October 28, 2012
Every three years
Bartimaeus' story is proclaimed in church.
Preachers all
over the Christian world tell how he, the blind beggar of Jericho, was cured by
Jesus as he made his way to Jerusalem.
They will say all
sorts of nice things about him• about how he had real faith and recognized the
Savior on the road. About how he, even though he was blind, he had more vision
than the disciples.
He is called a
model of Christian discipleship
But think about
how difficult his life must have been.
He suffered many
indignities in his lifetime; people probably laughed at him when he would fall
over something, looked the other way when they passed him by,
even said the reason he was blind was because
of some sin his parents had committed.
People can be so
cruel when they have a mind to be.
But of all the
indignities he had to bear in life, the one that really got to him was that
nobody ever knew his name.
They called him
Bartimaeus, which means "son of Timaeus."
It was like when
some kids are called Junior or Sis instead of their real name.
Or when you get a
nickname when you are little, or at school, and that becomes your name.
After all, who
wants to wake up at sixty and still find themselves being called Sonny?
To make matters
worse, when Matthew and Luke borrowed his story from Mark, they dropped even
the name Bartimaeus from their telling of the story.
In Matthew, he
became "two blind men," and in Luke he was simply called "a
blind man."
So, you see, he
knew what it meant to be not only blind but nameless, a nobody.
He must have
become very sensitive to how he referred to people.
So, when he heard
a great commotion one day about Jesus of Nazareth passing by, he, who had no
name of his own, called Jesus by an ancient and royal name: "Jesus, son of
David."
That bothered
many in the crowd.
Even good people,
even pilgrims, don't like to hear the truth; they don't like to hear truth
named in detail.
That's why they
tried to shut him up.
Jesus stopped not
just because he called out to him but because he dared to call him "son of
David."
He dared to
remind him that even though he was heading to Jerusalem where he would suffer
and die on the cross, he was not alone, he was somebody, he was the Messiah, he
was not just the carpenter's son, he was God's Son.
Bartimaeus must
have known it's not always easy for anyone to speak the truth.
Some things never
change; people still try to stifle those who dare to speak the truth.
Many times people
tell us not to tell the truth under the guise of "keeping it a
secret."
There can be
times when there is a real value in secrets.
But there are
times when the truth is also twisted under the cloak of secrecy.
It takes a lot of
courage for all of us to talk about topics that have been cloaked over for
years: racism, sexual harassment, child abuse, economic injustice.
When we do, we face
the same humiliation Bartimaeus faced in the crowd that day.
Like back then,
people will mumble things like: "Shut up!"
"How dare
you speak out?"
"You are a
nameless little nobody in the crowd."
"What right
do you have to tell me what I should and should not do?"
We don't have to
spend our lives constantly telling people off.
That's not
telling the truth.
That's living out
of anger.
But, when those
special moments happen in our lives, like the one for him that day at the gate
of Jericho,
those special moments
when we know we have to make a choice,
when we have to
speak the truth,
when we can't
worry about what people will say,
but only worry
about what we know God wants us to do.
It's those
moments when we, like Bartimaeus, need to have the courage to name the evil, or
the injustice, or the truth, and speak out in the name of God.
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