Sermons
Sight Restored
“Sight Restored”
Text: Mark 10: 46-52 Esv
46 And they came to Jericho. And as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a great crowd, Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the roadside. 47 And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" 48 And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent. But he cried out all the more, "Son of David, have mercy on me!" 49 And Jesus stopped and said, "Call him." And they called the blind man, saying to him, "Take heart. Get up; he is calling you."
50 And throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51 And Jesus said to him, "What do you want me to do for you?" And the blind man said to him, "Rabbi, let me recover my sight." 52 And Jesus said to him, "Go your way; your faith has made you well." And immediately he recovered his sight and followed him on the way.†
I. Reading the Text
Back to Jericho?
Last week, you’ll remember, Jesus and his followers were on the road from Jericho up to Jerusalem. Now they seem to be back in Jericho, and very briefly. Those first words say it clearly:
And they came to Jericho. And as he was leaving Jericho
That took no time at all, like those little towns you drive through on long trips, if you blink, you’ll miss it.
Jericho was, in fact, a small village—one with ancient roots. The old town was the size of about two or three city blocks.
Why are they back? Most Bible scholars suggest careless editing of the early texts, but this is not the only possibility. I for one believe in the order of the narrative.
Rendezvous with Responsibility
One of my friends back in seminary had the greatest preacher’s name ever: Stuart Calvin Lord. A great name, a great guy. Stuart had been highly accomplished in his college days—student body president and all that—and as a seminary student, he was every bit as impressive. He was scheduled to preach at one of the large, prestigious Brooklyn Tabernacle churches, even as a student.
On the Sunday morning of his sermon, he woke up one of my friends in a panic because he had missed the dingy, a train that runs the short route from Princeton to the Princeton Junction station. He pleaded with my friend to drive him to Princeton Junction so he wouldn’t miss his train into New York and Brooklyn. My friend kindly obliged and quickly got his car. As they nervously raced to the train station, Stuart burst out, “Oh, no! We gotta go back!” “Why?” asked my friend, “Because I forgot my sermon!”
They turned around and raced back to the seminary. Stuart ran into his dorm and came out with a messy sheaf of papers in his hand. They sped back to the station, only to find they had missed Stuart’s connection by mere moments.
“You gotta take me to New Brunswick—we can beat the train there.” It was a 16-mile drive, but without Sunday morning traffic, their chances were good. As they sped up New Jersey Highway 1, Stuart nervously looked through his sermon notes. He said he had been counting on the time on the train to finish the sermon. As he put pages in order and anxiously scribbled notes, my friend asked him, “What’s the sermon title?” With tremendous pride and dignity, Stuart announced: “Rendezvous with Responsibility!”
Sometimes, you just gotta go back.
Bartimaeus: Son of Timaeus
The name Bartimaeus is used only here, and we are immediately told that Bartimaeus is the son of Timaeus, but that is the literal reading of Bar Timaeus. It’s like saying Bill Peterson, the son of Peter. It sounds obvious and redundant, but Mark has poetry up his sleeve.
In the Bible, the “son of” epithet can be either literal or figurative. Son of Man refers to Jesus, but it also referred to Ezekiel. It not only means, as with Jesus, the literal son of God, but it also means human being. The son of prefix functions as a kind of superlative. We could call Tom Brady the Son of Quarterbacking, Michael Jordan the Son of Basketball, and Judd Bonner the Son of choral music.
So who was Timaeus? We have no idea. This is the only time his name is used in Scripture, and there is no information about him among the early Church Fathers. The name Timaeus is intriguing in its own right. It can mean one of two things: either to rightly estimate as highly valuable, or toxic and unclean. This means that Bartimaeus is either “the Son of him who is highly prized” or “the Son of the Unclean One.” There’s no confusing them; they’re night and day opposites in meaning.
This is just like Mark, for in Bartimaeus, a blind beggar outside Jericho, the world sees the Son of Uncleanliness, one to be avoided, silenced and kept away; but Jesus sees the Son of one who is rightly estimated as highly valuable.
It is just like Mark to put us all in the place of Bartimaeus, for we are all spiritually blind, all Children of Uncleanness by sin, and all rightly prized as highly valuable in the eyes of Jesus who loves us.
Son of David
Bartimaeus does not call out to Jesus as teacher, healer, or sir—he calls him “Son of David.” This is the first time we’ve heard this in Mark, and it is qualitatively different from other titles. It identifies Jesus as the promised Messiah. From 2 Samuel 7 we read:
When your days are over and you rest with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever (2 Samuel 7:12-13).
Not only is he calling him Son of David, but it seems he is doing so in a loud and obnoxious way. He must have had quite a set of pipes, and must have been wailing away something fierce. It’s so bad they tell him to pipe down. I imagine his voice must have had a way of grating on nerves—a fingernails on a blackboard quality—that caused the crowd to tell him to shut it already.
The text says he cried out all the more. It was like trying to put out fire with gasoline. The truth of God would not be silenced, despite the source.
Called by Christ
Jesus stops: “Call him.” They go to him and say, “Hey, buck up! He’s calling for you.” The text doesn’t say merely that he came to Jesus, it says he sprung up and threw off his cloak. There is power and energy in this. Again, Mark gives us significant details. He is planting in our minds an image, one of new life. A cloak flung off and a soul springing up to meet Jesus.
The day will come for all of us, when, out of our blindness and death, we too shall hear the Lord’s call, cast off this mortal coil, and spring up to meet him.
This image is an intimation of the resurrection itself, and Mark means for us to see it, to get it, to not be blind to it.
Sight Restored
Jesus asks, “What do you want me to do for you?” I’m sure it was obvious to everyone around, but Bartimaeus could have answered in many ways:
• “My life as a beggar is hard. Could you find it in your heart to bless me with a better voice so that I don’t alienate donors?”
• “Jericho has become a lot more expensive and money is tight. I really could use a larger-than-normal donation today.”
His answer is marvelous and right to the point:
“To see, my Master!”
I think that works without the comma as well because he doesn’t call Jesus Rabbi, which means teacher, but Rabbouni, which means something much greater than merely teacher; it means Master.
Mark is in perfect, ironic form. Those that are sighted do not see Jesus for who he truly is. It is the blind man who sees him as Messiah and Master. In the upside-down kingdom of Jesus, the sighted are blind and the blind see.
“You are saved by faith,” says Jesus—and by extension—to all of us.
“On your way,” Jesus tells him, but his way is to immediately and ever after follow his Master, his Lord, the Son of David, the Son of God.
So the blind see, which fulfills prophecy about the Messiah:
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; —Isaiah 35:5
In that day the deaf shall hear the words of a book, and out of their gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind shall see. —Isaiah 29:18
But what is blindness today?
II. What is Blindness?
Thinking spiritually, it has nothing at all to do with eyesight. This is a story for those who have eyes but do not see, and ears but do not hear.
Blindness, in Jesus’ day, was the principal and premier problem with the people of God. We’ve seen it throughout Mark: Jesus, the very one the people prayed for and awaited, is neither seen nor recognized except by the oddly gifted—like Bartimaeus the blind—or by the damned, the demons within the possessed.
The Righteous Ones—the Scribes and Pharisees—all blind;
The Gentiles—Greeks and Romans who rule their world—blind; and even those closest to Jesus—the following crowds, the many disciples, the Twelve, James & John, Peter—all as blind as potatoes; a battalion of Mr. Magoos, all fumbling forward in collective self-confidence, all personally convinced they are on the right path because all the other Magoos are aligned in the same direction, and surely, surely, everyone can’t be wrong.
And of course, the selfsame blindness is the single greatest spiritual scourge in our world today. From the dawn of the Modern Age, cultural elites have waged and intensive campaign to deliver the world and its future from religious belief—particularly, the kind of religious belief that says Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. Oh, it’s fine and dandy to support a massively-inoffensive generic Deism—a passing belief in “a” God who stands behind and distant from all the things we really want to do—or, it is perfectly acceptable to be a follower of Jesus so long as you keep it to yourself and don’t go around talking about it, oppressing others with “your version” of the truth; but to sincerely believe in Jesus and to say that Jesus is the only way; and to intend to convert people from other religions—well, that is just another form of bigotry and narrow-minded exclusivism.
They believe that we are the blind, and they would presume to lead us.
Yes, dear Christians, tone it down a bit, won’t you? It’s okay for you to have your belief systems, but nobody likes Christians who actively proselytize others—who insult the beliefs of others by insisting that they are right and everyone else wrong.
Our world is dominated by blindness and by the blind who lead the blind.
Western society—and America—suffers a blindness that is quickly developing complications. In addition to its basic spiritual blindness, the Modern Age has developed patricidal tendencies. Western Christianity has “progressed” toward a spite and hatred of God the Father as he is revealed in Scripture.
The Feminist Movement, meant to exalt womanhood, has rather succeeded in debasing manhood and vilifying masculinity. With it has come patricide—a hatred for God who is called “Father” by Jesus and his followers from every era. Blindness is epidemic and spreading.
To believe in Jesus, to be part of his holy Church and to proclaim that salvation comes through his name alone has become—and is increasingly becoming—socially unacceptable.
The Scribes and Pharisees are back in charge. We, the people of God, are coming into a relationship with culture that we haven’t seen since the first centuries of the Church. Like the Jews in Jesus’ day, we live in our own homeland but are ruled by secular overlords. Magoo University, Magoo Publishing, Magoo media, Magoo business, Magoo curricula for schoolchildren, and Magoo courts.
[And here is an irony: they say that justice should be blind, but if there is one institution that ought not to be blind, it is justice. Blind as to bias and privilege, yes, but in a world of Magoos, you can guarantee that someone’s finger is always on the scales.]
America is moving toward total blindness as long as it refuses to see that Jesus is Lord. He is not Rabbi—just another teacher among teachers—but he is Rabbouni, which means Master. He is Son of David, Christ/Messiah. The only Savior—not one among others. He is the revelation of the one, incontestable Lord God of the cosmos, and he lovingly offers sight to all born blind who ask to see; especially to see him.
And we, his Church who have heard his call—we who have sprung up and cast off the cloak of this world, come to him in all eagerness, in spite of the crowds that would shout us down, in spite of the well-aligned movement of the herd from blindness to blindness—we come to him because we hate our blindness. We want to see and we want to see him every single day. We defy the many voices of the crowd because we want to hear his voice before any others. And as he enables us to see, and gives us our freedom saying, “On your way, then.”—we have no greater way to go than to follow right behind him no matter where he is leading. Jerusalem? Fine. A cross? Okay, because every alternative amounts to following the blind. People with eyes to see don’t do that.
All who are Christians need to be leaders. We need to learn to lead.
III. How Do the Sighted Lead the Blind?
In the backwards, upside-down kingdom of Christ, it is the sighted who are blind and the blind who see, so we need to take our cues from Bartimaeus. In fact, Bartimaeus sets a pattern—a model—for our prayer life that we would do well to follow. Three steps:
1. Acknowledge Who Jesus is.
We start by knowing Jesus and acknowledging him to be who he is: nothing less than Lord, God, Savior, and Master. This is perhaps the chief therapy of worship: returning us to full remembrance of the true nature and character of Christ. Worship, done well, prevents us from swallowing the lies of culture which diminish, devalue, or deconstruct God.
2. Cry out to him persistently.
Like Bartimaeus, crying out by the side of the road, we too must be persistent in crying out to him. A constant and focused prayer life is our surest immunization against the illusion that it is all up to us. In prayer, we let go of the steering wheel of our lives and repetitively surrender our will to his.
3. Ask for your heart’s desire.
Like Bartimaeus, we know what want and how to ask for it. If we are diligent in practicing our worship and prayer, then our hearts will be well-steeped in God’s kingdom and purposes.
Walking the blind to Jesus
Our role in a world of Magoos is like that of the disciples in our text. They did not heal Bartimaeus, but when he cried out Jesus’ name, Jesus called him through his disciples. We continue that same role today. We are to find the blind who hunger for their Lord and his help. We must meet them where they are, be ready to speak words of encouragement to them and walk them to meet Jesus.
Jesus is eager to meet the blind, eager to heal them, and eager for them to be saved by faith. †
A Big Favor
“A Big Favor”
Amazed and Afraid
In the text that immediately precedes today’s text, we see Jesus, the Twelve, and the crowd of disciples following him on the road up to Jerusalem. The Bible regularly uses this phrase, “up to Jerusalem,” and it is most appropriate wording, for Jerusalem’s elevation is more than 2,500 feet above sea level. Jericho, down near the Jordan River, 850 feet below sea level; so their morning walk, they travel about 15 miles up—about 3400 feet—to Jerusalem.
For many of us this would be a kind of marathon, but this was normal traveling in Jesus’ day.
The text says the disciples were “amazed and afraid.” (Remember your wedding day?) Here they are, finally, approaching Jerusalem. Anything might happen. Jesus tells them for the third time that he will be arrested, handed over, mocked, beaten, and killed before he rises on the third day. Today’s text picks up here:
Text: Mark 10: 35-45 Esv
35 And James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came up to him and said to him, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you." 36 And he said to them, "What do you want me to do for you?" 37 And they said to him, "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory." 38 Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?" 39 And they said to him, "We are able." And Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you will drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized, 40 but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared." 41 And when the ten heard it, they began to be indignant at James and John. 42 And Jesus called them to him and said to them, "You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. 43 But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. 45 For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.""†
1. reading the text
My sisters would regularly come up to me and say, “Would you do me a really big favor?” I always hated that because it put me between a rock and hard place. If I said yes, I was obliged to do their will, which might have meant anything; but if I said no, I was being selfish. The only way out was immediately ask, “What? What’s the favor? You tell me the favor you want done first and then I’ll tell you whether I’ll do it or not.” Are we all familiar with this dynamic?
As Jesus and his disciples are on their way up to Jerusalem, two of his closer followers—James and John, the brothers—kind of sidle up to him, perhaps out of the others’ hearing. They say: “Rabbi, would you do us a really big favor?” Jesus says, “What is it?” They say (and the size of this can’t be overestimated, hence the all caps):
“Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.”
Just a teensie-weensie favor: we want to sit in the seats of honor when you take the throne in your kingdom.
James and John were in fact close to Jesus—a kind of small group—there are times he takes Peter, James and John into special confidence, as during the Transfiguration, but the unmitigated gall of this request seems out of all proportion.
“You don’t know what you’re asking,” says Jesus, which is a gentle understatement. “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?"
“Oh yes, most certainly!” they say, but they are clueless. We have no reason to think that they were not listening when Jesus reminds them for a third time that he will be arrested, beaten, betrayed and murdered. It may be that it was something they didn’t want to hear.
DIFFERENT VISIONS
Jesus and his followers were operating with different visions of how the kingdom would come. James and John were like most of us. They were like most of the people of God of their day in that they expected something very different than what was going to happen, despite Jesus clearly telling them.
In the Old Testament, a cup typically represents joy and the salvation of God for his people. James and John see the cup of joy and the cup of salvation, and so they think they too can drink of it, but for Jesus, the cup means something different: it is a cup of suffering.
As for baptism, in the Old Testament, baptism represents purification and holiness. Ancient Jerusalem had dozens of mikvahs or baths. Visitors coming to temple in Jerusalem were expected to bathe and change their clothes before even entering the city gates. James and John thought the baptism represented this kind of purification and holiness, so they thought yes, they could do that; but for Jesus, the baptism was his death, by which humankind would be purified and made holy.
EMPOWERMENT, GLORY, GAIN, & HONOR
James and John saw their movement up to Jerusalem as one of empowerment, glory, gain and honor. This is why they colluded to ask for Jesus’ own cup and baptism.
Knowing what is coming, you and I have to hear the request of James and John on behalf of fallen humanity as the ultimate favor: Lord God, would you do us a big favor? Since we can’t do the whole righteousness thing, would you do that for us? Oh, yes, and would you suffer and die for us as well? Thanks!
The odd thing about this is that Jesus says yes.
James and John will get what they ask for, short of the seats of honor, which Jesus, in short, says are already reserved by the Father.
When the other disciples hear what James and John did, they were indignant, which I think here means very ticked off. I have to imagine that Peter especially would have been riled, for it seems James and John, in going to Jesus for those seats of honor, directly threw him under the bus.
INVERTED PYRAMID
Whatever fracas ensued, Jesus reminds them that the way of his people will not be the way of the world:
“Whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.”
Jesus announces that his kingdom will be an upside-down version of the kingdoms of this world. The first will be last and the last will be first. The lowly raised up and the high and mighty brought low.
What is more, Jesus sets the example by going up to Jerusalem not to win, in the world’s eyes, but to lose.
Ransom: the Big Favor
For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom
Perhaps the ultimate irony of the gospel is not that the Disciples are constantly clueless, or the religious Jews looking for the Messiah fail to see him, but that Jesus’ answer to the preposterous question Will you do us a huge favor? is yes. When asked—Oh Lord, would you please be rejected, spit on, beaten to a pulp, betrayed by us and killed in the most excruciating way for us?—his answer is yes.
Because of this big favor, our righteousness is accomplished for us in the life of Christ. The cup we drink is a cup of joy and salvation, and our baptism is indeed one of purification and holiness.
What more could we possibly ask for? What more could we possibly want?
The Challenge
We, like James and John—and perhaps all disciples and human beings—are driven to find our own empowerment, glory, gain, and honor. But we’ve been given all these things through Jesus, so why do we need to seek them further?
On Super Bowl Sunday I tell you we have already won, therefore we do not have to strive to win.
We are called to live as servants of the gospel and slaves of Jesus Christ—that is for all who desire their own greatness. The kind of righteousness we live out today can be best seen by giving these things away.
We can afford to let others win.
Empowerment Like Jesus, since we have been granted his kingdom, we have no need to grasp power; we can share or give it away meaningfully.
Glory: As Jesus passed all glory on to the Father, we can pass all glory on to him. Therefore, we can let others have earthly glory, let others have the limelight and the adulations of this world.
Gain: Sometimes the best way to win is to let someone else cross the finish line first.
Honor: We have the love of God, therefore we do not need the praise of men. As God said to Paul: “My grace is sufficient for you.” We can let others be honored and even actively honor others. I’ll remind you, two weeks ago our text called us to “outdo one another in showing honor.”
The challenge of living in Christian love is to share these things out, as Jesus did for us. We can be givers of empowerment, givers of glory, givers of gain, and givers of honor.
We can let someone else win. We no longer need to “be good” in order to be saved, but because we are being saved, we can be good. Give goodness. Give love. Love all, serve all.
†