As Jesus was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a sizable crowd, Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus, sat by the roadside begging. On hearing that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me.” Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.” So they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.” He threw aside his cloak, sprang up, and came to Jesus. Jesus said to him in reply, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man replied to him, “Master, I want to see.” (Mark 10.46-47, 49-51)
In Trina Paulus’s 1972 book, Hope for the Flowers, often considered a children’s book but really a book about life for adults, Paulus pens a parable about two caterpillars, Stripe and Yellow, who seek the meaning of life. Watching as other caterpillars form a high pillar as one after another tries to climb to the top, a clear symbol for a world where most everybody wants to get to the top, Yellow decides it isn’t for her, so she descends the pile-on, choosing to spin a cocoon, eventually emerging as a butterfly that flies into the sky.
At some point, there is a conversation between Yellow, still a caterpillar, and a butterfly who has already emerged from his cocoon, “How does one become a butterfly,” Yellow asked pensively. The butterfly answers her, “You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar,” “You mean to die?” asked Yellow, remembering the three cocoons who fell out of the sky.
“Yes and No,” he answered. “What looks like you will die but what’s really you will still live.” He continues, “Life is changed, not taken away. Isn’t that different,” he asks Yellow, “from those who die without ever becoming butterflies?” Encouraged by these words, Yellow begins to spin her cocoon, her confidence in the butterfly before her, her hold onto the past loosened by her hopes for the future.
Meanwhile, the disillusioned Stripe climbs back down the pile, after having reached the top, only to see he still could not get into the sky. Yellow, now a beautiful butterfly, waits for Stripe to get back to the bottom and shows him her empty cocoon, urging him to abandon his fears so that he also might spin a cocoon, the first step to his becoming a butterfly like her. Then, together, they can fly into the sky.
That word “abandon” also plays an important role in the selection from Mark’s gospel that we read today, a word that, in truth, becomes a key part of every disciple’s life as he or she walks the road of discipleship. The scene that Mark presents in this passage is of a blind man that sits on the side of the road, begging passersby to throw coins or alms into his cloak that he has spread out before him.
The scene, not unusual then or even now, is unusual in Mark’s gospel only in that Mark provides us the name of the blind beggar, Bartimaeus, the only other named beneficiary of a miracle being Jairus, who appeared earlier in the text. Some speculate that Bartimaeus is named because he still was alive and active in the community when Mark wrote his gospel. Perhaps so.
As the scene unfolds, Rabbi Jesus is leaving Jericho, making his way to Jerusalem, some fifteen miles away. We have seen multiple times already how important “the way” is to Mark’s understanding of the Rabbi’s purpose, his path to Jerusalem leading to his persecution and crucifixion, his walk the way of suffering and dying, a reminder to all who follow in his footsteps that “the way” is one of self-sacrifice and suffering.
As he leaves Jericho, one of the oldest cities in Judea, a cry pierces the air, the words reaching Rabbi Jesus’ ears, “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me,” a familiar cry because the Rabbi has met many others on the way who cry out to him in their need. Stopping, he tells those around him to bring to him the blind man that has cried out to him. Here, as Bartimaeus stands, we are told that he “abandons his cloak, springs up, and comes to Jesus.”
Sometimes translated as “casting aside,” the word abandon, or apobalon in Greek, carries the full depth of Bartimaeus’ action, reminding us of when the first followers abandoned their nets to walk the way with Rabbi Jesus. As with the nets, so here. Bartimaeus abandons his means of livelihood, casting aside the cloak and casting his lot with Rabbi Jesus, Mark telling us that after Rabbi Jesus heals him Bartimaeus “followed Jesus on the way.”
Nor, for that matter, can we or should we ignore the stark contrast, probably intentional, between the blind man who abandons his cloak and the rich man we met just a few verses earlier who walks away from Rabbi Jesus when the Rabbi asked him to abandon his riches in order to follow him. While Bartimaeus casts aside his cloak, the rich man cannot cast aside his wealth, instead choosing to hold onto his possessions.
And in that contrast that Mark provides for us between these two men, we find another contrast, with the blind man seeing clearly while the visually unimpaired man cannot see clearly. The beggar puts his faith in Rabbi Jesus, abandoning his cloak; the rich man puts his faith in his possessions, refusing to abandon them. And in that reversal, we learn who really sees and who really doesn’t see.
Or, using again Paulus’ parable, the blind man “wants to fly so much that he is willing to give up being a caterpillar,” while the rich man, like the other caterpillars, chooses to stay with what he has, eventually “dying without ever becoming a butterfly.” Fearful of abandoning or casting aside the safety of life as it is, he will never know life as it might be were he able to let go of those things holding him back from making the change.
For Bartimaeus, as we have seen, it is his cloak that he must abandon, surely a ragged, dirty cloak, but still his primary means of sustenance, casting it aside so that he might walk the way of the Galilean Rabbi. The question that the example of Bartimaeus puts before us is whether or not we can abandon our cloak to do the same, to walk the way to Jerusalem with Rabbi Jesus.
Here, we ask ourselves what is our own cloak, that thing that stands between us and Rabbi Jesus, the thing we cannot abandon, but hold onto, preventing us from becoming a full follower of the Galilean, freed from our fears, fully committed to the path that he walks. Each of us has our own cloak that we hold tightly in our hands, unable or unwilling to abandon it as Bartimaeus did.
Years ago, the gifted preacher and Jesuit priest, Walter Burghardt, in one of his sermons, set the situation before his listeners in simple and stark terms. He said, “Essential to the pilgrimage is kenosis: you have to let go.” He explained, “For the journey to go forward, to move ahead, you have to let go of where you are now, so as to live more fully.”
Offering a myriad of examples, Burghardt said, “Whether it’s turning 21, 40, or 65; whether it’s losing your health or your hair, your looks or your lustiness, your money or your memory, a person you love or a possession you prize; whether it’s yesterday’s applause or today’s rapture; whether it’s as fleeting as Malibu’s surf or as abiding as God’s grace–you have to move on.”
Well aware of our reluctance or refusal to let go, he added, “It’s painful and it can be bloody. And so we hang on, we clutch our yesterdays like Linus’ blanket, we refuse to grow.” How rightly he describes our situation, Bartimaeus’ cast-off cloak a stark reminder of our own refusal to risk, our misplaced belief that our safety is in what we keep rather than in what we let go of.
As Mark tells the story of the Rabbi from Galilee, this was the last healing miracle that he performed. His eyes now set on Jerusalem, only a few miles away, he offered the blind man a new way of life, a new way of seeing. “Go your way. Your faith has made you well,” he tells Bartimaeus. Mark, succinct in what he wants us to take from this story, tells us, “Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus on the way.”
Unlike the rich man who could not follow on the way, Bartimaeus follows Jesus; and unlike the disciples who cannot see that the way of the disciple is the path of selflessness and sacrifice, Bartimaeus, his eyes opened spiritually as well as physically, sees that fullness of life comes, not to those who refuse to abandon their cloak, but to those who cast it away.
This same insight came to the writer Frederick Buechner who, writing in his book, A Room Called Remembered, offered this thought, “We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old. This,” he said, “seems to be close to the heart of that mystery. I know,” he wrote, “no more now than I ever did about the far side of death as the last letting-go of all, but I begin to know that I do not need to know and that I do not need to be afraid of not knowing.” As he said, “God knows. That is all that matters.”
For the follower of the Galilean, then, it is important that we learn the same lesson, allowing ourselves to become something new by ceasing to be something old, casting off our cocoon so that we can soar in the sky like butterflies, more alive than ever, fully absorbed into the way that the Rabbi walked, understanding now what he meant when he said, “Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
If we are ever to let go of our cloak, then it must be sooner rather than later, the longer we hold onto it the less easy it is to let go of it. We live in a culture that teaches us to take possession of things, not to let go of things. As a result, we, like the rich man, finding ourselves in that moment when the Galilean Rabbi asks us to abandon all for him, find it near to impossible to do, having little or no practice in letting go, but plenty of practice in accumulating and in amassing.
If we are to rise to the occasion, answering the Rabbi’s call to let go of all that holds us back from following him, then we must learn the art of letting go. And learning takes time and it takes practice. As one writer put it, “There is neither freedom nor real life without an apprenticeship in dispossession.” It is that apprenticeship that we undertake today, perhaps seeing clearly for the first time in our life the truth in those words.
Bartimaeus, a beggar and a blind man, had had just such an apprenticeship in dispossession. Forced to live on the side of the road, on the margins away from other men, without sight and without means, he had learned to dispossess himself of most everything. And so, when the moment of encounter with the Galilean Rabbi came, Bartimaeus, schooled for years in the art of letting go, abandoned his cloak, the only thing he had left to his name, following the Rabbi on the way to Jerusalem, faithful, not fearful, butterfly wings sprouting on his back with that first step into a new future.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 