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The Reverend Mark H. Byers
October 29, 2006- Year B, Proper 25
Preached at St. Margaret’s, Palm Desert
Mark 10: 46-52

The Road to Jerusalem

The obvious way to go with this sermon, to me at least, is this:

Blind man calls out to Jesus, “Heal me!”
Jesus heals him and says, “Your faith has made you well.”
Lesson: Jesus can heal us if we’re faithful. So be more faithful and your life will be better, because Jesus loves you.

And of course, I would begin with a joke or a fun anecdote, just so you could get to know me better and we could develop a connection. And at the end, having heard my joke and my pithy, life-applicable homily, you would go home to watch football or play golf. In my congregation in Connecticut, just up the river from Long Island Sound, it would have been boating.

If that’s the sermon you needed to hear, there it was. You won’t get a joke or a story today, but I saved you fifteen minutes by just giving you the Cliff Notes.

Now I’m going to give you a real bargain: another sermon during the same service. Remember this deal when it comes time to make your pledge.

Questions that pop into my head as I’m reading this gospel lesson, and that maybe popped into yours:

Where is Jericho? Why is Jesus there with his disciples? Where were they before? What were they doing before? Why are they leaving so soon? That’s all from the first verse and a half.

Who is Bartimaeus son of Timaeus? Is it significant to the story that he is blind? (Could it have been any infirmity that Jesus healed and the story is the same?) Why does he call Jesus the Son of David, rather than the “Son of Man or Son of God or the Messiah? Why does he say, “Have mercy on me,” rather than “Heal me”? Why does Jesus ask him what he wants, when he must quite obviously be blind? Why is it that, having been healed, and having been told to go on his way, he follows Jesus on his way? Finally, where is Jesus going with the disciples and this crowd and Bartimaeus following after?

Jericho is not far from Jerusalem, and Jesus passed through there with his disciples on the way from Galilee to Jerusalem. Galilee, of course, was where he had done much of his healing, exorcisms, and preaching, where he had taught his disciples and his adversaries, too, and where he had grown from childhood to manhood. Jericho is, in this story, simply a waypoint on a journey from one place to another.

Bartimaeus isn’t named in Matthew or Luke, but they both talk about Jesus’ healing of a blind man either entering or leaving Jericho. Maybe Mark knew of him through stories or even personally: the fact that there is a name in this account suggests it, and it was only forty years or so from the time of Christ’s death to the writing down of this gospel. The fact that he is blind and then has his sight restored has been called an “acted parable.” In other words, this blind man is healed through faith in the power of Jesus Christ and, when his sight is restored, chooses to follow Jesus. Sight in this instance would mean both that of the eyes and that of faith. Those who see truly and faithfully and whose sight isn’t obscured, in other words, choose to follow Jesus. Kind of like the first sermon I preached. But more study gives us better understanding, and I don’t think Mark wants us to walk away with just one paragraph’s worth of the story today, so let’s keep going.

Bartimaeus calls Jesus the Son of David. Earlier, Peter called Jesus “the Messiah.” Both names indicate that Jesus represents someone that Jews had been hoping for: really, the same person, but perhaps slight different understandings of who that person might be. One would be the heir of David; one would be the anointed one of God: maybe the difference would be shaded slightly political in one instance and more religious in the other, although I don’t believe that Jews would have made the same distinctions that we do now.

He says, “Have mercy on me,” rather than “heal me,” because sin and disease or infirmity were closely associated in those days. Disease, of course, has nothing to do with sin anymore. Or at least, not in the way that people thought back then. So we know, for instance, that malaria is caused by the bite of mosquitoes carrying sporozoan parasites. That doesn’t mean that sin isn’t a part of the equation, but rather, that the disease is a function of the sin of others than the sufferer. Rampant, resurgent malaria is an expression of the extreme poverty, dirty water, ruined infrastructure, and lack of medical care available in post-colonial states left in shambles after Cold War proxy battles between the superpowers. And most of us don’t imagine that Jesus judges us for this complex situation, even though there is every reason in scripture to believe we’re wrong.

I imagine Jesus asks Bartimaeus what he wants, even though he’s obviously blind, because it’s important even for people of faith, especially for people of faith, to acknowledge the source of their blessings and healing. Again, it’s easy just generally to give thanks to God for the blessings of this life without thinking too deeply about what these truly mean. In that sense, we’re not really operating on the same level as Bartimaeus. We’re operating on the level of the people Jesus critiques: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.”[1] He’s saying that true gratitude, and true discipleship, is the response of faith to God’s blessings. They transform our relationship to God. When Bartimaeus is healed, both physically and in his “spiritual” sight, he follows Jesus on his way.

Which brings us to the most important question; the one that has been hanging over this whole story. Actually, we can’t read or hear any part of the Gospel of Mark without this answer in mind. Jesus is going to Jerusalem, and here is why, in his own words:

“See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again.”

If we don’t know this and have it in mind as we’re reading this story, then we will simply be like the disciples throughout the story. They don’t understand what Jesus is talking about even when he tells them because they can’t grasp that any person, even God’s own anointed one, would willingly travel a road that ends in suffering and death. The miracles and healings and exorcisms are wonderful, aren’t they, but they are meant to point to God’s glory and power, made manifest in Jesus Christ. They don’t change Christ’s destination: they simply affirm that Jesus is who he says he is, rather than who his accusers and executioners say he is. So he’s executed for blaspheming and claiming to be something he’s not, crimes of which, by the way, he’s guilty in the eyes of his accusers.

No doubt Bartimaeus was there at the Crucifixion, with the other people who followed Jesus into Jerusalem, saying whatever the first century Jewish equivalent of “what the heck just happened?” Because the people who followed Jesus understood that he taught with authority, and that he was sent by God, unlike his would-be rivals. But they didn’t realize that this trip from Galilee to Jerusalem would end up with Jesus strapped to the gurney, receiving his lethal injection cocktail of drugs. I changed the means of execution for a moment so that we could realize again that Jesus was executed the same as a serial murderer would be today. The cross, as much as it becomes the instrument of his glorification, was first the brutal instrument of his death.

The even bigger question is this:

Why did he have to do it? What was he hoping to accomplish?

The first line of this story is this:

“The beginning of the good news (or Gospel) of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

Somehow, this story ends up being Good News for all of us, and it’s not small news, either. It isn’t just about what Jesus is going to do for you personally, or Bartimaeus wouldn’t have ended up on the same road as Jesus.

The first thing that Jesus Christ says in the Gospel of Mark is this:

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

I am a church planter. I am here in the valley to start a new Episcopal church. For me, I can’t do that without being clear on what the church is supposed to be doing. We are called to be agents of transformation in this world, through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. We are the church of Bartimaeus, who followed Jesus because Jesus restored his sight, made him able to see again both the beauty of the world and the glory of the God who had made him. We invite others who are blind to join us. Not because we feel superior to them, or sorry for them, but because we are them, or would be, but for the mercy of Jesus Christ. That is, in a nutshell, the gospel.

[1] Mark 7: 6-7

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