Job 42.1-6, 10-17; Psalm 34; Hebrews 7.23-28; Mark 10.46-52
The key theme in today’s lectionary readings is that of passage or transformation. Passage from a place—variously described—of ignorance, fear or blindness to a place of repentance, trust and the enlightened following of Christ.
Over the past few weeks we have been reading about Job. Here, at the very end of the book, God finally speaks up to cut through the ignorant speculations of Job’s advisors. The response of Job to this rather spectacular intervention is recorded in the verses we read:
Who is it that obscures your counsel without
knowledge? Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful
for me to know. You said ‘Listen now and I will question you, and you shall
answer me’. My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I
despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.
The passage traversed here by Job is not the classical Greek journey from apparent knowledge, through ignorance, to ‘true’ knowledge. It is not that Job thought he knew about divine things, but then was shown some secret knowledge or mystery which gave him the key to understand what God was on about in a brand new way. Not at all. Job’s passage is from apparent knowledge, through ignorance, to repentance. A crucial difference, that. Not to ‘true’ knowledge but to repentance. The point of this last chapter in Job is not that he has a beatific vision of God that unveils for him the meaning of everything, but that Job has a vision of God that uncovers precisely nothing, nada, nihil. That is the paradox of this final vision. God reveals Godself, certainly, Job is given to ‘see’ things that he had only heard about up until the moment in question, but the God so revealed is one who cannot be mapped, contained or domesticated within the strictures of human thinking or imagining.
The ‘repentance’ of Job represents, therefore, an acknowledgement of this fact. ‘My eyes have seen you . . . therefore I repent in dust and ashes’. Dust and ashes is apparently all that remains of Job’s apparent knowledge and insight into God’s ways. That Job’s fortunes are then immediately restored, and doubly so, should not therefore be read as some kind of reward for Job’s new-found insight, a classically Greek restoration of equilibrium because of the hard work of the hero in order to restore order from chaos. On the contrary, the restoration is a gift. It comes without antecedent or reason. It cannot be inferred or deduced from anything that comes before. It is sheer grace, the very opposite of that karmic worldview which is obsessed with buying the favour of the gods through the performances of virtue and knowledge. In Job, the abundance of the final restoration represents, by contrast, the sheer grace of the divine toward everyone who repents of such ambitions.
When we turn to the gospel text, a very similar rite of passage or transformation unfolds, a passage that may be characterised as the movement from karmic blindness to Christian discipleship. The gospel stories are highly symbolic. They should not be read primarily as history in the modern sense, although they certain contain such history. Thus, this story of a blind man encountered and healed by Jesus on the road from Jericho probably does have a historical core. But Mark takes this core and turns it into an occasion for preaching about the path one must take to become a true disciple of Jesus Christ.
That this is so becomes clear when we consider the name of the blind man. It is Bartimaeus—the ‘son’, Mark is careful to underline, of ‘Timaeus’. Now Timaeus is not a semitic name, it is neither Aramaic nor Hebrew. It is Roman. So we know immediately that this man represents not the people of Israel, but another population of the lost, namely the Gentiles, citizens of the wider Roman empire which, at this time, is overwhelmingly karmic in the sense we have begun to describe.
That Mark is not particularly impressed with such ideas is clear from his story. For here we find Bartimaeus, surely a ‘son’ or ‘disciple’ of Timaeus, in a very bad way! His careful following of the way of his philosophical father—the way of virtue, industry and knowledge—has not, in fact, led to enlightenment or a superior station in life, but only to ‘blindness’ and economic poverty. In fact, he is a beggar who has reached, as it were, the very bottom of life’s barrel. And he has done so a very long way from where he thought he might be by now, living on the very margins of this barbaric town he must now call home, Jericho.
Now it’s a funny place, the bottom of the barrel. It is a place where things can suddenly become very clear in a way that they have never been before. It is the place where many an addict, for example, recognises that they have been kidding themselves, and will probably continue to kid themselves to death unless . . . unless they get some help from somebody else, some other who can intervene on their behalf and give them a hand. And that is exactly what this former disciple of Timaeus does. Having recognised that the path of the self-made man has taken him nowhere fast, he cries out for help. That Bartimaeus was very, very desperate is clear from his willingness to seek the help of one whom his philosophical masters would certainly have regarded as a complete ignoramus, a Philistine or Cretan even, namely the Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth. ‘Son of David, have mercy on me’ he cries out, and not very timidly. On the lips of the historical blind beggar, the term ‘Son of David’ would probably have meant little more than ‘hey, Jewish person’. But in Mark’s story it takes on the character of a nascent step of faith towards a very new God. It means ‘Hey Jesus, anointed one of God, Messiah, have mercy on me’. There is a recognition, here, that the way of his philosophical master—the way of Timaeus—has come to nothing but blindness and poverty. There is a recognition here, that Bartimaeus needs a rather different kind of God than that offered by the Roman philosophical tradition, a god who sits impervious in the distant heavens and waits for us to earn our way to his footstool. He needs, instead, the God of Jews and Christians, a God who is gracious and loving, a saviour and healer who meets us where we are, in the midst of our troubles, and actually helps. And so he cries out to Jesus time and time again, even when he is told by the frankly racist crowd to shut up.
What happens, of course, is that Jesus responds. He ‘calls’ Bartimaeus to come. This ‘calling’ is something that only the God of the Jews does. It is the way in which the God of the Jews creates his people Israel, his chosen people, his covenant people. Not on the basis of their deserving industriousness, virtue or knowledge, but on the basis of God’s free choosing and grace. So when Jesus ‘calls’ Bartimaeus, he is saying ‘come, be part of the community of God’s calling, the people who know God’s grace and favour, the people to whom God has given God’s very self.’ When Bartimaeus responds to the call by indeed coming to Jesus, Jesus immediately acts to heal him, to take away his karmic myopia and gift him with the chance to take a rather different route in life.
It is important to note that the Greek word for ‘heal’ is the same as the Greek word for ‘save’. Jesus heals the man of his disease, that is to say, but in so doing also ‘saves’ him from the karmic chains in which he is bound so that he can experience, for the very first time, that reality we call the ‘grace of God’, that is, God’s unmerited favour and love. Note, also, that Jesus tells the man that it is his ‘faith’ that has saved him. ‘Faith’ mind you, not virtue or industriousness or knowledge. For faith, in the Christian tradition is basically about trusting someone else with our lives, trusting Jesus the son of God. It is the opposite of trusting in our own selves, in our own virtue, work or knowledge. It is about trusting that someone else’s virtue, work and knowledge—the virtue, work and knowledge of Jesus Christ—is able to save us. The story ends with the man following Jesus along the road to Jerusalem, an image of true discipleship if ever there was one.
Now, what are we to make of these stories today, in the midst of our own world? Well, simply this, I suggest: that we are as likely as Job or Bartimaeus to be enslaved by the laws of karma so beloved by the author of the Timaeus. While the philosophy of the ancient world is rarely read anymore, its basic message nevertheless permeates our society at every level. Day by day, in popular culture or high culture, on the television or at the museum, we are bombarded by a philosophy that proclaims that our purpose in life is to ascend some kind of pecking-order, to better ourselves through virtue, industriousness and knowledge. Some versions of this philosophy are purely materialistic, and measure the desired-for ascent in purely materialistic ways, like how prestigious your job is or how big a house or holiday your income will buy you. Other forms are more ‘spiritual’, explicitly proclaiming the potential divinisation of the human self through various paths of virtue, self-discipline or self-knowledge. These range from the ‘neo-buddhist’ and the ‘new age’ through to versions of ‘Christianity’ which emphasise a need for human beings to save themselves. This possibility was probably revived, ironically enough, with the subversion of Christianity by capitalism. When Max Weber toured northern Europe and America at the turning of the 20th century, he noticed that it was the ‘protestant’ countries that were succeeding the most in economic terms. He proposed that there was a ‘Protestant work ethic’ that made this possible. Protestants worked harder than atheists or Catholics because they lived to work rather than working to live. The irony here is that this ‘ethic’ is as far from the foundations of the reformed faith as one can get. The reformers wanted to protest what they saw as a subversion of God’s grace in Catholic thought and practise, the tendency in medieval Catholicism to grant salvation only to those who were able to satisfy the church’s harsh conditions and demands.
The good news for us today is the same good news that revolutionised the ancient Roman world and gave rise to the Reformation. That God does not treat us as we apparently deserve to be treated, that the favour of God is not conditional upon our capacity to be good, or industrious or knowledgeable. That God simply loves us, and has acted to save us from our misguided attempts at saving ourselves in Jesus Christ. For in Christ we can throw ourselves upon the mercy of God and find that God has accepted us and welcomed us into God’s family or commonwealth no matter what we have done or what we think we know. I, at least, find that to be very good news indeed, not least because I feel that I am simply unable to ‘come up to scratch’ in ways that this society and culture can recognise as ‘successful’. Perhaps you do as well! In the welcome and grace of God I feel that I am loved, accepted, and valued. And I need that more than I can say.
Garry Worete Deverell
First preached at Monash Uniting Church on the 30th Sunday in ordinary time, 2012.
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