“Isn’t It Obvious?”

A sermon by Dr. Jim Somerville, Pastor
Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
October 25, 2009

Mark 10:46-52

          One of the liabilities of the preaching profession is that you begin to look at the whole world as sermon material.  You clip an article from the morning newspaper and file it away thinking, “That’ll preach!”  You jot down some notes after a conversation at the hardware store thinking, “That’ll preach!”  You wipe a tear from your eye in the privacy of a darkened movie theater thinking, “That’ll preach!”  And if you read the Gospels you see that Jesus suffered from this same affliction.  “Look at the birds of the air!” he said.  They’ll preach.  “Consider the lilies of the field!” They’ll preach, too.  Mustard seeds, fig trees, pearls, and prodigal sons: in the mind of the preacher they all become sermon material.  It happened to me the last time I preached on the blind Bartimaeus passage.  I was pastor of the First Baptist Church of Washington, DC, in those days, and in my notes on that sermon I found this:

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I think I saw Bartimaeus last Thursday afternoon.  I was driving home through the Adams-Morgan neighborhood and there he was, at the intersection of 18^th Street and Columbia Road, standing in front of McDonald’s.  He was wearing sunglasses and an old, felt hat.  He had a white cane in one hand and a handful of change in the other.  It was a warm day.  I had my windows rolled down.  And I could hear him shaking that handful of change, making the coins clink, hoping to arouse someone’s generosity.  I did a double take because I had just been thinking about Bartimaeus and there he was, or someone very much like him.  As I drove by the whole story began to play itself out in my mind:

Blind Bartimaeus: the DC version.

          In this version Jesus wasn’t going from Jericho up to Jerusalem, but from Adams-Morgan over to Capitol Hill.  He and his disciples had spent the night in Rock Creek Park and they were moving slowly, their joints stiff and aching from sleeping on the cold ground.  But the morning sun was shining and they could feel the warmth seeping back into their bodies, the blood starting to pump.  They stopped in at McDonald’s for coffee and while they were there people started whispering:  “Isn’t that him?  Isn’t that Jesus?”  Within minutes a big crowd had gathered, even at that time of morning, and they started pushing and shoving to get a better look.  Bartimaeus asked what was going on and someone told him:  “It’s Jesus!”

          That was all it took.       

          Bartimaeus had heard about Jesus.  He had heard that he fed five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two little fish, that he cured a leper, walked on water!  But more importantly, that he had healed a blind man.  The way Bartimaeus heard the story Jesus had led the man away from the crowd, spit on his fingertips and touched the man’s eyes, and then asked him if he could see anything.  At first he said he could see people, but they “looked like trees walking around.”  So Jesus touched his eyes again and this time he could see everything clearly.  Everything!  Clearly!  Bartimaeus had gone over that story again and again, worked the details over in his mind the way he clinked those coins in his hand.  And now here was that same Jesus, right here in McDonald’s.

          “Jesus?” he said, struggling to believe it.  “Jesus!?!” 

          “Yes,” someone said, annoyed.  “It’s Jesus.  Now hush!”

          But Bartimaeus wouldn’t hush.  He knew this might be the only chance he would ever have.  He began to shout at the top of his lungs, begging Jesus to have mercy on him.  He banged on the plate glass windows with his stick, he waved his arms and yelled, he tried to force his way inside.  The people standing around him began to tell him to be quiet, some began to shove him roughly away from the door.  But that only made it worse.  Afraid that he wouldn’t get to see Jesus at all he began to swing his stick around like a lunatic, threatening to crack some skulls while he continued to yell for mercy.  People were ducking and running for cover.  The manager called 9-1-1.  Jesus, of course, was taking in the whole scene from a table near the front of the restaurant.

          “Bring him here,” he said at last.

          “What?”

          “Bring him here.”

          By this time a couple of burly police officers had succeeded in dragging Bartimaeus away from the door.  They were hauling him off down 18^th Street when the disciples called them back.  “It’s OK,” they said.  “He’s asking for him.”  When the police let him go Bartimaeus jumped to his feet and ran back up the street, bumping into people along the way, and banging his forehead against the door.  He yanked his hat off, threw it down, and rubbed the spot on his head before a couple of the disciples hooked their arms in his and led him to Jesus.  He stood there gasping for breath and trembling, trying to steady himself with his cane.  Everything was suddenly quiet, everyone watching to see what would happen.  You could have heard a French fry drop.  Jesus looked Bartimaeus up and down and then asked:

          “What do you want me to do for you?”

          Bartimaeus was surprised by the question.  I mean, wasn’t it obvious?  The dark glasses, the white cane, the rising lump on his forehead?  He reached up with a trembling hand and took off his glasses so that Jesus could get a good look at his sightless eyes rolling in their sockets.

“Please,” he said, begging.  “I want to see again.”

And then he waited to hear Jesus spit on his fingers, waited to feel him touch his eyes, but instead Jesus just said, “Go.  Your faith has made you well.”  And that’s when it happened.  That’s when the flash of light exploded inside his head, that’s when a kaleidoscope of colors tumbled and fell into recognizable shapes and patterns, that’s when he saw Jesus sitting in front of him, sipping coffee out of a styrofoam cup.  For the longest time he just stood there and stared, his eyes focused, his vision clear.  He wanted to burn the image of this man on his brain forever like a photograph. But Jesus finished his coffee, nodded to his disciples, and they all got up to go.  When they moved toward the door Bartimaeus found himself moving with them, and when they turned right on Columbia Road toward 16^th Street, Bartimaeus followed.  How could he do anything else?  This was the man who had given him his sight back, and what if that were only the beginning?  The crowd emptied out of McDonald’s, moved on down the street behind Jesus, and the manager—suddenly alone in his restaurant—bent down to pick up an abandoned cane and a pair of dark glasses.

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          Of course that’s not exactly the way Mark tells the story, but that’s the way he might have told it if it had happened in Washington last week.  And what I’ve noticed about this story in the re-telling is the apparent absurdity of Jesus’ question: “What do you want me to do for you?”  I mean, isn’t it obvious?  There’s a blind man standing in front of him.  What else could he want but to see?  But what I’ve learned in my years of ministry is that our deepest needs are not always our most obvious ones.  For instance, when someone comes by the office to talk to me I will usually ask (as Jesus did), “What can I do for you?” And usually the person will say something like, “Well, I’ve been under a lot of stress at work lately.”  But while the relief of stress may be the most obvious need, it is almost never the deepest need.  As we talk he tells me about how hard he’s been working and how much he wants to succeed.  And then, suddenly, the tears are flowing and he’s telling me how he just wants his father to be proud of him.  As I hand him a tissue he says, “He never came to any of my Little League games.  Not even one!”

          The relief of stress may be his most obvious need, but what is not immediately obvious is how he’s been trying to use this job as one more way to win his father’s love, as he has tried so many other things—unsuccessfully—for the last twenty years.  Behind all that frantic effort at work is a boy with a broken heart.  If he knew that his father loved him the whole situation might be transformed.  He might be free to work without the fear of failure, or to give up that job altogether for something he had always dreamed of doing—taking flying lessons, working in a bakery, joining the Peace Corps.

          “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks, and it would serve us well to dig down deep for the answer to that question.  There are the obvious things, of course, but there are the other things that aren’t so obvious.  When you ask the homeless man on the corner what he wants he will say he wants a few dollars to get some food, but after he’s had some food what does he want?  Well, maybe a hot shower, and a clean, dry place to sleep.  Fine, but after that what?  Maybe some clothes to wear, a job to go to, some self-respect.  OK, but then what?  Do you see how it is?  When the obvious need is met another need emerges, and then another, and then another, and eventually you get to those needs that are not obvious at all, but may render all the other needs superfluous.  Who knows?  If we had enough love in our lives, enough laughter, enough grace…we might find that we didn’t need anything else.

          In a novel called How to Be Good Nick Hornsby writes about a woman named Kate who became a doctor because she wanted to do good.  But when her therapist begins to ask why that’s so important to her he challenges her to think about those things she feels guilty about.  Without thinking very hard Kate is able to come up with five things: abandoning her home (even if it’s only for a few hours each night), cheating on her husband (even if she thinks he deserves it), neglecting her parents, her patients, and her children (in that order).  At the end of her list she lets out a sigh, and even though she is a confirmed agnostic she says, “When I look at my sins (and if I think they’re sins, then they are sins), I can see the appeal of born-again Christianity.  I suspect that it’s not Christianity that is so alluring: it’s the rebirth.  Because who wouldn’t want to start all over again?”[1]  I doubt that many of the good doctor’s friends would have suggested that what she really needed was to be born again, but maybe it’s there in all of us, down deep, a need that makes all the others seem like nothing.

          In another story from the Gospel of Mark four friends bring a paralytic to Jesus and let him down through the roof of the house where Jesus is teaching.  When he sees their faith he says to the man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”  Now, that certainly isn’t his most obvious need.  The man is lying on his mat, unable to move his limbs.  Any faith healer worth his ad in the Yellow Pages would have said, “Stand up, take up your mat and walk.”  But maybe Jesus is simply digging down through all those surface layers of obvious need to get to the man’s deepest need.  Maybe what has gotten him into this state in the first place is his sin.  What if all that could be forgiven?  What if all those times he had sinned against God and others could be wiped away in a single stroke, like a wet sponge across a dusty chalkboard?  What if the same could be done for you?  Wouldn’t that make you feel like jumping up off your mat?

          Along with the other notes I found in that sermon folder from a few years ago I found my own attempt to answer Jesus’ question:  “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked, and I answered, “Isn’t it obvious?  No?  Well, let me dig a little deeper.  Maybe what I want is forgiveness for all those times I have sinned against you and others.  Maybe I want a clean slate, too.  Maybe I want to be born again, again.”  What if the quest for eternal youth I see in so many people—those fitness classes and facial scrubs and cosmetic surgery—what if all that is really just a desire to start over again, to re-enter the age of innocence, to see once more through the eyes of a child?  Those days in DC were often difficult.  In one of my journal entries I wrote: “I used to be able to see the light of heaven pouring through the crack in the firmament, I used to be tuned in to the wavelength of the Holy, so that every encounter seemed touched by the presence of God.  It’s not like that anymore.  Have I become hardened?  Is this city doing it to me?  This job?  Where is my old eyesight?”  Remember that Bartimaeus didn’t say that he wanted to see, but that he wanted to see again, like he used to.

          I want you to close your eyes for a moment, if you will.  I want you to imagine Jesus standing in front of you and asking, “What do you want me to do for you?”  What would you say?  How would you answer?  You’d want to think it over carefully.  If Jesus has the ability to meet our deepest needs we certainly don’t want to waste his time or ours on only the most obvious ones.  I think Bartimaeus learned that lesson.  When Jesus healed him he said, “Go, your faith has made you well.”  But Bartimaeus didn’t go.  He came.  He fell in behind Jesus and followed him on the road toward Jerusalem as if blindness were only the most obvious of his problems, as if his deepest needs were only just beginning to be met.

—Jim Somerville © 2009