Last Sunday after Trinity, 27 October 2024, Austwick, Clapham
We often hear the expression, seeing is believing. It comes from a material, physical view of life, which holds that the only things which are real to us are those things which we can see, or quantify, or prove. And which tends to exclude those vast areas of human experience which may be invisible, but are just as real to us – what goes on in our mind, in our emotions, in our spirit.
The story of Jesus’ encounter with Bartimaeus turns that expression on its head and shows us another way. For Bartimaeus teaches us that believing is seeing.
Believing is seeing. Viewing life through the eyes of faith reveals a very different perspective.
Believing is seeing. The believer is one whose eyes are opened to the world in a whole new way.
You don’t even need your sight to know this. The blind beggar teaches us that believing is seeing.
Bartimaeus may not have had the sight that others had, but his faith in Jesus was by no means blind faith. Jericho was a tourist spot, the last pilgrimage stop before Jerusalem. A beggar at the gate of a city on the pilgrimage trail, Bartimaeus would have heard the pilgrims discussing Jesus’ words and actions, debating whether Jesus’ authority to teach and heal came from God. Street people like Bartimaeus always have their ears to the ground, their insights are forged through a combination of hard lived experience and conversations with all sorts of people.
We can imagine Bartimaeus’ faith being sparked by the excitement of hearing about Jesus’ teaching of the kingdom of God, the new way of life which Jesus was bringing into the world, which had at its very centre, good news for the poor. [1] How Bartimaeus’ faith must have grown in his heart as he realised that meant the good news the kingdom of God was for him.
Jesus’ teaching meant Bartimaeus could see himself differently. Others, quick to condemn the beggars, would dub them unclean, untouchable, defiled. That’s how the passers-by saw those who begged at the gate. But Bartimaeus will have heard Jesus teaching that what defiled a person was not their outward appearance, but what came out of their hearts. [2] This helped Bartimaeus to see that he was every bit as valued and loved by God as the next person.
Banished to the gate of the city – abandoned outside, among the lowest of the low – Bartimaeus came to understand Jesus’ teaching that in the kingdom of God, the ones considered first in their society would be last, and the ones considered last would be first [3]. This revealed to Bartimaeus the amazing truth that he was highly regarded in this kingdom of God coming into the world.
Society would try to keep him in his place, but Jesus would transform him. He had just a cloak to warm his back at night and to spread out on the ground to collect the pennies the pilgrims might toss him in the day. But when Jesus called him, Bartimaeus threw off his cloak, sprang up and went to him. Any pennies he had collected rolled away into the dust. Even before he was given his sight Bartimaeus threw away all he had because his eyes were opened to a different world, his view of himself, of God, of life, now removed from all restrictions and bathed in the light of Christ. And Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your faith has made you well’.
Imagine if Bartimaeus had remained burdened by the view that ‘seeing is believing’ – that the way things appear are the way they should remain. Accept your status as a poor outcast, believing that God has put you there. Know your place. Don’t fight it. Don’t dare dream of a different way. But no, Bartimaeus believed Jesus saying, ‘The last will be first’. It gave him a vision of a different future for himself. And he followed on that way.
Mark’s gospel is full of men who Jesus calls blind; that is, people who have sight, but whose inner vision is constricted by a poverty of belief, by belief in something other than Jesus’ kingdom values.
Remember, for example, the disciples James and John, who wanted to sit at either side of Jesus in his glory, believing that their happiness was determined by their social status. Jesus opened their eyes to his way of relating, where ‘whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all’. [4]
Believing is seeing. What we believe influences how we see the world. How does this work for us?
Do we believe – as Jericho’s comfortably-off believed – that people in our society like Bartimaeus have only themselves to blame for their poverty? That we can thus treat them as untouchables, and abandon them to sort out their problems alone, without our care or intervention?
Or do we believe – with Bartimaeus – the good news that ‘Blessed are the poor… for theirs is the kingdom of God’? [5] And with Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian philosopher, theologian, and Dominican priest, widely regarded as ‘the father of liberation theology’, who died this week aged 96, and whose lifetime’s work was concerned with the central pastoral question, ‘How do we convey to the poor that God loves them?’ [6]
Gutiérrez perceived that so many in Latin America had been written off by the rest of the world. The poorest, abandoned outside the gate. He wrote that ‘the question in Latin America will not be how to speak of God in a world come of age, but rather how to proclaim God as Father in a world that is inhumane. What can it mean to tell a non-person that he or she is God’s child?’ [7]
The liberation theologians teach us that it is the blind beggars of the world who will open our eyes, with their insights into life, as they experience it, and into scripture, as they understand it.
Believing Jesus’ kingdom values means seeing others differently. As James and John came to see others not as pawns in their power games, as means to their self-promotion, but as people to be served, for the betterment of all.
Jesus taught that the kingdom of God means what God is doing in the here-and-now, to privilege the poorest in society, to challenge other people’s judgmental attitudes towards them, to open up ways to transform human relationships economically, politically, physically. This is what is meant in Catholic social teaching by ‘The Preferential Option for the Poor’, which, Gustavo Gutiérrez wrote, ‘involves a commitment that implies leaving the road one is on’ in order to enter the world of an ‘insignificant’ person; selflessness is the goal of this lifestyle. [8]
Interesting that this roots the kingdom of God in our material, physical life. It connects our inner life to the way we act out in empathy and compassion towards others, particularly those at the roadside, outside the gates. The more we do this, the clearer it becomes for all to see that ‘the kingdom of God is among us’.
Notes
A rewrite of Bartimaeus: Believing is seeing, preached in Somerset in 2015 and Devon in 2012. Influenced by the life and teachings of Gustavo Gutiérrez, who died this week (22 October 2024) and by Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, p.281ff.
[1] Luke 4.14-21.
[2] Mark 7.15.
[3] Mark 10.31.
[4] Mark 10.35-45.
[5] Luke 6.20.
[5] Matthew 5.3, Luke 6.20.
[6] Gustavo Gutiérrez, Hablar de Dios desde el sufrimiento del inocente. Una reflexión de el libro de Job. Quoted in translation in Wikipedia: Gustavo Gutiérrez.
[7] Gustavo Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History, p.57.
[8] Gustavo Gutiérrez, The Option for the Poor Arises From Faith in Christ. Theological Studies (70): 318. Quoted in Wikipedia: Option for the poor.
