“They Wanted to See” (Luke 18:35 – 19:10)

During my years in active pastoral ministry a large proportion of my reading was taken up with biblical, pastoral and theological works. So, one of the goals that I set for myself in retirement was to read more fiction. I have to admit that thus far I haven’t managed to live up to that resolution in quite the way I’d hoped. But it has been a delight to be introduced to characters from a whole variety of places and periods and to share (if only for a brief period of time) in their worlds and their experiences.

One of those characters was a young French teenager named Marie-Laure Leblanc. Her story takes place in German-occupied France during the Second World War. Her world is one of darkness, not only because of the Nazi invasion and the horrors of war, but because Marie-Laure is blind. As I lived with Marie-Laure and shared in her adventures and in her world of sightlessness, I didn’t want the story to end. For me it was one of those books you wish would go on forever.[1]

In the real world, though, blindness is an affliction I hope that none of us would wish on anyone. On the other hand, I have been privileged to know a few people who were blind over the course of my ministry. And I have to say that in every case they were able to meet their circumstances with a remarkable perseverance and a determination to live life to the fullest, in spite of their loss of sight.

Sadly, such was not the case in the world that Jesus and his followers inhabited and where blindness was much more common than it is today. It could be a condition of birth, as we see in the man whom Jesus sent to wash his eyes in the pool of Siloam (John 9:1-7). It could also be the result of a variety of diseases, even something as easily treatable as pinkeye. And then there was the blindness of old age, usually due to cataracts and aggravated by repeated exposure to sand and the fierce glare of the Middle Eastern sun.

To make matters worse, no effective treatment was available to those who suffered from diseases of the eye. There were no antibiotics and no safe or effective surgical procedures. In my research for this morning’s sermon, I did come across a form of surgery for cataracts that was known in the ancient world, called couching. (If you’re at all squeamish, you may want to block your ears for a moment.) Couching involved using a sharp thorn or a needle to pierce the surface of the eye and force the lens downwards until the patient could begin to see shapes or movement. Needless to say, in the vast majority of these procedures the patient ended up totally blind.

It would not be for more than a thousand years after the time of Jesus, in 1268, that eyeglasses first came into use. Another five hundred years would elapse before the founding of the first school for the blind, in 1791. It would be nearly forty years more until Louis Braille invented his system of raised dots so that blind people could read, in 1829, followed four years later by the publication of the Gospel of Mark in raised print—the first time blind people could read the Scriptures for themselves. Another century would pass before the founding of the first seeing-eye dog school. And it was in the late 1960s—within the lifetime of many of us here this morning—that modern laser eye surgery became a possibility.

In spite of all these improvements, blindness remains a daunting affliction. But try to imagine what it must have been like in biblical times!

Bartimaeus

Which brings us to the gates of Jericho, as Jesus and his followers are making their way into the town. By now Jesus’ fame has become widespread and they are surrounded by a large crowd. The commotion is such that you might hardly notice a crouched figure sitting at the side of the road. Luke doesn’t even give us his name—and I suspect that no one in the crowd knew it either. But in Mark’s gospel we find that it is Bartimaeus.

The sound of the crowd piques Bartimaeus’ curiosity, so he tugs at someone’s robe and asks what’s going on. “Jesus of Nazareth is passing by,” comes the reply. So Bartimaeus begins to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Someone in the crowd yells at him to shut up, but that only encourages him to cry out all the louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”

Then Jesus stops. A silence descends over the crowd, as Jesus asks for the man to be brought to him. “What do you want me to do for you?” he asks. “Sir, I want to see,” comes the reply. “Receive your sight,” Jesus says to him. “Your faith has healed you.” Bartimaeus opens his eyes and there before him he sees the faces of the crowd, staring in amazement. He sees the azure blue of the sky and, flitting back and forth, the birds, whose twitters he could only hear before.

What Bartimaeus and the crowd were experiencing in that moment was a fulfilment of a prophecy spoken by Isaiah centuries before:

Then will the eyes of the blind be opened
     and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
Then will the lame leap like a deer,
     and the mute tongue shout for joy. (Isaiah 35:5-6)

Jesus himself had spoken about it when he read from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue at the beginning of his public ministry: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind…” (Luke 4:18-19). Bartimaeus’ healing was not an isolated incident. It was a sign that the messianic age was dawning. A new era was erupting into the old.

The apostle Paul endured poor vision for much of his ministry. Perhaps he was placing his own experience failing eyesight of into that context when he reflected to his fellow believers in Corinth, “Now we see things imperfectly, as in a poor mirror, but then we shall see face to face.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)

“Dear friends,” wrote the aged apostle John a generation later, “now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)

What happened to Bartimaeus outside Jericho is what will one day happen to you and to me and all of God’s people as we gather with that great crowd from every race, language and nation to stand before the throne of the Lamb and see him face to face. We will be freed of all our infirmities. We will be healed from all our diseases. We will no longer be crippled by the wounds that have been inflicted on us and that we have inflicted on ourselves. We will finally be the people that God intended us to be from the beginning of time, when he declared, “Let us make human beings in our image.” This is the future for which all creation waits with eager longing, what the Bible calls the glorious liberty of the children of God (Romans 8:21)—and it was what was breaking into the present as Bartimaeus stared around and the crowd back at him in stunned amazement.

Zacchaeus

It is an astounding promise. And we could contemplate it for hours. But as Jesus pushed on, so must we. As we do, we find ourselves entering the gates of Jericho. And here we come upon one of the most curious scenes in all of the gospels. Luke points our eyes upwards, into the branches of a sycamore-fig tree.

These trees were common in the Middle East. They were leafy evergreens, growing to a height of as much as twenty metres, with wide-spreading branches, and they produced a small, sweet-tasting fruit several times a year. If you wanted a tree to hide in, they were the perfect choice—and that was exactly what one person in Jericho was looking for.

I suspect that Zacchaeus’ horizontal challenge was the butt of humour in his own day—and it has been ever since. Perhaps there are some of you here who grew up with the old Sunday school ditty, “Zacchaeus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he…” But things were made much worse by the fact that Zacchaeus was a tax collector. And here we need to stop for some historical background.

I don’t think there are many of us today who enjoy paying taxes—particularly at this time of year as we go through the laborious process of assembling T3s and T4s and T4As and charitable receipts and medical receipts and whatever else to send off to Revenue Canada. But the Roman Empire had an entirely different system, and here is how it worked. Local contracts for tax collection in the Roman world were auctioned off to the highest bidder. But the government did not pay them for their work. Instead, the tax collectors charged the taxpayers an additional levy for their services. And in many cases the fees they exacted were extortionate—to the point where at least one wag called them “birds of prey”.[2]

To add to that, in Judea tax collectors were generally regarded as traitors, collaborators with the Roman occupation. Even more, because they had to have regular dealings with the Gentile Romans, they were viewed as unclean, so that in later years it was even forbidden to accept alms from a tax collector. And if all that weren’t enough, Zacchaeus was no ordinary tax collector. Luke tells us he was a chief tax collector.

Yet, all the same, Zacchaeus held something in common with Bartimaeus. For like Bartimaeus, he wanted to see. But in his case it was a problem not of sight but of height. So it was that Zacchaeus bundled together his robes and clambered up the tree. Its leafy branches would have allowed him both to catch a glimpse of Jesus and also to remain hidden from the crowd. And as they say, the rest is history.

Zacchaeus finds himself taking Jesus into his home—and here I have to say I’d love to have been a fly on the wall to hear the conversation that ensued between them. All Luke reveals to us is the conclusion. Yet, whatever the words they exchanged, it seems to me that what happened to Zacchaeus was that he began to see. Not in the way that Bartimaeus had begun to see, but in the way that Jesus wants us all to see.

What do I mean? The explanation comes in what to my mind has to be the most arresting parable that Jesus ever told. It is found not in Luke’s gospel but in Matthew’s. There Jesus gives a picture of the Son of Man seated on his throne with all the nations of the earth gathered before him. And he separates them as a shepherd separates sheep from goats, the sheep on his right and the goats to the left. Then he says to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me.”

The sheep are puzzled and they ask, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison and go to visit you?” To which the King replies, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:31-40)

Did you notice what the sheep asked? “Lord, when did we see you … ?” I believe that what happened to Zacchaeus was that he began to see in that sense: to see the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked and the sick—and to see those he had cheated for years, perhaps decades—as he saw Jesus.

And therein lies the challenge for you and for me. May Jesus give us sight—eyes to see as he sees and to discover, in the words of C.S. Lewis, “There are no ordinary people.”[3]

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[1]     Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

[2]     “Publicans”, Oxford Companion to the Bible

[3]     “The Weight of Glory”

“What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:32-52)

By his own profession H.G. Wells, the great science fiction writer of a century ago, was not a Christian believer. However, in 1930 he wrote a short anecdote about an archbishop who found himself bothered by some niggling problem that had been eating away at him and that that he was unable to identify or explain. “Maybe the shadow of age was falling upon him, he thought, maybe he had been overworking… Or had he done something wrong or acted in a mistaken spirit?”

It troubled him to the point where he was unable to perform even the simplest, most routine functions. What was he to do about it, he pondered? At last the solution came to him. He would do what he was always telling everybody else to do who came to him with a dilemma: Pray!

Yes, he would pray.
Slowly he sank to his knees and put his hands together. He was touched by a sort of childish trustfulness in his own attitude. “Oh God,” he began, and paused.
He paused, and a sense of awful imminence, a monstrous awe, gripped him. And then he heard a voice.
It was not a harsh voice, but it was a clear strong voice. There was nothing about it still or small
“Yes,” said the voice. “What is it?”
They found His Grace in the morning… Plainly his death had been instantaneous…[1]

I don’t know about you. But speaking for myself I can say I’m grateful for the times when God hasn’t answered my prayers. That is not to say that there haven’t been occasions when God has graciously intervened in my life—when he has answered my prayers sometimes in ways far more wonderfully than I had even expected. But rather, I’m thinking of those times when my prayer has been selfish or short-sighted or half-hearted. Perhaps you don’t have those times, but I know I do—and more often than I care to admit.

Along the Way…

It seems to me that we have a classic example of that in our reading from the Gospel of Mark this morning. Mark tells us that it occurred as Jesus and his disciples were “on their way up to Jerusalem”. Now that word “way” in Greek is hodos, and it is a significant one—both for Mark, who uses it sixteen times, and for the entire New Testament, where you’ll find it more than a hundred times. In fact, long before they were ever called Christians, the earliest believers referred to themselves as those who belonged to “the Way” (Acts 9:2; 19:9,23).

For Mark that way begins with John the Baptist who has come to “prepare the way of the Lord” (1:2-3). Some chapters later, after teaching a crowd of four thousand people for a full three days, Jesus was concerned that as they journeyed on the long walk towards home they might collapse along the way (8:3). Two weeks ago, we read of how Jesus and his followers were heading towards Cæsarea Philippi. Mark tells us that it was as they were on the way that Jesus asked them, “Who do you say I am?” To which Peter replied, “You are the Messiah.” Again, in last Sunday’s reading, Mark tells us that it was as Jesus was “on his way” that a man ran up to him to ask, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (10:17).

Now in this morning’s passage we encounter it three times. Indeed, it is here in these verses that we begin to discover why the word “way” is so important for Mark. In the opening verses of our reading this morning Jesus himself makes it crystal clear: “We are going up to Jerusalem and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles, who will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him. Three days later he will rise.”

In fact, this is the third time Jesus has given this warning to his disciples. The way is the way to Jerusalem, the way to Jesus offering up himself in death for the sins of the world. Already the shadow of the cross looms ever darker over all that happens. And that is the context in which James and John approach Jesus with their brash request: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”

A Bold Request

Now we all know that there are other places in the gospels where Jesus assures us that our prayers will be answered. In John’s gospel, for example, we hear Jesus make the promise, “You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it” (John 14:14). Or again, in Matthew, “If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer” (Matthew 21:22). But notice that in each case there is a condition. We are to ask in Jesus’ name. We are to ask believing—not just believing that God can do anything or formulaically tacking the words “in Jesus’ name” onto the end of our prayers, but conforming our minds to the mind of Christ, our hearts to the heart of Christ, our wills to the will of Christ.

But the disciples’ request comes without any qualifications: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.” And then comes the request itself: “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.” If only the two brothers had known what they were asking! If they had, I imagine they would never have spoken as they did. They could be grateful that Jesus did not comply with their demand. For in the space of a few short days they would learn that Jesus’ glory would be revealed on a wooden cross and that the places they so desired on Jesus’ right and left would be occupied by two criminals.

The problem with James’ and John’s request (or prayer, if we may call it that) was that it revolved around them. Presbyterian theologian R.C. Sproul was one of many who have written about the false understanding of God as a celestial bellhop, a God whose very reason for existence is to do our bidding, one “who is on call every time we press the button, just waiting to serve us our every request”.[2] Of course that is a caricature.

This winter Karen and I have been attending a course on amateur astronomy. During the first couple of sessions our instructor dwelt on the way people largely understood the universe before the time of Copernicus in the early sixteenth century. Observers looked up at the movement of the stars and the planets and they assumed that everything revolved around the earth. In the face of considerable opposition Copernicus insisted that the sun was the centre of the solar system and it took more than a century for his observations to gain acceptance. Today we call that change in our understanding the Copernican revolution.

In the same way James and John needed a spiritual revolution—to move from a me-centred life to a God-centred life. We find it encapsulated in Jesus’ response to their request: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all”—and they would find a model for that as they travelled a little farther along the way.

True Prayer

They had just passed through Jericho, about fifty kilometers from Jerusalem, when their journey was interrupted by what I can only imagine were the piercing shouts of a desperate man. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Some of the people in the crowd tried to get him to shut up. But that only prompted him to cry out all the louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”

I can’t imagine that Bartimaeus was schooled in theology. And maybe his crying out from the roadside was a rather crude way of getting attention. But those shouts of desperation showed a far more profound grasp of what prayer is all about than James and John had displayed earlier that day. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

His words echoed a prayer uttered centuries before by the prophet Daniel. With his people living in exile, their capital city of Jerusalem and its temple in ruins, Daniel dressed himself in sackcloth and covered himself in ashes as he made his plea on their behalf before God. At the heart of his petition we find these words: “We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy” (Daniel 9:18).

At the heart of both Bartimaeus’ and Daniel’s prayers was the conviction that the God to whom we bring our petitions is one who delights to show mercy and that this is the only basis on which we come before him. This was how God revealed himself to Moses atop Mount Sinai: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness …” (Exodus 34:6). And those words to Moses become a chorus that we find repeated again and again through the Old Testament.

In the original Greek of Mark’s gospel Bartimaeus’ words are these: Huie Dauid Iésou, eleéson me. It did not take long for the early church to recognize the profound meaning in Bartimaeus’ prayer and to adopt it into its worship. We know it as the Kyrie eleison, the threefold cry, “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.” We can trace it back at least to the middle of the fourth century, to some of the most ancient Christian liturgies.

“Lord, have mercy.” I believe that these words—and Bartimaeus’ cry—are an expression of what true, God-centred, prayer is all about. For we come to God and we bring our needs before him not because of any deserving in ourselves—not because we’ve served him with our lives or because we’ve prayed faithfully over the years or because we’ve managed to get our doctrine right, no, none of these things—but because he is merciful.

And the depth of that mercy would become clear as it compelled the Son of God to continue along the road—the way that would lead to his own sacrificial death and to offer up his life as a ransom for many.

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[1] H.G. Wells, “An Answer to Prayer”

[2]     https://www.ligonier.org/blog/rc-sproul-warning-prayer/

Bible portraits: Palm Sunday (Part 1)

It will forever be etched in my memory, that day when we entered Jerusalem for the last time. The heat of the spring sun beat down upon us as we made our way up and down the slopes along the steep, winding road to Jerusalem. As we approached the great city a sense of anticipation, of exhilaration, surged through our veins.

Looking back on it all, I cannot put my finger now on what we were really expecting. The days past had certainly had their excitements. There had been the blind man just outside Jericho. How will I ever forget his pathetic cry, just barely audible over the stir of the crowd? “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Some folk tried to shut him up, but he refused to pay any attention to their threats. He just cried all the louder, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

I knew what the Lord would do all along. He never was one to pass by a person in need. When he heard the man’s voice he stopped dead in his tracks, and all the crowd with him. “Bring him over here,” he said to us. And so we went over and helped the man to his feet. We could hear his knees crack as they straightened out. With his bony hand he grasped onto my arm and haltingly we half-walked, half-stumbled our way over to where the Lord was. “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked, as he looked deep into the man’s lifeless and impenetrable eyes.

“Lord, that I may receive my sight…”

“Receive your sight,” he said to him in a manner that seemed so matter-of-fact, as though it were nothing unusual. “Your faith has healed you.” Even as the words were still on his lips I could see the opaque dullness of the man’s eyes melt into a sparkle. The look of absolute wonderment spreading across his face was enough to tell us all that a miracle had happened.

The next moment we were all praising God for what had happened to the blind man (or I should say, the man who had up till that time been blind). He himself couldn’t stop jumping up and down and coming up to each of us and staring for a moment or two into our faces as though he had lost hold of his senses.