Of Bart and the shooshers.
A reflection for the 24th of October.
There are three groups of people in this gospel story. There is Jesus, there are the people who tell Bart to keep quiet, the ‘shooshers’ and then there is Bart himself. And the usual course for the preacher is to zero in on Bartimaeus. To offer a smashingly good homily and marvel at how good it is that Bart had great faith. How Bart keeps calling out in the face of such overwhelming odds. Isn't it wonderful that his sight was restored? And isn’t Jesus just marvellous for making it all happen? And wasn’t it great that Bartimaeus became a follower of Jesus? But Bart's progress is not just a physical restoration of his sight and a movement towards Jerusalem. There are many other signs of movement here.
Bartimaeus goes from sitting on the road to following Jesus to Jerusalem.
He moves from having the security of his cloak, to having nothing to wrap around him except the confidence he has in Jesus. He no longer needs the cloak.
He goes from being a beggar, fiscally challenged, to having everything he could possibly need and more.
He moves from being an outsider, to being one of the ‘Jesus crowd’.
Bartimaeus begins by asking for mercy and is able to move to a point where he can ask specifically for sight to be restored. Something has shifted, moved in the ether. Bart is making progress. He has already begun his journey to Jerusalem, thus to the cross and therefore to resurrection. He just doesn’t know it yet. But he will.
More movement. Notice that at the start Bartimaeus calls out to the ‘Son of David’ but by the end of the story he refers to Jesus personally, tenderly. Jesus has become ‘My teacher’
And it all begins with that yearning deep within him for his sight. He knows that there is more than what he can see or rather what he can’t see. He goes from being silent to asking questions.And there is a not so subtle lesson for us here and the lesson is this. That asking questions and learning is the same as seeing. When we are prepared to ask and more importantly prepared to listen, that is when we, like Blind Bart, have the opportunity to have our vision restored and then we too can begin to go up to Jerusalem. It takes a lot of guts to call out in our darkness, to go against the flow of the people around us. To draw close to a teacher who lays down his life for you is an exquisite privilege and a terrifying challenge. Jesus' response is interesting. Of course he knows what Bartimaeus wants, he knows what Bart needs, but he wants Bart to articulate his need out loud. To say it for himself. Not, ‘I know what is going to be best for you Bart’ but rather “What is your agenda here Bart? How can I best support you?” Then Jesus said to him, ‘What do you want me to do for you?
’Perhaps it is only when we know and can articulate our own blindness and blinkered view that we have a hope of seeing more clearly and then we can go forward to Jerusalem. This is not gentle Jesus meek and mild who heals just because he can. The one who waves a magic healing wand to make all things nice with sugar and spice. Here we are confronted with a Jesus who asks quite a lot of us. To examine ourselves and to speak out loud of our failures and inadequacies. Our frogs and snails and puppy dog tails. Our healing comes at a cost. You can’t claim it all on medicare. You’ve go to know you need a Band-Aid, then you have to ask for one and only then can you receive one. This is the teacher who also looks us in the eye and he will ask us from time to time not what do you want, but more pointedly what do you NEED?
And then there are the third group of people. The ones I call the “shooshers”. They, like blind Bartimaeus, make some progress in this story. At the beginning of the story they sternly order Bartimaeus to keep quiet, but very quickly change their tune and say it's ‘OK Bart; off you go, he’s calling you’. They, perhaps more than Bart, make the biggest leap here. Bart knows his need and calls out in faith. The 'shooshers' are fickle and they think they know how the plot should go. I often wonder whether they joined Bartimaeus on the road with Jesus and went up to Jerusalem? I’d like to think that at least some of them did, if only out of curiosity. In the end the shooshers say Three things to Bart
‘Take heart;
Get up,
He is calling you.’
Their progress, is Bart’s progress, is our progress. Perhaps today we should consider the possibility that the shooshers are saying those three things to us as well.
Take heart;
Get up,
He is calling you.
Then we ditch our security blankets, take heart, jump up and get on the way.