THREE Gospel verbs tumble one after another: “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” NIV breezily puts it: “Cheer up! On your feet! He’s calling you.”
Encouragement is a blessed gift when we receive it, a generous one when we impart it. Like many gospel virtues, it runs counter to the understandable caution of a person who is beset with dangers. “Courage, brother, do not stumble,” runs the hymn; all of us are prone to stumbling, but, if anyone is calling us “brother” or “sister”, we are, by definition, not facing hardship alone. For Bartimaeus, courage consisted of nothing more challenging than standing up.
Mark calls him a “blind beggar”. Taken straightforwardly, the words suggest simple physical blindness. But blindness can be more than physical: it can mean an inability to see the physical world, or a failure to perceive truth. Luke’s Jesus presents himself in the synagogue, promising recovery of sight to the blind — a message for everyone.
The language of blindness to express spiritual ignorance is the heart of the episode for many. Jesus can deliver us from darkness and bring us into the kingdom of light. But Bartimaeus is a beggar, as well as a blind man; and we need to take account of this, too.
His identity as a beggar is not purely literal, any more than his blindness is purely physical. True, Bartimaeus is unable to “see” a way forward. But he is also stuck in the lowliest imaginable status short of slavery. Indeed, slavery was a common solution to extreme poverty, which almost any person could take, if they had to, by selling themselves. They could choose to exchange personal autonomy for the security of food and shelter — for a chance to live another day. But Bartimaeus’s blindness closes off even that terrible choice; for it makes him valueless. He cannot even sell himself.
How has Bartimaeus managed to see what others cannot: that Jesus is the Messiah (“son of David”)? The only answer that we have is the one given by Jesus. It is his faith that has given him that spiritual sight; and it appears that this faith is also what allows Jesus to effect a healing miracle, bestowing physical sight to go with the spiritual insight. Spiritual and physical are yoked together — as many can attest who have been through serious illness and come out the other side, free from disease, but sometimes troubled, physically and spiritually, by what they have endured.
The posture of a beggar is usually a low one: crouching, seated, or even lying down. To be non-threatening is the first rule of the successful mendicant. The fact that sellers of The Big Issue stand up to ply their trade is a wordless demonstration of their equality with passers-by. They are not mendicants, but merchants. Standing up can convey parity of worth, because it enables us to look into the eyes of those who meet us.
When adults talk of “standing up” to bullies, the words come out easily, and the advice — from parent to child — is always well-meant. But it is not easy. It needs encouragement. To stand up is to make oneself conspicuous, like a male skylark drawing every eye (including the potential predator’s) as he soars dizzyingly in his remarkable song-flight. No wonder that the physical act of “standing up” slides into a metaphorical term for resisting evil.
Jesus did not heal every blind person in Galilee and Jerusalem. If he had, we would have heard about it. Bartimaeus found healing because he first found faith, which gave him spiritual insight, and because Jesus recognised that faith when he encountered him “on the way”. But, when others “stand up” to illness and affliction, they may meet instead with abuse, contempt, or (perhaps worse) indifference. Even those who share the faith of Bartimaeus may have to accept that the Lord is not healing them.
What is left to those who suffer ongoing physical disabilities, whether or not they are people of faith? “Cheer up!” is advice that can feel more like criticism. Better to tell someone to take heart, to “be of good courage”; for real courage is not wilful ignorance of danger, being in denial about fear. We can meet hard challenges, not with blind faith or optimism, but with a clear insight into the danger or risk at hand —and yet still choosing to “stand up”.