30th Sunday Year B - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2021

It’s a great little Gospel incident we have today. There is Jesus and the disciples; there is the blind man, Bartimaeus; and there is the large crowd. We all know the story but let us look at it today freshly.

Bartimaeus, sitting forlornly by the side of the road, started shouting — and he got louder and louder. The crowd abused him, and told him to be quiet. Crowds can do that, can’t they. Often enough in the Gospels, we have heard of the apostles doing the same thing.

It makes me think of the situation constantly facing us here in Australia, as asylum seekers arrive unannounced on our shores — terrified, traumatised people, most of them, courageously fleeing for their lives, often from countries where we have made it impossible for them to live safely. We abuse them, label them as “queue-jumpers”, “illegals”. They are a nuisance. They will make demands on us. They risk interrupting our accustomed ways of life. We ignore them after a while. No way do we want to engage with them. It is not just the politicians — because we are the ones who keep on voting them into power.

Back to the story. “Jesus stopped”. He engaged with the blind man. The man wasn’t a nuisance to Jesus. He was a person in need. Jesus did not just do the generous thing; he did not see him simply as one more person in need. He related to him. He spoke to him as an individual: “What do you want me to do for you?” And the blind man replied, not as a nameless statistic, but as the unique individual he was, "Master, let me see again". Jesus went on to congratulate him for how he had cooperated: “Your faith has saved you”.

Jesus wanted Bartimaeus to become aware of the change happening in himself. From a nobody, when summoned by Jesus, he had thrown off his cloak; he had jumped up; he had stood tall; able to own his powerlessness; and felt confident enough in himself to trust Jesus.

It didn’t stop there. As his sight returned, “he followed Jesus along the road" — the road, in fact, to Jerusalem and to destiny.

Whom do you identify with most — with the crowd? with Bartimaeus? with Jesus? Or is there even a bit of all three, perhaps, there, somewhere in you?