The Way of Healing and Restoration to Community

Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate.

If you’re just joining in this eight-week series on the ways of Jesus, the central question that we’re pursuing in this series of sermons is this: How is our life together—here and now—anchored and animated by the work and the witness that Jesus continues to call us into? We’re doing this by looking at the major themes of Jesus’ life and witness and the things that he did throughout the gospels. Tonight, we lean in closely to passages that reflect one of the most ubiquitous themes of Jesus’s ministry: healing.

It's a constant feature of Jesus's ministry throughout the gospels with enough stories to fill a year of sermons. But this is the one that I'd like to land on for a few minutes together tonight. It comes from Mark chapter 10, and I'm gonna read New Testament scholar Eugene Boring's translation of this passage. It goes like this:

And they're coming to Jericho, and as he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, the son of Timaeus, Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting beside the way. And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, "Son of David, Jesus, have mercy on me." And many were giving him stern orders to be quiet, but he was crying out all the more, "Son of David, have mercy on me." And Jesus stopped and said, "Call him." And they called the blind man, saying, "Take courage, rise up, he's calling you." And he threw aside his cloak, sprang to his feet, and came to Jesus. And Jesus said to him, "What do you want me to do for you?" And the blind man said to him, "Rabboni," which is a heightened form of the word rabbi, meaning "my teacher," "Rabbi, I want to see." And Jesus said to him, "Go, your faith has saved you." And immediately he received his sight and was following him on the way.

By the time they were leaving Jericho, a large crowd had gathered around Jesus. They were roaming through the streets, following Jesus and the disciples from one place to the next. And over all the noise that a crowd naturally produces, one singular voice rises above the others: "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me." If you had been following Jesus around the countryside through the pages of Mark's gospel, you might be tired of people crying out for help from Jesus, too.

From one place to the next, a person in need here, another clamoring for attention there. From town to town, city to city. Day after day, by the time you get through ten chapters worth of miracles and healings and casting out unclean spirits and raising the dead to life, no one pays much attention to a blind man sitting on his coat, begging on the side of the road, shouting for Jesus to stop. Many sternly ordered him to be quiet. The crowds attempted to silence him.

Now, more than perhaps any other time in our collective life, together we know what that cry is about. This week, we heard Bishop Mariann Budde and the Washington National Cathedral make a very similar plea, only on behalf of others rather than herself. As she preached to a congregation that included the newly sworn-in president and vice president of the United States, she ended her sermon saying, in part, "In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land."

Representative Mike Collins tweeted that the bishop should be added to the deportation list for her sermon. Congressman Josh Brecheen introduced a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives condemning the bishop's sermon that read, "It is the sense of the House of Representatives that the sermon was the display of political activism, and the House of Representatives condemns the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde's distorted message." The president's midnight missive demanded an apology from the bishop and from the cathedral, calling the bishop's sermon "ungracious, nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart."

I preached another sermon back in November, but I'm gonna remind you of this sermon tonight because I think it hits home more now than it did a month ago. When we start to care for each other, when we begin to rescue one another, the state sees that type of communal care as a threat, and capitalism needs a disposable class of people. So all the myths we learn about ourselves and all the stories we tell about our neighbors suggest that the neighbors are to be feared and that the fates of others are in no way linked to our own fate. All of that is meant to strengthen myths of rugged individualism, self-sufficient autonomy, and the disposability of those who can't make it on their own. When those myths are challenged by organizing toward mutuality and communal care, or even by a simple plea for mercy, they are silenced or crushed or both. Now you see it.

The state criminalizes caring for people when care becomes an act of radical resistance to the politics of abandonment and disposability. Even churches are now subject to ICE raids and the detainment of undocumented worshipers. I need you to remember this as we move into the years ahead. Care. Care is a radical and revolutionary act in an era of cruelty and violence.

In Jesus' day and in ours, voices that cried out for mercy were routinely ignored, condemned, silenced by force if necessary, and no one, not one person, spoke up for Bartimaeus. Don't forget that detail in the text. No friends brought him to Jesus, as in other stories we read in the gospels. No one said, "Hey, hey, over here, look at him." No one stopped to console him as Jesus seemed to be passing by, not noticing him at all. They just said, "Would you please shut up?"

But not allowing the crowd to silence his voice or impose anonymity upon him, he cried out more loudly, "Son of David, have mercy on me." Now this is something we'd miss if we don't pay careful attention. "Son of David, have mercy" is a type of lament that names something about Jesus that no one else has named in the Gospel of Mark to this point, except for Peter, sort of the chief disciple. And it's pretty clear in the way Mark writes it that Peter doesn't actually even know what he's saying. Bartimaeus is the first person to make this kind of christological claim about Jesus's identity, and he does it in a way that's much more subversive than we first recognize. His insight into Jesus' identity as Christ also implicates Jesus in his unwillingness to stop and heed his cry for lament for mercy because Jesus too was going to pass by him.

The title itself, "Son of David," harkens to David's literal son in the Old Testament, Solomon, and some Jewish traditions about Solomon around this time associated him with healings and exorcisms. In one of those Jewish writings about Solomon, we even get the phrase, "Solomon's son of David, have mercy on me." So you see what Bartimaeus is doing here with this phrase, with this claim about Jesus's identity. He's not only naming something about Jesus's messianic identity that no one else but Peter has named—and even Peter seems a little unclear about what it meant—but Bartimaeus is also calling out Jesus's identity as a healing figure with the title "Son of David."

And he does not get quieter as the crowd pressures his silence, but he gets louder, more disruptive, more difficult to ignore. His disruptive, subversive voice isn't lost in the noise of the crowd, and Jesus finally stops. He says, "Call him." And they called the blind man, saying to him, "Take courage, rise up, he's calling you." And he threw aside his cloak, sprang to his feet, and came to Jesus. Jesus said to him, "What do you want me to do for you?" Notice this: Bartimaeus makes no claim for his worthiness, gives no reasons for his condition, offers no explanation for his request. He only asks Jesus for mercy. And when he is asked for more detail, he asks to see again.

Now, here's where it gets tricky. We've read this passage and others like it for centuries, focusing on Jesus as the main character of the story and on the healing miracle as the point of the story. This is how we tame a text. But I'm going to suggest to you that we've been misguided in those readings. Neither Jesus nor the healing miracle are the central elements of this story, and when they become so in our preaching and teaching, we miss some vital things about this passage.

First, we miss the blatant fact that Bartimaeus is a partner with Jesus in his own healing. Without his agency, there would have been no healing because Jesus wouldn't have stopped without his tenacity and determination not to be silenced. The crowds would've overcome his voice and his will. Bartimaeus is the protagonist in the story, and when the miracle occurs, and his sight is restored, it's almost a footnote in the story. Did Jesus wave his hands around Bartimaeus' face? Did he say some prayers or magic words? Did he spit in his eyes, hit him on the head, or give him butterfly kisses? We don't know because the text never describes the miracle itself, nor does it describe the crowd's reaction to witnessing it. Don't you imagine if the point of the story was Jesus performing this cure of Bartimaeus' blindness, that it might be given more than a half verse's worth of treatment in the text? Instead, the text immediately puts the focus back on Bartimaeus. Jesus said to him, "Go, your faith has saved you," and immediately he receives his sight. That's it.

Much like Jesus in the text that Debbie preached last week on the healing of the Syrophoenician woman's daughter, Jesus in this text too is acted upon by someone on the margins of his life, someone that it would've been easy for him to have ignored, someone he seemed perfectly content to pass by along with the crowd at first as he continues walking by and Bartimaeus is calling out for him.

Disability theologian Erin Rafferty says there would be no story of transformation without Bartimaeus’s crying out. There would be no transformation without Bartimaeus pushing and prodding Jesus. She says we see a Jesus who decenters himself by calling Bartimaeus to him, dialoguing with him, and extolling his faith. We see a Jesus who understands disability ministry as a ministry of justice in which disabled people play a central role.

Bartimaeus is the protagonist in his own healing narrative. If we are going to identify with Jesus in this text, then the text pushes us to ask of ourselves—the church—where we have failed to listen to the calls of lament and cries for mercy from those around us. What else we miss when we place the spotlight solely on Jesus as the wonder-working healer and believe the point of the story is the miracle of sight restored is the difference in this text and so many others like it between a cure for an ailment and healing of a whole person.

In her book, My Body Is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church, Amy Kenny offers a framework for reading the healing narratives in the gospels that shifts from a focus of curing to a focus on healing. Kenny describes the painful encounters she has endured in her church communities over the years when people have foisted Jesus-inflected understandings of her own disability upon her in the guise of prayer or care or encouragement. She says, "I wish I could be more than my diagnosis, more than a problem in need of fixing, as if my disability is only valuable if converted into a cure." She talks about the ways that these well-meaning but ultimately harmful ways of seeing her as a disabled person in the church are rooted in readings of the gospel's healing narratives.

She says, "On repeat, they applaud the stories where Jesus healed a disabled outcast like me without stopping to consider that curing bodies and healing lives are not the same thing." Curing, she says, is a physical process—individual, quick, focused on eliminating a disease. Healing, on the other hand, is a sociocultural process. She says it focuses on restoring interpersonal, social, and spiritual dimensions. It's lengthy and ongoing because it's a process of becoming whole.

Rafferty adds to interpret the miracle in the text then as the restoration of Bartimaeus' sight is to miss the profound impact of his social exclusion or the way the two are bound up with one another. We’ll look at more texts like this in the Bible study this week, where the healing miracle is followed by someone's restoration into the community that they have been cut off from. The miracle, the healing that is taking place in the text, isn't actually done when the cure is arrived upon. The next movement is healing the wholeness of that person's life in community.

Healing is a transformative process that seeks to make someone whole—non-linear, time-intensive. Healing isn't about fixing, it is about restoring. In fact, even the word here in the passage when Jesus says, "Go, your faith has saved you," or "Go, your faith has made you well," is a word much richer than our English translations ever convey. It is a word that Eugene Boring says connotes deliverance from the enemies of life that threaten authentic existence. That is what is bound up in this word "saved you" or "made you well"—deliverance from the enemies of life that threaten authentic existence.

Amy Kenny goes on to say, when we approach life with a healing mindset instead of a curing mindset, we invest in the flourishing of our neighbors and open ourselves up to all kinds of possibilities that we never thought possible.

Friends, we've witnessed a barrage of bad news this week, news that we know will translate into suffering and even death for many in our own communities. It doesn't get easier from here. When cries for mercy are met with cruelty and scorn from politicians—and even many Christians in the US believe that those words are derived from a radical leftist agenda rather than the sermons of Jesus himself—we are in need of a genuine revival of the church in the way of Jesus, and it won't come with winning arguments, correcting doctrine, better church attendance, or bigger budgets.

The revival, the rebirth, the transformation of the church will come when we invest in the flourishing of our neighbors and open ourselves up to all kinds of possibilities that we never thought possible. The life of our church will be anchored and animated in the ways of Jesus when we commit ourselves to a ministry of deliverance from the enemies of life that threaten authentic existence for us and for our neighbors. When we, like Jesus, finally hear the cries for mercy calling out for us to stop, and we ask genuinely, "What can we do to contribute to your healing and wholeness?" Until then, the subversive cries of lament continue to resound over the chaos and cruelty of the present moment. Jesus, son of David, have mercy.