St Mark is a great theological story teller. He tells stories with a moral and spiritual intelligence. He weaves together all his material to tell a particular kind of story about Jesus. But as with any great writer we have to be alert to what he is doing and hearing week by week little chunks of his gospel isn’t the best way to appreciate his skill as a story teller. One of his techniques is to make you think you’ve been here before. He does it with the two miracle stories of Jesus feeding large crowds. And he does it with the two stories in which a blind man is healed. And each time you have to look back on the things that have happened between each story to see what Mark is really getting at. So imagine you’re listening to a radio serial and have to be brought up to date with what has happened so far.
At Bethsaida Jesus took an unnamed blind man outside the village and healed him as it were in two stages. At first people seem to him like walking trees and only gradually does his vision come into clear focus. Then come two events in which Jesus seems to come much more clearly into focus for the disciples. Peter acknowledges him as the Messiah and then he and James and John witness Jesus transfigured by the light of God on the mountain top. But then things seem to go wrong. The disciples can’t heal a paralytic child; they argue about which of them is the greatest; they turn away children and get huffy with someone who isn’t part of their group but is healing people in Jesus’ name; and then James and John come and ask if they can have the best seats nearest to Jesus in the kingdom. It’s obvious that the disciples aren’t seeing clearly. And so they come to Jericho. Ahead of them is the road up through steep, barren and dangerous hill country to Jerusalem. And as they start out on that road a second blind man appears.
The details of the ensuing story have a special resonance for Mark. This blind man is named Bartimaeus. The friends of the first blind man ask for Jesus’ help. This man seems to have no friends. When he calls out the crowd tells him to shut up. But when he does call out, he is the first person in the gospel to address Jesus as, Son of David.’ It’s a dangerous name perhaps that’s why the crowd tries to silence him. It’s a political title. It’s a way of addressing a potential king who isn’t Caesar or Herod. But Bartimaeus wont be silenced he calls out again, Son of David have mercy.’ Jesus seems not to be worried. He calls him. The crowd relaxes. Well if Jesus doesn’t mind and they encourage the blind man to get up. He does so, casting aside the old cloak which he would normally spread out to receive alms from pilgrims going up to Jerusalem. It’s a confident move. Jesus asks what he wants. One would have thought it was obvious. But to say what you really want is a test of faith. Master that I may receive my sight.’
Jesus responds with familiar words, Go, your faith has made you well.’ But Bartimaeus does not go. Immediately he received his sight he followed Jesus on the way.’ And it is that sentence which is so resonant for Mark. The last recorded healing in his gospel tells of a man whose sight has been restored and who follows Jesus on the way. Christians were subsequently called followers of the way.’ Bartimaeus’ restored sight is a special sight. Is he now ready to see are we Mark’s readers ready to see what the disciples have clearly closed their eyes to? To be able to follow the way of Jesus is going to take special sight, special attention, close and painful observation. To understand the Son of David who will be crucified and rise again, requires a cleansed imagination. The hearers of Mark’s gospel have been given a new prayer; Master, that I may receive my sight.
Eyes have been in the news a lot recently. Eyes looking at us through the narrow slit of a veil; women who feel the need to be protected from a certain kind of male gaze; eyes that want to be able to look you full in the face to be able to talk to you or be taught by you.
The ancient world believed that the eyes were the lamp of the body. As Jesus says, If your eye is sound your whole body will be full of light.’ What we look at and how we look at it, how we perceive and treat human beauty, how we wish to be seen, how we look into each others eyes or avoid each others gaze is not a subject much talked about, but it seems to me fundamental if we are to get behind some of the current tensions in our society. On the one side of the divide is a religious fear of the way in which western eyes look at bodies; that looking is cultivated by fashion, advertising, the media, and the film industry. We may make jokes about Victorians covering up table legs in embarrassment, but modesty has become an alien concept in a society obsessed with looking young and showing it, a society capable of coining the phrase eye candy’. On the other side of the divide is a secular fear of what is different, or appears to be different; a fear of what looks like ostentatious religion and a type of behaviour that doesn’t seem to conform with what we take for granted.
Of course there are greater complexities than these. There are legitimate questions to be asked about the way women are treated in Islam; but the agenda for those questions has to be set from within Islam and not by a liberal western culture that refuses to look at its own treatment of female and male bodies and its neglect of the spirit and the person within.
If Bartimaeus goes up to Jerusalem and stays there to follow the story of Jesus he will witness the moment when Pilate displays the beaten, bloody and nearly naked body of Jesus crowned with thorns and draped in a purple robe. And Pilate will say, Behold the man.’ It will require a special seeing from Bartimaeus and all the disciples to find in that figure the true humanity that is in us all, seen and loved and valued by God whatever we do to ourselves or one another, however we see ourselves or one another. We might add to Bartimaeus’ prayer the familiar medieval prayer: God be in my head and in my understanding; God be in mine eyes and in my looking.’