Eric Weihenmayer calls himself an “unrealistic optimist,”
and that is a good description since he was the first blind climber ever to
reach the top of Mount Everest. Now he does business consulting and charity
work, helping people see the world in new ways.
Asked by Fast Company magazine
what he looks for in teammates, Eric’s response sums up what faith is all
about. He said, “I look for people who have an unrealistic optimism about life.
I hear people say, ‘seeing is believing.’ I want people who believe the
opposite, ‘Believing is seeing.’ You’ve got to believe first in what you’re
doing and be sure you have a reason to believe it. You can tell who those
people are. You say, “Hey, want to climb Everest with a blind guy?” Pretty
quickly you’ll figure out who’s a believer.”[1]
Today we are going to read about another blind man who had
great faith and what that faith produced in his life. Listen for God’s word to
you from Mark 10:46-52….
They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd
were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by
the roadside. 47 When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out
and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48 Many sternly ordered him to
be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49 Jesus stood still and said,
“Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get
up, he is calling you.” 50 So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51 Then Jesus said to him,
“What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher,[a] let me see again.” 52 Jesus said to him, “Go;
your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed
him on the way.
Today I want to
look with you at six components that produced a miracle in this story. First,
there was Bartimaeus’ Penetrating Prayer.
Matt Woodley
writes:
We don’t know much about Bartimaeus. We know his father’s
name is Timaeus, which implies that the early church may have known his whole
family. Isn’t that amazing? That’s the ripple effect. As Jesus touched and
transformed Bartimaeus, he transformed his whole family.[2]
But it all started
with Bartimaeus’ penetrating prayer. Bartimaeus was sitting by the roadside in
Jericho. When he heard that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by, he began to shout
and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.”
This is one of
the most powerful prayers that anyone can pray. Members of The Eastern Orthodox
Church use a form of this prayer they call The Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer
goes like this: “Lord
Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
This
is a prayer you can pray anytime, anywhere. You can pray it out loud, or you
can pray it silently in your mind and heart. You can pray it in church, or at
work, at school, or at home. If you are pressed for time, you can pray a
shortened form of the Jesus prayer: “Lord have mercy.” Or “Christ have mercy.”
I am told that if you pray this prayer often enough, it becomes a sort of
mantra, always there at the back of your mind, even when you wake in the night.
Bartimaeus,
when he first spoke these words, certainly had no sense of inaugurating a
prayer that would be prayed by others for centuries, even millennia, to come. Nonetheless,
that is what has happened.
Of
course, this prayer finds precedent and echoes elsewhere in Scripture….
·
David prayed, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast
love; according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.” (Psalm
51:1)
·
And the psalmist prays, “Have mercy upon us,
O Lord, have mercy upon us, for we have had more than enough of contempt.”
(Psalm 123:3)
·
In the Gospel of Matthew, two blind men
together, on two different occasions, say to Jesus, “Have mercy on us, Son of
David!” (Matthew 9 & Matthew 20)
·
The Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 presents a
similar plea to Jesus, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.”
·
A man with a demon-possessed son says to Jesus,
“Lord, have
mercy on my son.” (Matthew 17)
·
In Luke 17, ten lepers cry out: “Jesus, Master,
have mercy on us!”
·
And in Luke 18, in one of Jesus’ parables, a
tax collector says, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”
What
a great prayer this is to make our own, and to focus our minds on the mercy and
grace of God in Jesus Christ! “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
A second thing I
see in this story is Bartimaeus’ Persistent
Pursuit of Jesus. Even though the crowd told him to shut up, Bartimaeus did
not give up calling out to Jesus until he got an answer.
Once again, I
love what Matt Woodley says about this….
Imagine if someone
started shouting right in the middle of our service. We’d do exactly what
happens in this story: we’d start shushing him.
Verse 48 reads, “Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet.” Throughout the
Gospels the disciples try to protect Jesus from “problem” people, but Jesus
responds: “The messed-up people aren’t the problem; you’re the problem, because you keep blocking me
from the people who need me the most.” So the crowd shushes Bartimaeus. Jesus
is really busy, they say. Jesus has important things to do.
This is what people in power always do to the powerless: they
shush them. You have questions about your faith? Shush. You were abused as a
child? Shush. You desperately need mercy and healing and compassion? Shush.[3]
But Bartimaeus
doesn’t listen to the shushers. He doesn’t listen to the people who think he is
nothing. He continues to call out to Jesus.
Bartimaeus calls
out to the same Jesus, who elsewhere in the Gospels, commends persistence in
prayer. In Luke 11 Jesus tells this story:
“Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight
and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; 6 for a friend
of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ 7 And he
answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and
my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ 8 I tell you,
even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend,
at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he
needs.
9 “So I say to
you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the
door will be opened for you. 10 For everyone who asks
receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the
door will be opened. 11 Is there anyone among you who,
if your child asks for[e] a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? 12 Or if the
child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? 13 If you then,
who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will
the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit[f] to those who ask him!”
What amazing promises
Jesus gives to those who are persistent in prayer. Yet, are we persistent in
prayer like Bartimaeus?
God responds to
persistent prayer. Jesus responds to persistent prayer. Did you notice what
Jesus does in this story? When Bartimaeus continues to call out to Jesus, the
Master stops and stands still. When you call out to Jesus in prayer, he stands
still for you, and he calls you to himself.
A third
contributing factor to the miracle that eventually takes place in this story is
Bartimaeus’ Present-Tense Response to
Jesus.
When Jesus called
Bartimaeus, the blind man got up immediately. He threw off his cloak. Since
Bartimaeus is a blind beggar, this may have been his only cloak. But he throws
it off because he doesn’t want anything to hinder him from getting to Jesus as
fast as he can. Mark says that Bartimaeus, jumping up, came to Jesus! His
response to Jesus was immediate.
We have seen this
over and over again in the Gospel of Mark. The key word in this Gospel is
“immediately”. Mark uses this word 27 times, including one time in this
passage.
God lives in an
eternal now and he wants us to respond to him in the now. There is magic in the
moment.
The Psalmist
says, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts…” (Psalm 95:7-8)
And the writer to the Hebrews quotes this statement of the Psalmist more than
once. (Hebrews 3:7-15; Hebrews 4:7) Furthermore, Paul says in 2 Corinthians
6:2, “Now is the day of salvation.”
Are you
responding to Jesus’ offer of salvation and healing in this “now” moment?
A fourth factor
that contributes to the miracle that happens here in this story is Bartimaeus’ Precise Request.
When Jesus asked
Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus replied rather
precisely, rather succinctly, “My teacher, let me see again.” That’s six words
in English, but actually, in the original text of Mark 10:51, Bartimaeus speaks
only three words, and one of them is in Aramaic: “Rabbouni”. This is a reminder
that what we have here is an eye-witness account. Aramaic was the spoken
language of Jesus and his fellow Jews in Palestine in the first century. Whoever
recounted this story the first time remembered the precise Aramaic word that
Bartimaeus used to address Jesus, and Mark records that word in writing for us.
If you were to
stand before Jesus today and he were to ask you, “What do you want me to do for you?” what would
you say?
Last
week, we saw how Jesus asked this same question of James and John, “What do you
want me to do for you?” James and John replied, “Let one of us sit at your
right and the other at your left in your glory.” The goal of this request was self-aggrandizement—not a good
thing. And so, Jesus denies James and John’s request. But what Bartimaeus asked
for was a good thing and as Jesus reminds us, our heavenly Father loves to give
good gifts to his children.
The fifth and
most important contributing factor to the miracle of healing that takes place
in this story is Jesus’ Powerful Word. “Go,
your faith has made you well.”
Jesus attributes
this healing to Bartimaeus’ faith, and faith is important. But without Jesus’
word, without Jesus’ gift, salvation and healing cannot happen. Faith is the
conduit that receives the powerful word of Jesus. Faith is the conduit that
receives the salvation and healing that can only come through Jesus. Healing is
the gift that Bartimaeus received from Jesus, and he received it immediately
upon Jesus’ word.
Bryan Chapell
tells this story….
Several years ago, a news report detailed the
story of an adult man who received his sight back through the wonders of modern
medicine. An interviewer asked the man, “What’s life like now? Tell us what
does it mean to after all these years suddenly be able to see?” And the man
initially said what you would expect—things like colors are amazing and it’s a
wonderful gift to be able to see the faces of those that he loved. But the
interviewer expected him to say those things. He wanted the man to say
something extraordinary, something totally unexpected about how his life had
changed since getting his sight back. So he asked him, “What’s the most
unexpected thing?” … The formerly blind man … said that the most incredible
thing was watching the leaves falling every autumn. He said, “I know that
leaves fall. I know that people rake them and put them in piles and burn them
or throw them away. But I’d always imagined that the leaves would come down
just like a blanket. I didn’t know that when leaves fall that they pitch and
glide and turn in the wind as they come down to the ground. It’s beautiful.”[4]
The healing,
powerful word of Jesus can restore beauty to our lives when we receive that
word in faith.
One final thing
we see in this passage is Bartimaeus’ Personal
Reaction to Jesus. Bartimaeus followed Jesus along the road.
Bartimaeus didn’t
know much about Jesus. Bartimaeus called Jesus “Son of David” which was
probably a recognition that Jesus was the Messiah. But the most important thing
to Bartimaeus was that Jesus was his healer. Jesus was the man who changed his
life. And so Bartimaeus chose to follow the person of Jesus.
I wonder: are you
a personal follower of Jesus? Have you received him personally into your life
as your leader, forgiver, healer, savior? If not, today can be the day that you
do just that.
What was it that
attracted the world to Jesus in the first century? Historian Rodney Stark
argues that there was one huge factor that helped capture the attention of the
ancient world—Christianity’s revolutionary emphasis on mercy. In 2012, the
second largest publisher in the world, HarperCollins, published Stark’s book, The Triumph of Christianity. In that
book he writes:
In
the midst of the squalor, misery, illness, and anonymity of ancient cities,
Christianity provided an island of mercy and security…. It started with Jesus….
In
contrast, in the pagan world, and especially among the philosophers, mercy was
regarded as a character defect and pity as a pathological emotion: because
mercy involves providing unearned help or relief, it is contrary to
justice…. [Thus, according to some in the ancient world] humans must learn “to
curb the impulse [to show mercy]”; “the cry of the undeserving for mercy” must go
“unanswered.” “[Showing mercy] was a defect of character unworthy of the wise
and excusable only in those who have not yet grown up.”[5]
In the midst of such
a cold moral climate, the mercy of Jesus proved tremendously attractive. Jesus’
mercy and love continues to attract people around the world to him.
At the beginning of
this story we read that Bartimaeus “sat by the way”. That’s a literal
translation. Then at the end of this story, Mark tells us Bartimaeus followed
Jesus “in the way”. “The Way” has a double meaning in this story. It means the
way, the road to Jerusalem. But “the Way” was also the first designation for
what we now call Christianity. Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and
the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)
What is our
response? Are we merely sitting by the way, like Bartimaeus was at the
beginning of this story? Or are we following Jesus in the way?
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