Today's readings: Jeremiah 31, 7-9; Hebrews 5, 1-6; Mark 10, 46-52.
The healing of blind Bartimaeus is a miracle story full of symbolic significance that says a lot about Jesus but mostly about our condition. The condition of the blind beggar "sitting by the side of the road" represents the many people who are sidelined to live in a society whose mechanism corrodes even their willingness to change.
The beggar's shouting, the almost violent way he throws off his cloak and jumps to his feet, reveal his desire to change, to let go of his dark past and to overcome hurdles. He is impeded from approaching Jesus and is told to shut up.
Yet he had the courage to persist. He knew he was blind. We too can be healed of our blindness only if we desire to see again. But the world that we struggle to reconstruct is the same world that kills all hope.
Jesus asks Bartimaeus the question: "What do you want me to do for you?"; the same question Jesus poses to James and John. The latter asked for power, Bartimaeus just wanted to see. The attitude with which we approach Jesus makes all the difference.
Given the symbolic meaning of this healing, this text stimulates deeper reflection and understanding of the human condition. We live in a society whose mechanism can easily silence our inner voice. Many are robbed of the courage to change, to go beyond the ephemeral.
We are even made to believe that any talk about faith should necessarily start from a neutral standpoint.
Blindness today stands for our incapacity to immediately perceive God. He is no longer visible in our culture as He used to be. Not that God has taken leave. We are incapable of seeing. The worst is when we theorise about this blindness as if it's proof of the maturity of modern man.
But there is nothing diminutive about human nature in regarding the God question as inherent to the human question. Scepticism may be a necessary stage in our search for the transcendent. But it should never end up being our prison cell. There are standpoints we take in life that block, rather than broaden, our viewpoint.
In the first reading, Jeremiah speaks about reconstruction to those returning from exile. "They had left in tears, I will comfort them as I lead them back." At times, we seriously doubt the possibility of a return to our true selves, which, is not a nostalgic return.
The Gospel today follows a clearly catechumenal logic of how salvation occurs in our lives. There is nothing magic or instantaneous. It's always a long and gradual process.
As Benedictine nun Joan Chittister writes, there was a time when asking a question about the purpose of life was simpler than it is now because the answer never changed. We learned that God had a particular function or role for each of us. It was a game of cosmic dice. Some people won; some didn't. And God was in charge of it all. Unfortunately, we get too tangled up in the implications of what we say about God. One of Einstein's most insightful statements was that "God is subtle but not malicious".
In today's Gospel narrative, we see how utterly indifferent we can be to the cry of people in distress. There is a way of doing things and even of being with Jesus which seems to empower us to shut the other out. We prefer beggars to remain beggars, just as when we believed that the social order was created by God and was to remain unaltered.