BILLTESKA

Jesus tells the blind Bartimæus that his faith has made him well, “and immediately he regained his sight.” Faith produces vision. So often we hear faith itself described as blind. But faith is actually the condition of sight. And faith’s opposite, fear, produces blindness. Blindness and all manner of stumbling both spiritual and political.

Timaios means precious, dear, rare, uniquely valuable. Bartimæus is the Son of the uniquely precious. In other words, Bartimæus is the human race – and he is blind. Not only blind, but a beggar. He represents each individual human being who has ever or will ever live, and he represents human society at any given time. And he is a blind beggar. There is one thing Bartimæus has that most individuals lack and most societies too (certainly ours, at the moment), and that is the recognition that they are blind beggars and that they need help. Bartimæus would have continued in his wretched condition, if he had not realized his own need and cried out for help. Mere recognition of his predicament was not enough by itself. He had to do something about it – something desperate and audacious: he had to hope that something could be done and he had to trust his hope enough to act on it.

Today’s Collect prays for an increase in us of just that audacity, an increase of faith, hope, and love. These virtues are always outrageous in the eyes of the world. That is, to those who see with the world’s eyes, who see as the world sees, which is to say those who really are blind. The crowd that rebuked Bartimæus and told him to shut up and stop pestering Jesus represents that world, to whom faith is always blind faith. Those people regard Bartimæus’s willingness to trust and act upon the hope that what he loved could be real as just silly, wishful thinking. That’s how the world sees faith.

Or rather, how the world fails to see faith, for in fact it is the world that is blind, not faith. St. Augustine observed that, like the Persons of the Most Holy Trinity, faith, hope, and love are substantially the same. All are an act of will: the audacious willingness to trust that what we love and hope for is, in fact, real. The world says that’s an illusion – a kind of willful blindness. The Gospel says it’s genuine vision. Faith produces vision, as in Bartimæus’s case.

The details of this story have always interested me. The blind beggar repeatedly calls out, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. One way to interpret this story is an allegory of Christian contemplative prayer. The cry of the blind beggar is almost identical to the ancient form of the Jesus prayer, the mantric repetition practiced for at least 1500 years in the Eastern Church, which may have influenced the Sufis, and whose practitioners claim this story as their biblical warrant. Because Bartimæus repeats his cry, you see. He has to say it over and over again to break through all the chatter and discouragement of the crowd, who in this allegory represent all the extraneous thoughts and distractions that buzz around the consciousness of anyone who tries to pray this way. But perseverance will open the way, the chattering thoughts turn into encouragement. “So, throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus.”

That is a particularly interesting detail. Bartimæus cast off his cloak. This action seems to be somehow integral to Bartimæus receiving his sight. Now this was a poor man, a beggar. And a cloak was no small thing. They were expensive. Not everyone had one, and only the rich had more than one. His cloak would have served him as bedding as well as protection from the elements. And yet, he threw it off, and never went back for it. What little security he had he threw away in order to act on his trust that what he loved and hoped was real. An audacious, reckless, even foolhardy thing to do. And it is a characteristic of the faith that produces vision.

In the mystical interpretation, the cloak may represent anything that weighs us down and hinders our springing to the Beloved. It is our love of security, our attachment to our possessions, our customary way of life, or to anything in this world. The cloak is anything that we love as much as God – or anything that we may fear to do without. The cloak is our fear – the opposite of faith, hope, and love. Vision comes to those who despise their fears and cast them off. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. A pure heart is a fearless one. Such a heart can receive the vision of God.

What is true of fear in the infinite temple of the human heart is also true of our human society, where there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Fear paralyses us as a society and imprisons us in blindness. A certain kind of leadership wants us to stay there. If we express some kind of hope that things might be better, we are told to shut up. You’re naïve, a dreamer, don’t bother the Master. Faithful people do not listen to that bad advice. Nor do they listen to anyone who seeks to manipulate them by scaring them. Faithful people do not wrap themselves in fear as in a beloved cloak. They don’t defile the collective hands of their society with blood, their fingers with iniquity in the name of national security. (If there ever was an idol it’s that: national “security.” And it will devour those who worship it.) Faithful people do not suffer leadership that mutters lies and wickedness – declaring, for example, that the permissibility of torture in the name of national “security” is “a no-brainer.”

This and all the rest of the cowboy, barroom tough-talk is nothing but the “growling of bears”, upon which the holy Prophet Isaiah pours such contempt today. We all growl like bears; he says. And when not growling threats, like doves we moan mournfully. The sentimental, cowboy blindness feels sorry for itself because of all those wicked people out there who just hate our freedom! And so we continue to stumble along at noon, holding onto the wall and tripping over ourselves as misstep follows self-inflicted misstep.

We surely will abandon this cloak of fear eventually, one way or another. Each of us will die and it will not save us. If, like Bartimæus, we have the sense to throw it off before then, by our own will, this act of faith will enable us to see, and we will no longer fear death or anything else (certainly not fanatics, whether they reside in a caves in Waziristan or in executive mansions here at home). If we can manage to bring our society collectively to throw it off – this disgusting cloak of fear and injustice – we may still be able to find a way to be “the world’s only super-power” other than the godless – or rather idolatrous – way of blindness we pursue at present, stumbling along at noon as in the twilight, among the vigorous as though we were dead.

AMEN

MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!

# posted by billteska : 6:20 PM