Transcript
Close Encounters: An Encounter with Blind Bartimaeus
First Baptist Richmond, October 27, 2024
The Twenty Third Sunday after Pentecost
Mark 10:46-52
They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside…
Sometimes when I’m out and about I will meet someone who says, “I watch you every Sunday! I really enjoy your sermons.” And I will say, “Well, thank you. I really enjoy my work.” And it’s true…most of the time. But it’s especially true on a morning like this one when I get to spend twenty minutes talking about one of my favorite biblical characters: Blind Bartimaeus.
I love this guy!
I love him because he refuses to take no for an answer. Mark says that when he was sitting there by the side of the road, crying out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” many sternly ordered him to be quiet. Did you hear that? Many (not just a few) sternly ordered him (they didn’t ask politely) to be quiet (you can guess what they actually said). But he began to cry out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” which is to say that you can’t stop him and you can’t shut him up.
I love this guy!
And I hope he will take it as a compliment, but this time around, when I thought about Blind Bartimaeus, I began to think about one of our members here at First Baptist, a guy who goes by the name of “Doc.” You’ve seen him here in
worship on Sunday morning, raising his hands and feeling the spirit. And when Eunice Kim plays a piano prelude he knows he’s not supposed to clap, but he does it anyway. He can’t help himself!
I talked to him about that after church one Sunday. I said, “Doc, Eunice is offering a gift of praise to the Lord, she’s trying to focus everybody’s attention on God, and when you clap for her it focuses everybody’s attention on her, it turns her gift into a performance. Or worse, if you’re the only one clapping, it focuses everybody’s attention on you. Do you understand?” Doc understood completely, and the next time Eunice played he jumped to his feet and began to clap.
He couldn’t help himself!
The first time I met him he presented me with a card that had his full name printed on the front. In the upper left hand corner was the logo of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—NASA—and just under Doc’s name was his title: “Astrophysicist.” I had to look twice because Doc didn’t look like any astrophysicist I had even seen, namely, he didn’t look like Stephen Hawking or Neil deGrasse Tyson. But if you took a minute to talk to him about astrophysics he could tell you things, things that made you think he was the real deal.
He came to my study after he joined the church so we could have that hour-long “get to know you” conversation, and in the course of that hour I learned that he had also worked as an ophthalmic surgeon. I remember looking at him in that moment, wondering if he was making all this up, because he didn’t look much like an ophthalmic surgeon either. He was a wild-eyed, bald-headed, raconteur, who expressed himself with big gestures and boundless energy. I couldn’t imagine him keeping his hands still enough long enough to hold a scalpel. But then he told me about taking his dog for a walk one night years ago, and trying to cross Broad
Street, and getting hit by a car and dragged for 200 feet; about ending up in the hospital, in a coma, for three months. And then some of these other things began to make sense. I began to see how everything else he was telling me might have been true at one time.
There’s a detail in the story of Blind Bartimaeus that you might miss if you weren’t paying attention. It’s that part where he’s standing in front of Jesus and Jesus is asking him, “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus says, “My teacher, let me see again.” It’s that word again that you might have missed. It means that Bartimaeus hadn’t always been blind. I tried to imagine it in another sermon on this text, preached more than two decades ago. I said: “I can imagine that it came to him slowly, this blindness, the way darkness falls across the landscape on a long summer evening, with twilight stretching out forever as you chase fireflies on the lawn or play hide-and-seek until your mother calls, “Come in! It’s dark out there!” and you protest that you can still see. For a long time it may have been like that for Bartimaeus, with the darkness coming on so slowly it was easy to deny, but as it got darker and darker it got harder and harder until, like those children who finally, reluctantly, come into the house, he had to admit he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. It was a long, slow tumble into blindness, each day bringing with it the grief of fresh loss.”i
So, he wasn’t like the Man Born Blind in John’s Gospel. It wasn’t like he had never known the beauty of a sunset or the smile on his mother’s face. Bartimaeus had seen those things, he had known those things! Unlike that other man he knew exactly what he was missing by not being able to see. So, when he heard that Jesus was in town—Jesus, the one everybody was talking about, the one everybody thought might be the long-awaited Messiah; Jesus, the healer, the one
who had cleansed a leper, and unstopped the ears of a deaf man, and opened the eyes of the blind—when Bartimaeus heard that Jesus was in town he made up his mind that he was going to ask to be healed, no matter what it took.
So, picture him sitting by the side of the road as this huge crowd starts passing by, and as he realizes that Jesus is in that crowd. He may have started out quietly enough: “Jesus? Hey, Jesus. Got a minute for a blind beggar?” But when the crowd kept going by and when he sensed that Jesus himself might be going past Bartimaeus began to cry out in earnest, “Jesus! Son of David! Have mercy on me!” It was a compliment, right? To say that Jesus was the Son of David was to say that he was the Messiah. It’s the first time in Mark’s Gospel that anyone has addressed Jesus in this way, and Bartimaeus may have been hoping that it would get his attention.
But it didn’t. It only got the attention of those who didn’t have time for a blind beggar. They told him to be quiet, and when that didn’t work they sternly ordered him. But Bartimaeus wasn’t about to be quiet. The crowd kept passing by, and somewhere in that crowd was the only person in the world who might be able to heal him. So he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!!” Until he got Jesus’ attention. Until Jesus stopped in his tracks, and looked around for the source of all that commotion. Until, with the same kind of smile I have on my face when Doc jumps to his feet and starts clapping after the piano prelude, Jesus said, “Bring him here.”
So, the same people who had been sternly ordering him to keep quiet now said, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” And here’s another detail I love: Mark, who doesn’t often waste time on description, says that Bartimaeus “threw off” his cloak (can you see that?), and that he “sprang up.” And that makes me think that
Bartimaeus must have been a fairly young man. If I’m sitting on the floor I can still get up, but I haven’t “sprung up” in a long time. Have you? And yet I could picture Doc doing it. Doc’s older than I am but if he were sitting by the side of the road and Jesus called for him I feel almost certain he would “spring up.” He would tell me later it was the power of the Holy Spirit because I’m fairly sure Doc knows what that power feels like.
Anyway, they bring Bartimaeus to Jesus, and he’s standing there in front of him, his eyes rolling wildly in their sockets, his whole body trembling with anticipation. Did Jesus, looking on him love him, as he did that Rich Young Ruler? Could he see that this blind beggar believed with all his heart that Jesus could do something for him and that he wasn’t going to give up until he did? Maybe so. And maybe that’s why he asked, “What do you want me to do for you?”
Back in 2009 I preached a sermon on this same story where I said, “What I’ve noticed this time around is the apparent absurdity of Jesus’ question: ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ I mean, isn’t it obvious? There’s a blind man standing in front of him. What else could he want but to see? But what I’ve learned in my years of ministry is that our deepest needs are not always our most obvious ones. For instance, when someone comes by the office to talk to me I will usually ask (as Jesus did), “What can I do for you?” And usually the person will say something like, “Well, I’ve been under a lot of stress at work lately.” But while the relief of stress may be the most obvious need, it is almost never the deepest need. As we talk he tells me about how hard he’s been working and how much he wants to succeed. And then, suddenly, the tears start flowing and he’s telling me how he just wants his father to be proud of him. As I hand him a tissue he says, “He never came to any of my Little League games. Not even one!”
The relief of stress may be his most obvious need, but what is not immediately obvious is how he’s been trying to use this job as one more way to win his father’s approval, as he has tried so many other things—unsuccessfully—for the last twenty years. Behind all that frantic effort is a boy with a broken heart. If he knew that his father loved him the whole situation might be different. He might be free to work without the fear of failure, or to give up that job altogether for something he had always dreamed of doing—taking flying lessons, working in a bakery, joining the Peace Corps.
“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks, and it would serve us well to dig down deep for the answer to that question. There are the obvious things, of course, but there are other things that aren’t so obvious. When you ask the homeless man on the corner what he wants he will say he wants a few dollars to get some food, but after he’s had some food what does he want? Well, maybe a warm, dry place to spend the night. Fine, but after that, what? Maybe some clean clothes to wear, a job to go to, some self-respect? OK, but then what? Do you see how it is? When the obvious need is met another need emerges, and then another, and another, and eventually you get to those needs that are not obvious at all, but may render all the other needs superfluous. Who knows? If we had enough love in our lives, enough laughter, enough grace…we might find that we didn’t need anything else.”ii
“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks, and Bartimaeus replies, “My Teacher, let me see again.” And then he waited for Jesus to do what he usually did in those situations: to bend down, spit on the ground, make some mud, and smear it on his eyes. But Jesus didn’t do any of those things. He didn’t have to. He said, “Go, your faith has made you well.” And that’s when it
happened. “That’s when the flash of light exploded inside his head, and a kaleidoscope of colors tumbled and fell into recognizable shapes and patterns.” iii That’s when he saw Jesus standing there in front of him, that wry smile still on his face. He said, “Go,” but Bartimaeus didn’t go. When Jesus and that crowd starting moving again he went with them. He climbed up that steep road that goes from Jericho to Jerusalem and when Jesus entered the city on Palm Sunday Bartimaeus was in the crowd.
And if you look at that story (because it’s right there in the next chapter), you find that many of the people in that crowd spread their cloaks on the road. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bartimaeus was among them. He was good at throwing off his cloak, remember? And others spread leafy branches they had cut in the fields. Bartimaeus may have been one of those, too. But those who went before and those who followed Jesus were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” And I’m sure that Bartimaeus was in that crowd. He was the one who had started that whole “Son of David” business in the first place, remember? He may have been out in front of the crowd, waving a banner, crying out at the top of his voice, “Hosanna to the Son of David!”
And I can see Doc doing that.
He’s not here this morning. He’s still in the hospital recovering from triple bypass surgery after a second heart attack a couple of weeks ago. But when he does come back I hope you won’t embarrass him. I hope you won’t say, “The preacher talked about you in his sermon!” Instead I hope you will think of Bartimaeus, the one who wouldn’t let anything stop him. And the next time you see someone begging on the street corner I hope you will consider that there may
have been a time when things were different for him, when he lived a very different kind of life. And the next time you look in the mirror I hope you will hear Jesus asking, “What do you want me to do for you?” You probably know better than anyone that your deepest need is not always your most obvious one. Whatever it is, tell him, and then strain your ears to hear those words,
“Your faith has made you well.”
—Jim Somerville © 2024
