Our Blessed Blindness

30^th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Jer 31, 7-9 / Heb 5, 1-6 / Mark 10, 46-52

 

We are blessed to be earthy people.  We can touch things and hear sounds.  We smell pine trees and we see leaves changing color.  Our world is full of colors and aromas – shapes and sizes – things hard and things soft.  And so we can understand the plea of the blind beggar to Jesus:  I want to see.

We need to see.  And we need to see on many levels and in many situations.  We need to see trees changing color, but we also need to see purpose and meaning in our lives.  We need to see the truth of our lives.  And we need to see the God of our lives – to see the God in our lives.

Often we do not see our life’s purpose – the truth of our lives.  Often – in fact, if we are honest, very often – we do not see God – we do not see God present in our lives at all.  We are blind to God’s presence.

Today’s Gospel calls our blindness a blessing.  The beggar’s blindness is, in fact, an enlightened blindness.  He knows he doesn’t know.  He knows he doesn’t grasp God’s goodness and presence in his life.  Bartimaeus is honest about his own experience, and he’s humble.  When Jesus asks him the all-important question:  What do you want me to do for you?  What do you really, deeply want? – it’s his very blindness that allows Bartimaeus to honestly answer:  I do not see and I want to see.  I want to see the living God in my life.  It is then that Jesus recognizes that before him is a man of faith: Go your way; your faith is healing your blindness.

The story of Bartimaeus is the last healing miracle in the Gospel of Mark.  It comes as a climax to a theme so important to Mark:  the arrogant blindness of Jesus’ disciples compared to the honest blindness of outsiders such as Bartimaeus.

Today’s story stands in direct contrast to the gospel story in Mark we heard last Sunday.  There Jesus puts the same question to his disciples, James and John, as he put to Bartimaeus, the outsider:  What do you want me to do for you?  What do you really want?  What desires finally shape your life?  Their answer – the answer of Jesus’ disciples and close apostles:  We want glory, recognition, power.  Jesus, we want to sit at your right and left in glory when the kingdom arrives.  Jesus can only answer:  You don’t know what you are asking for.  You have missed the meaning of my message – the meaning of my “good news”.  You are blind to the gospel and blind to your own blindness.

Here we are – the assembly of Jesus’ disciples.  The question now comes to us from Jesus:  What do you want me to do for you?  What do you really, deeply want?  What desires shape our lives – our daily lives?  Do we find ourselves much like our fellow disciples James and John?  Do we share their arrogant blindness?  Do we go for the glory – like being called “Christian” and “Catholic” – but without a thought to so living our lives with one another that a tormented world will see in us the possibility of hope, of honesty and love?

Let us beg for the grace to become honestly blind beggars.  Then we will have a chance of actually grasping God’s goodness and real presence in life.  Let us join with Bartimaeus and with all those blessed with his enlightened blindness.  Like them, we must become outsiders to all religious arrogance, pretense and posturing.  We will choose to live with one another in honest humility.  Then Jesus will recognize in us people of faith learning – or trying to learn – to walk his way of life.  Lord Jesus, we want to see!  We want to believe!  Help our unbelief!