Hi everyone, here’s my homily for the 30th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME – OCTOBER 28, 2012. The readings for today’s Mass can be found at: https://usccb.org/bible/readings/102812.cfm. As always, thanks for reading, sharing and your comments. God Bless – Fr. Jim
HOMILY:
What do you want me to do for you?
If there’s a Gospel passage that comes up the most when I’m meeting people for Spiritual Direction or confession, it is undoubtedly this Gospel passage, and usually because of the question that Jesus asks Bartimeaus, the blind man begging on the side of the road: What do you want me to do for you?
A few years ago, a parishioner asked if he could come and talk. He had been arrested and was out on bail. Because of the arrest he had been suspended from work and was most likely going to lose his job. A lot of the details and the timeline of who did what to whom resulting in his being in this jam kind of have faded in my mind. It was something that grew out of a massive fight he and his girlfriend had had. They had made a lot of bad decisions throughout their relationship. They had both done stupid things, said hurtful words and things continued to escalate and had gotten to the point that now their relationship was over, he had no place to live, he was in the process of losing his job and, consequently, had a whole host of legal and financial problems.
I remember Tom coming to talk, well more accurately, coming to vent for at least 6 weeks, over an hour each time, with me getting barely a word out over those weeks. I’d simply say, “Hey Tom, good to see you, so what’s going on?” And then 55 minutes later, I’d close in a brief prayer, say goodbye and schedule another time the following week.
After about 2 months of this, one day Tom came in and just looked exhausted, beaten up, drained. And I remember him saying, “I’m so tired of this, I feel like I’m drowning.” That’s when this Gospel story that we just heard proclaimed came to my mind. We read it together and I could see he was a bit confused, saying, “What’s the point?”
The point, for Tom and for you and for me is that every one of us, at some point in our lives, IS Bartimeaus. We all experience being the blind guy, sitting by the side of the proverbial road. We have something in our lives that has caused us distress, pain, worry – something that has inhibited us, leaving us begging for relief. After we’ve tried to “take care of it” ourselves (and probably made it worse); after the world, the crowds have grown deaf to our cries and ignore them, or have grown indifferent to them, there’s a point when people – even those who aren’t particularly religious – turn to God… God – Jesus – somebody – anybody … help me…
That’s where Bartimaeus’ story is so powerful. He’s heard about all of these amazing miracles that Jesus had performed; now he’s hearing that Jesus is passing through his own town – something within him drives him to takes a chance – Bartimaeus shouts out, over the rebukes of the crowds who were trying to keep him at a distance from Jesus and silence him,– he cries “SON OF DAVID HAVE PITY ON ME.” Jesus stops right then and there, ordering the crowd to “call him.”
It’s there that Jesus asks the question.
A question that, some years ago, while praying with this gospel, I started to laugh at… “What do you want me to do for you?” I remembered thinking, “What a question! What do you think he’s going to say, Jesus? HELLO – DO YOU NOTICE THAT I’M BLIND – I CAN”T SEE – WHAT DO YOU THINK I’D LIKE, JESUS?”
But like I found in talking to Tom, or dealing with my own “Bartimaeus moments” – there are times where our answers to that question could be less than obvious… For the nearly two months that I was talking with Tom there were things that he clearly wanted… He wanted revenge. He wanted to get even. He wanted people – people who he had thought were his friends and had abandoned him in his time of need, to suffer like he did. And as I pointed out to him, if that’s what you want, you’re going to be sitting, blind, begging, ranting on the side of the road for a long time…
Bartimaeus, coming face to face with Jesus, doesn’t get bogged down with all the people who have treated him badly, with those who have ignored his cries for help, with those who have barely given him any support at all. He doesn’t want Jesus to feel sorry for him. He recognizes that what Jesus desires is his wholeness… and Bartimaeus trusts, he has faith that Jesus will be able to give him that wholeness. He’s able to confidently, boldly say to Jesus, “Master I want to see.” We hear in this somewhat short encounter, “Jesus told him ‘Go your way; your faith has saved you.’ Immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way.”
Jesus is able to restore him because, in Bartimaeus’ heart, he desired fullness of life and knew that Jesus could bring that about – if he trusted in him, if he believed in him, if he had faith in him. He knew that if he truly did all those things, it was going to require a complete change of life. He wouldn’t be able to go back to his old life, he would have to live in a radically different way because of this encounter – and from the Gospel, we hear that he did…
For Tom, it took a lot longer for his healing to take place. First he needed to recognize that what he really wanted Jesus to do for him wasn’t to settle old scores – but to remove the hatred, the anger, the hurt in his life, for it to be gone; to find joy, to find peace again. The Lord would eventually do that for him by teaching him the true freedom that forgiveness brings by Tom taking responsibility for his bad choices, and experiencing and knowing Jesus’ forgiveness; by his ultimately getting to the point where he could let go of the anger and be able to forgive the people in his life that had hurt him.
And that’s something we all have to do.
For you and me, we have a choice to make. Hearing this Gospel, we can be distant, removed listeners to a story from 2,000 years ago – or we can recognize the invitation and the opportunity that Jesus offers us today. Seeing and hearing the cries coming from within our troubled hearts, asking for Jesus’ loving gaze to turn toward us and “have pity” on whatever it is that’s limiting, inhibiting us from being the faithful disciples we’re called to and long to be, we place our trust in Christ.
If we hear Jesus asking us, “What do you want me to do for you,” we need to be humble enough to admit we might not know the answer to that.
We might think that, if I get into this program, if I get accepted to this school, if I get that role in that play, if I get picked for that position on that team; or promoted in this field; or if I feel something different, if only this physical, or financial or other temporal burden was gone, well, that’s what I really need.
But we could be wrong.
What we really need – really and truly need to be the (amazing) sons and daughters of God He already sees us as – may be something only He can see right now. So we need to ask Him, and trust Him, but doing so knowing that He knows our inner wants better than ourselves. We need to admit our own blindness, at times, to seeing what is really important, really crucial to our following Him and beg, like Bartimeaus, for Jesus to have pity on that blindness.
What we see is limited.
Even what we ‘see’ in this gospel is limited. For us, there’s a blind man asking for sight; his physical sight, his vision is restored; and then, to us, this story ends. But who knows what was in Bartimeaus’. heart;
who knows what kind of ‘sight’ he was begging for;
who knows what interior healing went on inside of him;
what spiritual or mental cloudiness,
what uncertainty,
what indecision or obscurity was wiped away;
who knows what moral clarity Bartimeaus received at Jesus’ command, a second-sight more wondrous and irreplaceable than the gift of optical sight itself.
Let us be like Bartimeaus, asking for what we think we might need, but always being open to God, to His plan, to His ways, to His vision for our lives – which will, at times be much different from our own.
And, whether or not we can see our paths spread out clearly before us, let us always be open to His healing us, to His healing whatever it is He finds inside of us most in need of help, whether we can see it or not. Because that is the Son of David truly having pity on us.
