Homily for 25 Oct 2009

Homily for 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 25 October 2009

Today’s Gospel reading about the encounter of Bartimaeus with Jesus can only be properly understood if we put it in its context in Mark’s Gospel – it comes at the very end of Jesus’s ministry of preaching and healing, as he leaves Galilee, which has been the scene of his ministry so far, and heads for Jerusalem, where events will have their momentum and bring him to the climax of his earthly career, his Passion and Resurrection. This is the end of chapter 10, and chapter 11 begins with Jesus preparing to enter the Holy City, sending two disciples to find the ass he will ride on. So this meeting with Bartimaeus is the occasion of the last miracle that Jesus performs before he enters into his final days on earth, when he is caught up in the Passion that he had been predicting all along to the disciples.
The same chapter, chapter 10 has two other important stories, which we have heard the last two Sundays at Mass. First of all there was a man with every advantage in life- youth and wealth-who approached Our Lord and was thinking of joining him, and our Lord was attracted to him and was ready to welcome him into his band of followers – but, do you remember, the young man couldn’t make the kind of radical change that would be necessary in his life, there were just too many things that he was attached to, things that got in the way, things that he was not prepared to give up, and so he didn’t take up Our Lord’s offer and went his own way. And then we saw last week how even the people who have made a real commitment to Our Lord and who are among his closest friends- James and John- still get things wrong, still fail to understand what Our Lord is really about, what his message really is, what following him will really involve. Do you remember, they say, when you start running the show, when your regime really takes off, can we have the top jobs? And Jesus, shaking his head wearily as he realises that no one seems to be getting the point of what he’s been saying at all, says “You do not know what you are asking”.
But this final story today is quite different, a refreshing note to end the ministry on for Our Lord. Bartimaeus is someone who hasn’t got much going for him –he hasn’t had much of a start in life, he has gone blind and scrapes a precarious living begging by the roadside. He may be blind, but he is certainly intelligent and has the eye of faith- because when the crowd tell him that this passer-by that all the fuss is about is Jesus of Nazareth, notice that he does not then shout out “Jesus of Nazareth!” but “Son of David, Jesus!” He does not just repeat what he has been told, by the people around him who think that this Jesus is just another wandering prophet, another healer grabbing the headlines, or another political activist on his way to stage some great demo, no- he realises that this person is none other than the promised Messiah-“Son of David!” he calls out, the first person apart from Peter so far to give Our Lord this title, to recognise the divine nature of Our Lord. People try to shut him up, but he calls all the louder- how pleasing for Our Lord, after all the hesitations of the rich young man with his cautious questions, that here at last is someone showing a bit of eagerness, someone actually keen! And Our Lord stops and responds- “Call him here!” And look at the reaction of Bartimaeus when the call comes, when Jesus extends the possibility of meeting him- “throwing off his cloak, he jumped up and went to Jesus”. Now what is this cloak? Scholars tell us that this wasn’t really something he wore, but something he used to beg, it was usual in those times (what am I saying, I saw it on tube the other day!) for someone begging to lay their coat down in front of the, with the coins on it that people had given them, to encourage others to give. What Bartimaeus is throwing away without a second’s thought is his livelihood, the way he lives, the whole apparatus of his way of life up to that point. How unlike the young man who couldn’t take his mind off his current way of life. For Bartimaeus, he has met the Lord, the Lord is calling him, and he lets go of everything. What faith he must have had! No wonder that Our Lord, in giving him back his sight, exclaims “Your faith has saved you”. And now there is the further reaction of Bartimaeus to consider. He doesn’t go back and pick up the cloak with its coins, he doesn’t go off as other people have done in the Gospel who have been healed to run and show off to loads of people, he no longer seems to have thought of anything other than being with Our Lord- “he followed him along the road”, in other words he gave himself up from that moment on to leading the Christian life, the “way” as already by the time Mark wrote this, our Faith was being called.
The Fathers of the Church in the early centuries loved this Gospel and many of them have left us their homilies on it. Among them I want to end with quoting from St Cyril, the fifth century bishop of Alexandria, one of the great theologians of his day, who draws the contrast between the crowd around Jesus who could see him but didn’t realise who he was, and Bartimaeus who “felt his presence, and laid hold of him with his heart whom his eye could not see”. That is a great phrase isn’t it and one for us- we are not living during the time that Jesus walked the earth and our eyes cannot see him. But we have our Faith and by it we recognise Our Lord, as the disciples did in Emmaus, in the breaking of Bread. In the Blessed Sacrament we can feel his presence. Soon the bread and wine offered on our altar will become for us the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He will be supernaturally among us, he will be passing by Lewisham just as he passed in this story by Jericho. There will be that moment, at communion time, when Our Lord will be passing along our altar rails to meet us. The priest will say “Behold the Lamb of God” but underneath those words we may hear other words, the words of this Gospel :“Courage, get up, he is calling you!” Let us examine our lives afresh and ask ourselves if we have a cloak that we need to throw off, if there is something, some attitude, some attachment, that is holding us back, that is preventing us from accepting the invitation of Our Lord to follow him, that is hindering us from making the wholehearted response we know we should. Does it seem daunting, we may like that old cloak, it is so familiar. We are so used to it, we can hardly imagine doing without it. But what are those words again “Courage, get up, he is calling you!” May we come in answer to Our Lord’s appeal, and, like Bartimaeus, let us, in St Cyril’s words, lay hold on him with our hearts whom our eyes cannot see. Amen.