Today’s Gospel reading (Mark 10:46-52), superficially, appears to be just another pleasant story about Jesus healing a blind man. Mark’s gospel frequently is the one that gives the most details when telling a story. Some commentators suggest that is because he is using first-hand memories of eyewitnesses, possibly Peter himself. Because of the details, there is a lot to unpack from this story.
This story comes at the end of a long discourse that begins with the healing of a man who is deaf (Mark 8:31-37). In this section the disciples come to recognize Jesus as Messiah. Also in this section are the three predictions of His passion, death, and resurrection. Through it all we see the disciples stumbling along in various degrees of misunderstanding as they accompany their Master. Today’s story, coming at the end of this section, serves to summarize all that has gone before.
Today we find Jesus and his disciples, along with a large crowd, leaving Jericho, beginning their fateful journey south from Galilee to Jerusalem. As we will see shortly, the large crowd is with Jesus physically, but not in spirit. Sitting beside the road is a blind beggar named Timaeus. Mark tells us that the blind man hears all the commotion and wants to know what is going on. He is told that Jesus of Nazareth is passing by. Immediately on hearing this he calls out, “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!”
This is what we now call the “Jesus Prayer”. It is a short prayer we, too, need to make constantly; a prayer we can only make sincerely when we are truly aware and accepting of our dependence on Jesus’ help and guidance, when we fully acknowledge the distance that exists between what we are and what Jesus is calling us to be.
In making the prayer, the blind man is opening himself up to all that Jesus can and wants to give him. However, the surrounding crowd, smug in their physical closeness to Jesus, and contemptuous of an irritating beggar, tries to silence him. How often people have given up their approach to Jesus because of discouragements they have met? How often have we been a source of discouragement or scandal to people who were tentatively looking for Jesus and the meaningful life that He can open up for them?
This man, however, is not discouraged. The more he is scolded by the crowd, the louder he shouts. Remember that Jesus has told us many times to ask, not once, but many times. This is what this man does. Jesus stops. If the man had not called, Jesus might not have stopped. He might simply have continued on His journey. How often does Jesus pass through our lives? Every day. How often have we failed to recognize His presence? How often have we failed to call Him? And perhaps He passes on and out of our day.
“Call him over,” Jesus tells those around him. Notice that Jesus does not call the man himself. He tells others to call him. Is this not the norm in our lives, too, that Jesus calls to us through others?
Does not society tell us that if we believe that Jesus has appeared to us in a vision, or that He has directly called us, that we are either ready for canonization or, more likely, for a mental home! No, it is through others that we are constantly being called. In fact, we might reflect today on the huge number of people who have directly or indirectly brought Christ into our lives. It is because of them that we are what we are now. Without them, we might not know Jesus, or the Gospel, or the Church.
The opposite is also true. How many times have others stepped in and prevented us from calling out to Jesus? How many times have we stepped in and prevented someone else from calling out to Jesus? That is what the crowd was doing to the blind man until Jesus tells them to stop. Suddenly, those who were just scolding the man, telling him to “shut up”, are now urging him to approach Jesus. “Courage, do not be afraid; He is calling you.”
How many of us need to hear those words! “Courage, do not be afraid; He is calling you.” And how often do we never hear anyone telling us, “Courage, do not be afraid, He is calling you.” There is no need ever to be afraid of Jesus, our Good Shepherd. And He is calling all of us, in some way or other. Perhaps we have never heard the call. Perhaps that is because Jesus expects us to do the calling first.
“Get up!” they tell the man. Yes, he is being told to rise, the same verb that describes the rising of Jesus from the dead. The blind man is not just being told to get on his feet, but to enter a whole new way of living. He throws off his cloak, his only belonging, and comes to Jesus. He comes to Jesus encumbered with absolutely nothing. It is reminiscent of how the disciples left their boats, their nets, and their families to follow Jesus. It is reminiscent of the early Christians stripping themselves of all their clothes, symbolic of their sinful past, as they go down into the baptismal pool. When we approach Jesus, we also need to divest ourselves of everything, to get rid of everything to which we cling.
Jesus now asks him: “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks us the very same question every day. What answer are we going to give him? What you ask for is going to reveal a great deal about you and your priorities in life.
Jesus does not need to know the answer to His question, but you do. How has your answer changed over the years? What would you answer today? Earlier, the disciples asked for a special honor (sitting at his right hand in heaven). What did the blind man ask for? “Lord, I want to see.”
That seems to be a simple answer, but it is much more. He is looking for something much more important. He is asking for insight (note the play on words), the ability to see into the meaning of life, its direction, and its ultimate values. In making our answer to the question that Jesus is asking us, we could hardly make a better response: “Lord, I want to see.”
When we can see with our inner eye, it changes our whole way of looking at the world, and our behavior changes accordingly. We cannot ask for anything more crucial in life. Perhaps we feel all along that we have been able to see both literally and figuratively. But today we are asking to see again, to have a deeper vision that goes much further into the ultimate meaning of our lives.
Then Jesus tells him, “Go your way, your faith has saved you.” Jesus restores him to complete wholeness. Only a person with perfect sight (insight) is truly whole. Only a person with perfect sight knows where to go and how to get there.
And what happens then? The beggar receives the sight he asked for (“Ask, and you shall receive”) and what does he do? He does the only thing that a person with true sight can do – he follows Jesus on the road, that Road, that Way, to Jerusalem and all that it means. He becomes unconditionally a disciple.
Now let us go back to the beginning of the story. We are told that Timaeus, a blind beggar, is sitting by the road. Have we not also been like Timaeus? Until we discovered Jesus, we may have been very smart, very clever, highly educated, but we were still blind to what our values should be. We may have a great job, lots of money and material things, but we are still beggars. We have nothing that is really ours, nothing that will last for an eternity. And Timaeus was sitting beside the road, going nowhere, stuck in one place. At the end of the story, he is now able to see, is no longer a beggar, and is going somewhere, accompanying Jesus on the road that is His Way.
So we can “see” that this story has a message that is far more than a mere miracle story. It is a beautiful summing up of how Jesus’ disciples, now including Timaeus, learned to see and walk with Him along the Way. It is a Gospel in miniature, a vignette of the spiritually deprived person discovering where Truth and Life are and totally committing oneself to it.
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!