Our readings this Sunday offer words of hope and encouragement to people of faith. Jesus’ restoration of vision to the spiritually clear-sighted yet physically blind Bartimaeus, the assurances of Jeremiah that God will never abandon his faithful people, and the Letter to the Hebrews’ reminder that our High Priest, Christ the Lord, is both patient and merciful, all serve to powerfully reassure us that, while a life of faith is not always easy, it is always overwhelmingly rewarded. Our task is to embrace and live this faith.
Jesus’ restoration of sight to the blind Bartimaeus is the last healing miracle recorded by St. Mark prior to Palm Sunday. Jesus was leaving Jericho for the 15 mile journey to Jerusalem. As he was leaving town with his disciples and a large crowd, a roadside beggar began calling out to him, “Son of David, have pity on me!” (Mark 10:47b, 48b). This simple cry had deep significance. First, publicly acknowledging his faith in Jesus during those anxious days just prior to the original Holy Week was very risky. Signaling that he was a believer in Jesus could certainly have subjected him to religious and civil penalties. Second, the fact that only this “blind” man was pleading for Jesus’ help highlights the sad truth that only he really “saw” Jesus for who he was; the disciples, amidst their arguing about positions of honor and their failure to ever understand Jesus’ true mission, were the spiritually ‘blind” ones. Interestingly enough, the blind man is only the second human being in St. Mark’s Gospel to recognize who Jesus really was (St. Peter was first in Mark 8:29).
The title “Son of David” itself is rich with meaning. This title calls to mind the Messianic hopes of the Hebrew people. God’s promise to King David that “I will raise up your son after you … I will not remove my favor from him … your house and your throne shall endure forever before me” (2 Samuel 8: 12-16), was taken as an assurance that the Messiah would be an heir of David. By recognizing Jesus as the “Son of David,” Bartimaeus was seeing in him the agent of God’s promised restoration of his people, the promise heralded in this Sunday’s first reading from the Prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah exults, “Shout with joy for Jacob … the Lord has delivered his people … I will gather them from the ends of the world with the blind and the lame in their midst … they departed in tears, but I will console them and guide them …” (Jeremiah 31:7-9). God’s people may suffer for a time, but God promises that he will always raise them up again. Bartimaeus “saw” in Jesus the power to fulfill God’s promise in his own life. It is also interesting to note that the crowd seeks to silence the blind man. How often “the crowd,” both then and now, proves to be an obstacle to faith!
Jesus’ role, already glimpsed by Bartimaeus, is well explained in our second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews. The Letter to the Hebrews, written by an unknown author sometime between the years 70-90, is really not a letter at all but rather a lengthy sermon. The main theme of this sermon is that Jesus Christ is the new, eternal, perfect, and divine High Priest. All that was incomplete and lowly before Christ is now complete and exalted with his presence. In this Sunday’s passage, we read of certain key characteristics of the priesthood of Jesus Christ. First, we learn that “every high priest is taken from among men and made their representative before God” (Hebrews 5:1). Jesus Christ, as our great High Priest, represents and intercedes for humanity before the throne of his Eternal Father. He takes the imperfect sacrifice and obedience of humanity and completes it with his own perfect sacrifice (the cross) and obedience.
We further learn that Christ, even though he is perfect, “is able to deal patiently with the ignorant and erring, for he himself is beset by weakness” (Hebrews 5:2). Jesus Christ, being not only fully divine but also fully human, had a profound understanding of the temptations and trials faced by his people. He is, therefore, an advocate sympathetic to our weakness and failures, remaining patient with us and constantly encouraging us to turn back to his Heavenly Father.
The Letter to the Hebrews also teaches us that “it was not Christ who glorified himself in becoming high priest,” (Hebrews 5:5), but rather that “no one takes this honor upon himself but only when called by God” (Hebrews 5:4). Christ is our High Priest because he was commissioned by the Father, for he is not only humanity’s Representative before the Father, but the Father’s Representative and fullest Revelation before us. In the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, we truly have the fullest witness of the love and mercy of Almighty God.
That love and mercy was poured out upon the blind man in today’s Gospel. It is also offered constantly to all of humanity, calling us to turn away from sin, and to imitate the example of Bartimaeus. We are thus moved to be stalwarts of faith, placing our lives under divine guidance and crying out as humble sinners, “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on [us]!”
Msgr. Fell is a Scripture scholar and director, diocesan Office for Priest Personnel.