Today’s readings: Jeremiah 31, 7-9; Hebrews 5, 1-6; Mark 10, 46-52.

The gospel story of the blind man Bartimaeus meeting Jesus on his way out of Jericho focuses more on the struggle of Bartimaeus to regain his sight than on the action or teaching of Jesus. In the story, Jesus is asking the very same question he asked James and John in the preceding incident: “What do you want me to do for you?” Mark is here drawing a heavy contrast between the different requests, one for status and privilege, the other for vision.

Bartimaeus in this gospel stands for the myriad of people, near and distant, crying for help, demanding mercy. Like the crowd shutting out Bartimaeus, we too many a time prefer not to hear. The way we live today in our cities, and unfortunately even in many of our faith communities, makes our condition very similar to that of Bartimaeus.

There is a sort of collective blindness bound to the mechanisms we ourselves have created and struggle to sustain. Everything we see is filtered for us, and in turn all that we see we ourselves filter again to the extent that the vision of realty is always blurred or even distorted.

Like Bartimaeus we need boldness, Parrhesia, a Greek word often translated as free speech, as opposed to muted or restrained speech. Thomas Merton considered that the only life worth living is when we engage in the struggle to attain a conscious exercise of personal spiritual liberty. Bartimaeus stands for freedom from the pressures of the crowd.

At times we believers seem to be too complacent to adjust to the mechanisms of our culture that so easily proclaims in the footsteps of Nietzsche that ‘God is dead’. We need to recover from this complacency, of course not through the type of restoration that sounds fundamentalist in attitude. Yes, we need to be fearless, but also honest to our own selves, and mainly guided by a sense of inner journey that makes of us adult believers.

The surrounding culture, noisy and hedonist, easily suffocates the voice within, or at least the search for what at the end of the day makes life really worth living. This is what the prophet Jeremiah is doing to his people in the first reading: stimulating them to see what otherwise could not be seen. He was seeing beyond the suffering of his people.

That is the basic function of the prophet, of any prophet, including us all when we let go to reactivate in us the anointing of the Spirit. It takes boldness on the part of the prophet to proclaim in the midst of darkness the restoration of the people as if it was already felt and lived. The memory of suffering in people’s lives can at times be so devastating as to block people from seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, or at least of firmly believing that it is there.

This may have been the case of Bartimaeus for too long, until thanks to the light within he found the strength to acknowledge Jesus as “Son of David”. Likewise Jeremiah, in the face of the suffering of his people, finds the strength to be assertive: “They had left in tears, I will comfort them as I lead them back”.

As things are today, if we truly believe in God, it is good tidings that we need to proclaim. The world has always had its share of prophets of doom. Even the Church has for too long been resistant to change and driven by fear in the face of a culture that now is no longer a vehicle of Christian values. This is the time when the Church is called to humbly acknowledge that at times even it has lacked transparency and has given counter-witness to what it has preached.

Now is the time, like Bartimaeus, to take courage, to throw off the cloak of certain traditions that are burdening rather than liberating, and to return to its origin.

We all need to see again. The tradition of faith we have received from the past should make us see clearer and more in depth. When that does not happen, it means our tradition is serving only as blinkers, hindering us from going straight to the Lord and letting Him be the One who saves, who restores back to life all those desiring to live.