Years later, this young girl, now a young woman, receives an incomprehensible diagnosis. Terminal cancer. She weeps silently at the doctor’s hard words. Her world turns dark and foggy. Nothing makes sense anymore. How can this be happening? Where is God? How has life become this chaos, this problem with no acceptable solution? “Jesus, have mercy on me!” she shouts in her heart, over and over again. Now she is crying her desperation out loud. Nurses are rushing over to her, telling her to hush and to calm down, offering to call someone to take her home to rest. But her legs won’t work. Her mind won’t work. For goodness’ sake, the universe itself no longer works. She can’t see her way forward. She can’t see anything. “Jesus, have mercy!” is the only thing she has left in the darkness.
Seeing is so much more than merely the seeing that we do with our eyes, isn’t it? When we “see” something, we understand it. We grasp it. If only all of life were as easy to see as a math problem or a word puzzle! If only all frustrations could be reasoned out. If only all inconsistencies could be smoothed away with a well-placed answer. Sometimes we pretend that our own mental gymnastics or right actions can bring us the understanding that we seek. But blindness always lurks in the corners and beside the way.
Professor Gordon Lathrop presents an interesting take on this problem in his interpretation of today’s Gospel. Lathrop reminds us that the Timaeus is the Greek philosopher Plato’s most famous dialogue, probably known to the Hellenistic Jews of Mark’s time and place. Interestingly, the Timaeus also features a blind man. The Timaeus is about the cosmos and the mathematical beauty and wholeness of the universe—the perfect pattern of all things. The blind man in Plato’s work is left out of that wholeness, unimportant and cast aside in his imperfection. Lathrop believes that the blind beggar in Mark’s Gospel, given the specific name, Bar-Timaeus, “Son of Timaeus,” in Aramaic, is a direct contrast to Plato’s blind man. Lathrop believes that Mark’s story is meant to poke a deep hole in Plato’s perfect universe. The suffering have no place in Plato’s harmonious system. But in Mark’s Gospel, the suffering are directly engaged. God pierces the heavens and comes down to earth in the form of Jesus: Jesus who dives down into suffering with a love that leads to his own crucifixion.[1] In the Christian Gospel, the “perfect sphere [of the cosmos] is torn as the Triune mercy of God is made known on the earth” in Jesus Christ. [2]
In Mark, Bartimaeus, the Son of Timaeus, sits beside the Way, a beggar rejected by a society that won’t even abide his cries for help. But Bartimaeus is courageous enough to risk the taunts and jeers of those who exclude him. In complete humility, he cries out to a savior that he cannot see, a savior who rips open the heavens and comes to him in his small, sightless corner of the world.
“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks Bartimaeus—using the exact same words that he offers James and John in last week’s Gospel. In that exchange, James and John are still trying to figure out how God works. They think that life has an answer that will lead them straight to a place at Jesus’ right hand in glory. Bartimaeus, however, asks only to see. His suffering has taught him that the way to eternal life lies on the way that Jesus is walking, on the perilous road to Jerusalem. He asks to see a road that the disciples are still too blind to grasp. As soon as Jesus heals him and gives him sight, Bartimaeus takes off to follow Jesus, on the Way—no longer beside it—on the way that leads to the Cross.
Given sight, what Bartimaeus sees is not the cosmic mystery. He doesn’t learn why he was born blind. He doesn’t find out the answers to all of our curious questions about God and the universe. He doesn’t look down to find his beggar’s cloak turned into a king’s crimson robe. No, instead, he leaves even his precious cloak behind. All he sees … is Jesus. When the light enters his eyes, he looks straight into the face of Jesus, crucified Son of David, living Son of God. Jesus is always taking our stories and turning them inside out, isn’t he? Every time we think we have life and the universe figured out, he turns our solid answers into a vulnerable, loving face. Every time we think that we are peering into certainty, Jesus presents a picture of mercy, instead.
Today at St. Ambrose, we are celebrating “A Future with Hope.” Yet, what does that mean? Subconsciously, perhaps, our minds might drift toward the future proclaimed at the end of the Book of Job, a perfect, logical, “happily-ever-after” tale added to make Job’s senseless suffering less scary. “Hang in there, renounce yourself, and you’ll get riches and glory in the end,” this ending tells us. Job’s ending says, “Hey! These past 18 months of Covid have been scary, but before you know it, we’ll be back in the church and everything will be just like it was before, except twice as great! God will reward our faith by giving us so many new young families with children that we won’t know where to put them all!” That’s the way our world trains us to think, isn’t it? It tells us that we’ll learn from our mistakes, follow a given formula, and God will make it all better in the end. Self-help books galore tell us that we can always fix our lives. It’s possible to live your best life, Oprah promises us. Some preachers even tell us that nothing is impossible if we believe!
But that’s not what happens most of the time, is it? Kate Bowler, a church historian, is a real-life version of the young woman that I described at the beginning of my sermon. In her thirties, when she was a happy wife and new mom and had just landed an amazing new job, she found out that she had Stage 4 colon cancer. Ironically, her academic specialty was the “prosperity Gospel,” the Christian theology followed by many evangelicals these days. It’s the theology that proclaims material reward for the faithful--the kind of reward bestowed on Job in our reading. Multiple painful surgeries and treatments later, Bowler is now chronicling her cancer journey with amazing books and podcasts. There is no one more qualified than she to debunk our cultural myth of “happily-ever-after.” Her latest book is called No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear). Now in remission, Bowler is dealing with the constant uncertainty of her future. She writes, “Time really is a circle; I can see that now. We are trapped between a past we can’t return to and a future that is uncertain. And it takes guts to live here, in the hard space between anticipation and realization.”[3]
When you think about it, even the ending of Job points to the vulnerability of being truly human. Can you imagine the fear that would have haunted Job in his new-found prosperity? After knowing what it is to lose everything, he must have wondered, “Will these children be taken from me, as well? When will I lose my lands once again? When will this all disappear?” It would be easy for Job to retreat into mourning for what was. Or to forgo hope all together, detaching himself from the new, different life all around him, refusing to love, refusing to care. Yet, in spite of the uncertainty that must surely haunt him in every moment, we see Job pouring out love on his second family, breaking custom to give his sons and daughters an inheritance, feasting and living life with gusto.[4]
My hope and my prayer for our future as a parish is that we choose to be a community of courage. That we ask Jesus for the courage to see what is right, for the courage of self-giving love that leads to eternal life, for the courage to make the sacrifices that lead to health and wholeness for all, for the courage to invest fully in healing joy along the Way.
[1] Gordon Lathrop, Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2003), 33.
[2] Ibid., 35.
[3] Kate Bowler, No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear) (New York: Random House, 2021), 193.
[4] Debie Thomas, “Happily Ever After,” in Journey with Jesus. net, October 17, 2021. Found at https://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay?id=3191.
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