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When John the Baptist’s disciples ask Jesus if he is the one they are to
expect, or if they are to wait for another, Jesus answers by pointing to the healing that is taking place:
the blind see, the dumb speak, the lame walk, tax collectors begin to give instead of take. Lepers,
paralytics, out-of-control people with legions of devils, the rich and powerful, even dead people, all
find restoration through the person Jesus. The Kingdom comes upon them; they experience a New Creation.
From start to finish the Gospels seem to say that the coming of the kingdom has one unmistakable sign in
the ministry of Jesus: creation is healed, and those who are healed are sent to be instruments of healing
for others.
Today we find blind Bartimaeus sitting by the side of the road as Jesus and the crowds are coming
through Jericho on their way to Jerusalem. Bartimaeus is there to beg. When the sun came up this
morning, it may have been that he had no idea at all of being healed today. He was just going to work the
crowds.
But hearing that it is Jesus who is approaching, the blind man cries out, “Son of David, have pity
on me!” The people tell him to be quiet, because this crowd of pilgrims does not want to be delayed by
some blind beggar. Someone should toss him a coin so they can all move on.
But Bartimaeus cries out again, “Son of David, have pity on me!” And Jesus stops and asks for
Bartimaeus to be brought to him. And Bartimaeus throws off his cloak, jumps to his feet, and runs to
Jesus as fast as his blindness will permit.
And Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?” “Master,” the blind man says, “I want my
sight back.” And Jesus answers, “Go, your faith has healed you.” And at once he recovers his sight and
follows Jesus on the road.
Why does Jesus not heal everyone? Why does he not cure every infirmity and disease? Is it
because physical healings, as dramatic and important as they are, are not the most significant healing
that Jesus comes to bring? Perhaps there’s more here than meets the eye, because Jesus does nothing at
all for Bartimaeus, except to tell him that his own faith has healed him. Perhaps there is spiritual
healing, a healing of the spirit that is deeper and more important to Jesus than the opening of the eyes
to the light of the sun.
In the Gospels, you know, healing and salvation are closely related. The Greek word sozo means
both “to heal” and “to save.” To be healed and to be saved are two sides of the same coin. Salvation is
a matter of deliverance from some kind of un-wholeness, a matter of becoming a whole person, a matter of
becoming the spiritually healthy persons God created us to be.
So when Jesus heals someone of his lameness or his blindness, as he does with Bartimaeus today, he
does it not only for its own sake, but also as a sign of something else, as a sign of a deeper, more
important healing that he has come to bring.
Leslie Weatherhead talks about this in his book Psychology, Religion, and Healing. “It seems to
me,” he says, “that all healing methods known to modern science, including psychological methods, are on
one plane. Many, [like surgery and medicine], are efficacious, and we wisely continue to use them and to
seek others [like them].
“But Christ functioned on a higher plane and used methods in a different category altogether. His
unique relationship to God made Jesus at home in the spiritual world, and when this power broke into
situations of human pain and distress of body or mind, Jesus brought with him the energies on the
[spiritual] plane on which he lived. To put the matter another way, the energies of the Kingdom broke
through. Jesus came to lift humanity onto that level, to [help] us see the Kingdom of Heaven and enter
it. The healing miracles [of Jesus],” Weatherhead adds, “were ‘signs’ of the new [spiritual] order which
Christ initiated” and which he came to offer us all, whether we are in need of physical healing or
not.
As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience;
we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” And Jesus knew and lived that truth long before
Chardin said it.
Blind Bartimaeus, a spiritual being in rags who wants his spiritual “beingness” restored, stands
by the side of the road, a sign for all of us human beings who would walk the road to Jerusalem with
Jesus, a sign of the spiritual sight all of us need if we are to see the significance of Jesus for us and
for the world. The disciples who were walking along with Jesus had the gift of physical sight, but they
were blind to the spiritual reality of Jesus, blind to a fact that Bartimaeus was not blind to, blind to
the fact that Jesus was Son of David, a spiritual being having a human experience who was on his way to
give his physical life as a ransom for a world that was blind to the spirit.
Today there are scientific cures for some physical blindness, as there are for other illnesses or
deformities. There is surgery; there are pills. They help to release God’s healing power in the world
and, as Weatherhead says, we are wise to use them.
But there is no surgery, there are no pills, for spiritual blindness. There are no pills that can
open our eyes to the meaning of Jesus’ pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Cross, no pills that can open our
eyes to the meaning of Jesus’ desire to give his life for those he loves.
Helen Keller used to speak about blindness, about both her physical blindness and the spiritual
blindness that can affect anyone, regardless of physical sight. “I have walked with people,” she said,
“whose eyes are full of light, but who see nothing in sea or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in
books. It were far better,” she adds, “to sail forever in the night of [physical] blindness with sense
and feeling and mind than to be content with the mere act of seeing.”
And Jesus must have had similar thoughts as he turned the corner at Jericho. “Here I am on my way
to Jerusalem with those who would be my disciples, with people whose eyes are full of light but who see
nothing of the significance of this human experience we’re having, people who see nothing of the kind of
kingdom God has for us, people who see nothing of the meaning of life. As the prophet said, they are
‘like the blind who grope along the wall, feeling their way like men without eyes.’ Except maybe this
blind man who is calling my name.”
Bartimaeus, I think, reveals the process of spiritual healing. The psychiatrist Rollo May studied
healing in primitive societies, and he discovered that it was when people named the demon and acknowledged
its power that they opened themselves to healing. And notice that it is when Bartimaeus names his
blindness that he is healed. It is when he names his need, and holds it up before Jesus and asks for
help, that Bartimaeus is himself opened up to the grace of God’s healing presence and mercy. “What do you
want me to do for you?” asks Jesus. And in AA one begins the process of healing by naming his need:
“I’m an alcoholic. I want to be healed.”
George Reynolds, a former bishop of Tennessee, says that that’s what happens when we pray. When
we pray for healing by naming our need, it is opening us up to the grace of God which is already in our
presence. And when we name the problem, when we name the need, we who do the naming are transformed by
that grace. He says that some people seem to think that a prayer for healing is a kind of plea to God
from him to change his mind. “Lord, you haven’t been taking very good care of Aunt Mabel. She’s sick.
Now please get busy and heal her.”
But Bishop Reynolds suggests that healing works the other way around. He says that when we name
our need -- when we note, with the prophet Isaiah this morning, that truth and justice are absent from
the public square, and when we pray for those in power, asking that justice might be restored to our
public life -- it is we who do the praying who are opened up to the need for justice right here at home
every bit as much as in Washington, D.C. And so we ourselves are opened up to the healing power of God to
transform ourselves into just and truthful and generous people, so that the healing of the nation might
begin with us.
It’s like stewardship.
It’s pledge time again, that time of year when we put together a parish budget for the coming year
and then spend the next twelve months wondering how in the world we’re ever going to meet it. We talk a
lot about something called stewardship, and some suggest that there are pills you can take. One pill is
tithing. Just swallow hard and tithe, and it will make you a good steward.
I’m not so sure. I don’t want to disparage tithing. Those who do tithe -- and there are some,
I can tell you -- have found tithing to be a good discipline on the road to stewardship. And certainly
if all of us tithed, the Chapel of Our Saviour, and every parish church, would enjoy the opportunity of
having great amounts of money to use for Christ’s healing ministries in a world full of beggars in
rags.
So it’s time for me to tell you again my story about the time I visited our son Aaron in
Washington, D. C., at pledge time one year. On the Sunday I was there we went to my kind of church. We
parked the car a full block away, and already we could smell the incense. Inside, the church was so
filled with smoke you could barely see the altar, but Aaron and I somehow managed to part the smoke and
find a place to sit.
But when the procession began, my heart sank! The priest appeared to these eyes to be a beggar in
rags, just a shell of a man, so old and frail that I was concerned he might not make it all the way up the
aisle, and I feared that the sermon and Eucharist would be as weak as he seemed to be.
But I was wrong. When he began to preach, it was clear that he was very much alive, both
spiritually and mentally alive. He explained that he was himself a visitor that Sunday, and that he had
been asked by the rector to preach and celebrate the mass that day because it was Stewardship Sunday, and
the Rector had decided to take that week off.
Then this elderly man, who was so frail he could barely walk, preached one of the most vigorous
and spiritually sound stewardship sermons I have ever heard. He talked about the importance of our
calling on Jesus to restore our life, the importance of our calling on Jesus to lead us to sacrificial
life after the pattern of Jesus himself. At one point he suggested tithing as a way to begin, but he
wondered if tithing were really meant for us Episcopalians, if we were up to the rigors of it the way
Baptists are. He wondered if God hadn’t meant tithing just for Baptists, because they are really good at
it. But we Episcopalians? He wasn’t sure about us, because, well, we prefer to tip.
But he noted that some Christians, even some Episcopalians, have found that Jesus could open the
hearts even of beggars and give them new life, give them new hope of becoming the kind of generous, loving
persons that Jesus was.
And then, after the sermon, just before the Eucharist, at the offertory sentence, he invited us to
the Eucharist, I kid you not, with “the words of the Lord Jesus, who said ‘it is more blessed to give than
to tip.’”
The real issue of stewardship, as that wonderful preacher reminded us, lies at a level deeper than
tithing. The issue of stewardship lies at the spiritual level; it is a matter of seeing. Stewardship is
our seeing the truth -- that all life is gift -- and of our recognizing that gratitude is the only
appropriate response to a gift. So the question of stewardship, he said, is the question of life: “How
am I going to spend my life? How am I going to use all the blessings that God has so generously endowed
me with?” That, the old preacher reminded us, is why the Bible has so much to say about money, and about
our relationship to money. The Bible has a lot more to say about money, and how we use our money, than it
has to say about homosexuality, or about any kind of sexuality, or about going to church. In fact, did
you know, he asked us, that one out of every six words Jesus spoke in the New Testament, and one third of
all his parables, are about the spiritual issue of our relationship to our money and our possessions?
That’s because this topic was important to Jesus!
Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem was Jesus’ stewardship response to God. It was what he was going to
do with his life in response to the gift of life, and he invited blind Bartimaeus to join him. He was on
his way to Jerusalem to give everything he had and was. Jesus was on his way to give his life, because
Jesus loved the world the way his Father loves the world, and that love was leading him in the direction
of the Cross. God had created the world in the beginning by giving, by the giving of himself in love. In
the beginning, pouring his creative energies into the void, God brought us forth out of nothing and
created us to be givers, lovers, as he is Giver and Lover. Jesus knew this. Jesus knew, before Thomas
Merton said it, that “love seeks one thing only, the good of the one loved. It leaves all other secondary
effects to take care of themselves,” because “love, [like giving], is it’s own reward.” Jesus’ vocation,
his need, was to be Giver and Lover as his Father was Giver and Lover. And no one has greater love than
this, that he lay down his life for his friends. Jesus needed to be Lover and Giver as his Father was
Lover and Giver, because that’s what Jesus, a spiritual being, was sent into the world to have a human
experience for.
All this was Jesus’ need as his Father’s steward. And it is our need as God’s stewards as well.
For the alternative -- to be receivers and not givers, to be a taking people and not a giving people --
is simply unthinkable, even grotesque, in light of the great love that God has lavished upon us. All this
blind Bartimaeus could see even with he eyes closed, so he followed Jesus along the road.
So I want to suggest this morning that the real issue of stewardship is the issue of sight. It’s
the question of what we are going to do with our lives as we walk the road of human experience with Jesus.
We do not give to Christ’s Church in order to meet the parish budget. We give because, like Bartimaeus,
we have a need, a spiritual need. We give because God first gave to us and we are grateful, and how our
giving works itself out in helping to meet the needs of others is part of the healing of our own
need.
We see when we have faith enough to see. We give -- not just our money, but ourselves --
because we need to give. And we love because we need to love. Giving and loving are what we were created
by and what we were created for. We need to become givers and lovers, as Jesus was giver and lover,
because that is the meaning of life, because that is the life God created us for, because that is how we
claim our true inheritance and being. And that is why, with Bartimaeus, we call out to Jesus as he passes
by.
I want to end with the stories of three other people who meet Jesus in the New Testament, three
people rich in life and material possessions, three others who meet Jesus along the road to Jerusalem.
You’ll recognize all three.
One is the rich young man. Like Bartimaeus, this young man runs up to Jesus and kneels before him
and asks, “Master, what must I do to win eternal life?” And Jesus says to him, “You know the
commandments. ‘Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not give false evidence. Do
not defraud. Honor you father and mother.’
“But Master,” the rich young man replies, “I have kept all these since I was a boy. And Jesus
looks at him, and his heart warms toward him. “Well, then you lack only one thing,” he says. “Go, sell
everything you have, and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. And then come follow
me.”
But the rich young man cannot see. Although Jesus points it out to him, the rich young man
cannot see and name his need. Burdened by his reliance on his great wealth, his face falls. He fails to
receive the healing, the salvation, that Jesus offers, and he goes away with a heavy heart, for he is a
man of great wealth.
The second rich person Jesus meets along the road to Jerusalem, another man of great wealth, does
see. Like Bartimaeus, he names his need and is healed by Jesus. His name is Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus is a
sinner, a tax collector, a superintendent of taxes, in fact. And he is very rich, says Luke. Like
Bartimaeus and the rich young man, he is eager to meet Jesus.
But he is a little man, and the crowds walking along with Jesus are so dense that he has to climb
a sycamore tree in order to see him. And when Jesus comes by the place where Zacchaeus is, he looks up
into the sycamore tree and says, “Zacchaeus, come down! And be quick about it, for I must stay at your
house today.” Zacchaeus climbs down as quickly as he can, and he welcomes Jesus gladly.
And there is a murmur from the crowd, because Jesus has decided to be a guest in the house of a
sinner. But Zacchaeus stands before Jesus and names his need. He says to Jesus, “Here and now, sir, I
give half my possessions to charity, and if I have defrauded anyone, I will repay him four times over.”
And Jesus says to him, “Today healing, salvation, has come to this house.”
And the third rich person Jesus meets along the road to Jerusalem -- do you see it? -- is
you.
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |