Dear Parish Family,
The Gospel of Mark is a very readable narrative as it unfolds as a story with quick happenings. At every turn of the story of Jesus something happens. Sometimes reading this Gospel we can miss some underlying intricate patterns of faith journey. We as human beings rely on our senses for our knowledge of the world around us. While we learn with all our senses, the sense of sight, “seeing” becomes our primary faculty of learning. We also develop skills in different ways of ‘seeing’. A doctor sees symptoms of a sickness, a plumber sees the different pipes and fixtures to ensure supply of water. The seeing ability is different in a photographer, parent, scientist or anyone specialized in a particular skill. We also apply the concept of ‘seeing’ to the understanding of events and situations. “Now I see your point of view” we sometimes say at the end of a discussion.
Mark mixes this outward seeing with the eyes and inner seeing of faith in his narrative. Seeing isn’t limited to seeing the blue of the sky or the pebbles on the road home. It is also a matter of seeing the truth about things, or even of seeing The Truth himself. Believing is the deepest kind of “seeing.” The early Church called baptism enlightenment. This shows up in the way the evangelists treat Jesus’ healings from physical blindness. We meet a powerful example of this symbolic use of blindness and vision in this Sunday's Gospel, the healing of the blind man Bartimaeus at Jericho. For two chapters prior to this account, Mark has been presenting Jesus on the road to Jerusalem with his disciples. On the way, on three separate occasions, Jesus speaks of his approaching passion, death, and resurrection. Each time one or more of the disciples show some gross failure to comprehend what he has just said. And each time, Jesus takes them aside to teach that following him entails losing one's life to find it, carrying a cross, becoming the servant of all. In other words, Mark presents us with a picture of the disciples as spiritually blind. They do not really see who Jesus is and what he is about.
When we look at how Mark has arranged the elements of his story of Jesus it becomes evident that this is his deliberate theme. He has taken the two cures from blindness and placed them like bookends on either side of the segment about the spiritual blindness of the disciples. The keynote is sounded in the conversation in the boat, when Jesus asks, “Do you have eyes and not see, ears and not hear?” (Mk 8:18). Then follows the curious account of the blind man who is cured in two stages (seeing first partially, then fully). This parallels the situation of Peter, who in the next episode becomes the first disciple to see that Jesus is the Christ. Then, when Peter fails to see how suffering fits the Messiah, he demonstrates that his vision is, at this stage, only partial. The failure of the disciples properly to see what kind of Christ Jesus is (a suffering Son of Man) comes to a head in the blindness of the Zebedee brothers’ request for top positions in the glory of the kingdom, we reflected on last week.
Enter Bartimaeus. This beggar sitting beside the road shows immediately that he “sees” at least as much as Peter when he addresses Jesus with a Messianic title: “Son of David, have pity on me.” Jesus instructs the crowd to call him. When he springs up, throws off his cloak and comes to Jesus, Jesus asks him the same question he recently asked the Zebedee brothers: “What do you want me to do for you?” But this blind man knows enough to say what the Zebedees should have said, “Master, I want to see.” Mark's point: If you fail to see Jesus as the suffering Son of Man and what that implies about following him, pray that your blindness may be healed today.
Fr. Tom Kunnel. C.O.