THREE Gospel verbs tumble one after one other: “Take heart; stand up, he is looking you.” NIV breezily puts it: “Cheer up! On your feet! He’s calling you.”
Encouragement is a blessed gift once we receive it, a generous one once we impart it. Like many gospel virtues, it runs counter to the comprehensible caution of a one that is beset with dangers. “Courage, brother, don’t stumble,” runs the hymn; all of us are liable to stumbling, but, if anyone is looking us “brother” or “sister”, we’re, by definition, not facing hardship alone. For Bartimaeus, courage consisted of nothing tougher than standing up.
Mark calls him a “blind beggar”. Taken straightforwardly, the words suggest easy physical blindness. But blindness might be greater than physical: it could mean an inability to see the physical world, or a failure to perceive truth. Luke’s Jesus presents himself within the synagogue, promising recovery of sight to the blind — a message for everybody.
The language of blindness to specific spiritual ignorance is the guts of the episode for a lot of. Jesus can deliver us from darkness and convey us into the dominion of sunshine. But Bartimaeus is a beggar, in addition to a blind man; and we want to take account of this, too.
His identity as a beggar will not be purely literal, any greater than his blindness is solely physical. True, Bartimaeus is unable to “see” a way forward. But he can be stuck within the lowliest possible status wanting slavery. Indeed, slavery was a standard solution to extreme poverty, which just about any person could take, in the event that they needed to, by selling themselves. They could decide to exchange personal autonomy for the safety of food and shelter — for a probability to live one other day. But Bartimaeus’s blindness closes off even that terrible alternative; 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’ve got is the one given by Jesus. It is his faith that has given him that spiritual sight; and it seems that this faith can be what allows Jesus to effect a healing miracle, bestowing physical sight to go together with the spiritual insight. Spiritual and physical are yoked together — as many can attest who’ve been through serious illness and are available out the opposite side, free from disease, but sometimes troubled, physically and spiritually, by what they’ve endured.
The posture of a beggar is generally a low one: crouching, seated, and even lying down. To be non-threatening is the primary rule of the successful mendicant. The proven fact that sellers of The Big Issue rise up to ply their trade is a wordless demonstration of their equality with passers-by. They will not be mendicants, but merchants. Standing up can convey parity of price, since it enables us to look into the eyes of those that meet us.
When adults talk of “standing up” to bullies, the words come out easily, and the recommendation — from parent to child — is at all times well-meant. But it will not be easy. It needs encouragement. To rise 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 right into a metaphorical term for resisting evil.
Jesus didn’t heal every blind person in Galilee and Jerusalem. If he had, we might have heard about it. Bartimaeus found healing because he first found faith, which gave him spiritual insight, and since Jesus recognised that faith when he encountered him “on the best way”. But, when others “rise up” to illness and affliction, they could meet as an alternative with abuse, contempt, or (perhaps worse) indifference. Even those that share the religion of Bartimaeus could have to simply accept that the Lord will not be healing them.
What is left to those that suffer ongoing physical disabilities, whether or not they’re people of religion? “Cheer up!” is advice that may feel more like criticism. Better to inform someone to take heart, to “be of fine courage”; for real courage will not be wilful ignorance of danger, being in denial about fear. We can meet hard challenges, not with blind faith or optimism, but with a transparent insight into the danger or risk at hand —and yet still selecting to “rise up”.
