or novels…  and describe how they’re similar…  but also how they’re different…  the characters…  the themes…  the detail or lack of it…  and when you were done…  you had gained a deeper understanding of the author’s intent…  what she or he hoped you’d gotten out of the story…

And have you ever thought that the Gospel passages which the lectionary authorizes… which we hear on Sunday morning aren’t enough…  that it can make it more difficult to hear the story in its context…  to understand the big picture…  to understand what Jesus intends to convey…  what he intends to teach…  for us to see the whole picture…  and did you know that while we’re not allowed to shorten the lessons…  we are allowed…  encouraged perhaps…  to hear more…

So I want to compare and contrast two stories in which Jesus healed blind men…  today’s Gospel in Ch. 10…  and five short verses in Mark…  but there’s also a connection between today’s passage and last week’s story about James and John…  that I’ll try to unpack as well… 

So let me read Mark 8:22-26…  They came to Bethsaida…  some people brought a blind man to Jesus…  and the man begged Jesus to touch him…  Jesus took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village…  and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him…  he asked him…  “Can you see anything?”  and the man looked up and said…  “I can see people…  but they look like trees…  walking…  then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again…  and he looked intently…  and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. Then Jesus sent him away to his home, saying, “Do not even go into the village.”

And the Gospel recounts that from Bethsaida…  Jesus and the disciples went to Caesarea Philippi…  and Jesus told them of his death and resurrection…  six days later he took Peter…  James…  and John up the mountain to witness the Transfiguration…  then Jesus heard about the boy who was possessed by a Spirit which made him unable to speak…  and the boy’s father told Jesus that the disciples tried to cast it out…  but could not do so…  from there they went to Galilee…  and Jesus again told them of his coming Passion…  but they didn’t understand what he was talking about and were afraid to ask him any questions…  then they came to Capernaum…  where on the Way they were arguing about who would be the greatest…  then they went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan…  and there were questions about divorce and whether it was lawful…  and the rich man asked what he had to do to inherit eternal life…  and then on the way to Jerusalem Jesus told them a third time about his death and resurrection…  and then last week we heard the way James and John set Jesus up…  and how Jesus responded…  What is it you want me to do for you…  and did you notice…  it’s almost word for word the way Jesus responds today to Bartimaeus…  What do you want me to do for you…

Jesus is the pre-eminent Spiritual Director…  he respects James’ and John’s…  and the blind man’s dignity…  and doesn’t project his own desires on to them…  or presume to know what they want…  he invites them to speak their truth…  which comes from their hearts and out of their mouths…  Spiritual Director Jesus creates a safe space…  and by asking people what they want…  he’s letting them reveal what they value…  who they really are…  and what they need to follow him…

The first man who is healed…  is not named…  the second is…  Bartimaeus…  the son of Timaeus…  a named man…  because in scripture…  unimportant people are generally not named…  and so Timaeus may have had an important role in the early church…  and his son knew about Jesus…

The first blind man is led by some people to Jesus…  and this blind man never speaks his request…  Bartimaeus shouts out to Jesus…  he’s the first person in Mark’s Gospel to identify Jesus as the Son of David…  the Royal Messiah…  but he is silenced…  he calls out to Jesus a second time…  and in a humorous kind of turn around…  those who sternly ordered him to be quiet…  now say…  Take heart…  get up…  he is calling you…  and before Jesus even speaks to him…  before his sight is even restored…  remember…  he was not born blind…  and before Jesus even asks him what is on his heart…  he leaps up…  and throws off his most valuable possession…  his cloak…  not knowing whether he’ll ever be able to find it again…  which also means that he throws off his old life…  because his cloak was his blanket at night…  it was where he concealed the alms given him…  and in a way…  in that moment of throwing off…  we can see that his desire is so strong…  that he commits to follow Jesus even before he knows whether he can…

Jesus takes the first blind man by the hand…  and leads him out of the village…  away from the community he knew…  and rubbed saliva on his eyes…  not once but twice…  because for some reason the first time wasn’t enough…

And then there’s the question…  What do you want me to do for you…  James and John wanted to share in Jesus’ glory…  but they thought that Jesus’ glory would look different than it did…  Bartimaeus on the other hand…  wanted to see…  but he wanted to see God’s truth…  he didn’t just want community…  he wanted God’s community…  v. 46 describes Bartimaeus as sitting by the roadside…  and the Greek word odom [ ὁδὸν ] can also be translated as The Way…  though he’s parked on the shoulder of the road…  like a man who has a flat tire…  not going anywhere…  but in v. 52 we heard that he followed Jesus on The Way…  so in six short verses…  this man goes from being a spectator…  to being a participant…  from being alienated from community…  to being restored to it…

And the story about the first blind man…  not seeing fully the first time he is tended to by Jesus…  carries a symbolic message about the disciples’ blindness…  their inability to see who is before them the first time…  but it also reveals that we too can be blind the first time or two…  to what Jesus teaches and does… 

A few years ago…  I explained that people who are color blind can’t see the full range of colors that most of us take for granted…  most types of color blindness occur when the green and red color cones in the eye… overlap too much…  and this causes some colors to become indistinguishable from each other…  as a result…  the number of shades of color a typical color blind person can see are reduced by as much as 90%…  but when you’re born this way…  what you see is what you see…  it’s not quite the same as being able to distinguish between thousands of Sherwin Williams paint color samples…  and then not being able to…

So imagine what it’d be like to walk out of your black and white house in Kansas…  which is all you’ve ever known…  and into a stunning technicolor Oz…  and that’s what EnChroma glasses do…  they use lenses developed by an optician and a mathematician…  which correct this deficiency by optically adjusting for the overlapping green and red cones… and those people who have always and only known muted colors…  who intellectually understood that their perception was less than that of their family and friends…  those people who never had a point of reference to know what being “less than” meant…  are catapulted into a world of screaming colors…  and they now know what it is to be equal to…  to be restored…  and in YouTube video after video…  they can hardly believe how glorious what they see is…  I don’t think it’s an overstatement…  to say that they’ve been given a new life…  a new identity…  like Bartimaeus has…  but his identity is not just as one who can see…  it’s as a follower on The Way…  after all…  doesn’t salvation mean that we can finally…  fully…  truly see…  and I wonder what Bartimaeus did with this gift…  I wonder what we’ll do with ours…  as we increasingly understand Jesus’ teachings…  and what Jesus has done for us…