Jesus said to him in reply, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man replied to him, “Master, I want to see.”
Mark 10:51 – 52
American novelist and essayist Flannery O’Connor (1925 – 1964) was a Catholic writer who wrote from the depth of the American South and indeed from the depth of her faith. Her writing often focused on questions of morality and ethics. What makes her writing exceptional, however, is ‘how she challenged the self-assurance of her Catholic and secular readers. Her stories expressed her sense of sacrament and of the possibility of redemption in the midst of the strangeness of ordinary life’ (Richard O’Brien).
It is not that either sacrament or the sacred are missing from our ‘ordinary lives’, it is usually because we fail to see it there. For the community of Mark the evangelist, Jesus reveals himself, sometimes ‘secretly’, until his mission is fully unveiled. Indeed, it is more through action than word that Jesus is truly revealed.
The story of Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46 – 52), in fact, epitomises the way in which Mark ‘feeds out’ information – the crowd is trying to keep this blind beggar from calling out for Jesus. He is rebuked but he persists in calling out for Jesus, and he reveals Jesus’ messiahship in calling out, ‘Jesus, son of David!’ Bartimaeus is healed and he follows Jesus.
There are many levels to this story from the literal to the allegorical, but I like Flannery O’Connor’s idea, that there is a narrative waiting to be told.
Undoubtedly, we all want to have sight, but to see and understand, to have insight is something that we learn. On 20 October Pope Francis canonised fourteen new saints, including the Martyrs of Damascus, St Elena Guerra, St Marie-Leonie Paradis and St Giuseppe Allamano. And while these lives have extraordinary merit and now recognition, it is in our own ordinary lives that Jesus walks with us. His vitality reaches into our acts of charity through to our concern for our neighbor and our care for the poor, into our conversations with the lonely, into the advice and encouragement of our children and those we mentor, into the generosity with which we give our talents to the community and into the joyfulness in the way we accept what life gives us.
It takes insight to see the hand of God at work, as each action ‘feeds out’ a sense of his presence, and those who recognise that hand do call out, ‘Jesus, son of David!’ and in doing so acknowledge the redeeming power of God, of the possibility of salvation. It is in the strangeness of our ordinary lives that God is truly revealed.
Mr Peter Douglas
Director of Faith and Mission