Proper 25, Year B: Mark 10:46-52
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
October 24, 2021
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
“Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your faith has made you well.’”– Mark 10:52a[1]
Last week we talked about how there’s quite a bit of humor hidden in the Bible. We tend to miss it because jokes, colloquialisms, and the like are difficult to translate—if an interpreter has to choose between a phrase’s primary meaning or a verbal pun, they’ll probably focus on the former—especially in a religious text. Another aspect of it is that we’re simply used to taking these stories extremely seriously. Our minds collapse vast spans of history into a few paragraphs and imagine this static view of our spiritual forebears where everyone is forever poised and perfect, like you’d see in an icon. Even when we know that these characters have genuinely terrible flaws, we ignore those failures and instead create these ideas of untouchable saints so distant and perfect that we can never hope to be like them.
But not only can we be like them, many of us already are! It’s important to remember that the Bible offers us extraordinary moments in the lives of completely normal people. Think of how much has changed since October of 2018, and then consider that everything happening in the Gospel of Mark also takes place over the course of three years. Abraham’s story fills only eight chapters in Genesis but covers roughly 80 to 100 years of his actual lifespan. Jeremiah and Isaiah each prophesied for something like half a century, but everything we know about them as people fits into a few pages. If we were to condense your most brilliant (and/or lousiest) moments into the same amount of space, you probably be amazed at what you look like, too. And God values your story just as much as any of theirs.
But going back to the Bible’s sense of humor, today’s brief Gospel passage is overflowing with enough verbal and physical comedy to have left Mark’s initial audiences in stitches. Everything Bartimaeus does is extreme—bordering on slapstick—and the crowd isn’t much better. Bartimaeus doesn’t just calmly sit there calling for Jesus, he hollers. And when the crowd starts berating him and yelling at him to shut up, he starts bellowing even louder so he can be heard above their noise. Jesus is shocked at the erupting chaos and stops like he ran into a wall. And Bartimaeus pretty much charges at him like a bull when he’s called.
Once the physical action slows, we start getting into some wordplay. After all that bold, fearless behavior, the audience would have heard a strong double meaning of “I need confidence!” in Bartimaeus’ request to receive sight. And “go” is probably the weakest and most polite possible translation of what Jesus says once Bartimaeus is healed. It’s much more along the lines of “cool it, man!” or “get lost—quietly!” Although clearly meant to draw out laughs, Mark’s depiction offers us real-life characters—including Jesus—having the same everyday, in-the-moment responses we might.
However, despite the fun this passage offers, there’s some serious stuff happening in Jesus’ response, too.
“Go; your faith has made you well.”
“Faith” is a very important word within the Church—pretty much sacred. We hold the term with love, awe, and respect, even staking our eternal destinies on it. People have waged wars and sacrificed their lives for this beloved and powerful word.
We generally understand “faith” to be a spiritual intangible, something like a heartfelt belief or a more substantial form hope. It dwells in the realm of other emotional and intellectual concepts. Faith involves something you feel to be true, something you deeply agree with but may not have hard evidence to prove. Because of its nature as an internal reality, we also think of it as something impossible to judge: a person’s faith is ultimately between an individual and God.
But our view of this term isn’t all that different from how we've come to imagine our “heroes of the faith.” It, along with other terminology, has also achieved that sort of poised, statuesque status, honored and beloved yet still somehow distant and unrelatable. And by removing its heart and energy, by reducing faith’s entire being to what is just a snapshot of one particular moment, what we think of when we hear this word often doesn’t line up with what Jesus or the Apostles were actually saying.
In Jesus’ day, faith wasn’t an individualized mental construct. She was a well-known character—one of the virtues from Pandora’s box. Although the Greeks highly honored this supernatural entity, the Romans venerated her as the full-blown god—the embodiment of fidelity. She was extremely popular among the military, including the legions of soldiers occupying Israel. So even if you weren’t officially a Roman citizen, when you heard someone use the word “faith” back then, it would have been impossible to ignore the image of honor and loyalty she invoked.
Beyond that, when the Bible was initially translated into English in the mid-1300’s, the word they used for this concept/being referred not to an inner type of consent but to the lived out action we would describe as “faithfulness.” And the word “believe” carries a similar history, simply being, in fact, the verb form of the same Greek noun, meaning it should carry the idea of “be faithful to” for us. Over the past 700 years, despite the extensive transformation of English as a language, we’ve spent all our energy clinging to a term while forgetting what the text itself is trying to say.
Moving from “faith” to “faithfulness” can be a difficult change to process. I remember when they revealed the restored the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We were all used to seeing Michelangelo’s famous masterpiece as this dark, gloomy, yellow-toned fresco. That’s how it appeared in everyone’s photos, and that’s how we thought it was supposed to look. But once the experts cleaned off 500 years of pollution, soot, and candle wax, everyone was shocked. The colors were bright and brilliant, making us reconsider how we’d understood entire generations of Renaissance-era art.
While many of us celebrated the revelation and recovered spirit of joy that had long lain hidden, some people loudly protested the change and demanded that the restorers undo their work to make it look the way it was “supposed” to be. But those voices had it backward—what was they longed for as familiar and comfortable was, in truth, a dark distortion. The shining whites and glowing tones we know today were the reality the artist himself would have remembered.
So then, what happens when we understand Jesus to tell us that Bartimaeus’ faithfulness restored his sight?
One of the first things that comes to mind involves the idea that your amount of belief in or ability to trust God are what somehow bring blessing or pain to your life. In our traditional rendering, that’s certainly what it looks like. But despite its popularity, that sort of “name it and claim it” theology is not something Jesus would have recognized. Plenty of God-honoring people have led difficult lives, both in and outside the Bible, and plenty of bad people continue to live good ones. Your amount of or ability to believe won’t make God treat you better, and the doubts you might try to suppress don’t prevent you from receiving God’s favor. It wasn’t Bartimaeus’ intensive internal hope—his unwavering faith—that healed him. He didn’t somehow trust just enough to make his dream of seeing again come true, and he wasn’t so committed to his own magical thinking that Jesus decided to make his blindness go away. Jesus said Bartimaeus was healed through his own faithfulness, the materialized, continuing action of seeking God through Christ.
This restored understanding also strikes me as a bit of a warning. It’s easy to say that you have faith in something or someone. It’s much more revealing to see whether or not someone remains actively faithful in their behavior. Faith as we understand it simply involves thought, which does indeed make it impossible to judge. But faithfulness is easy to determine: we see the reality of an internal thought or belief being played out over time in the real world.
But along with its challenge, “faithfulness” also gives me a huge sense of relief. As a human, ensuring you have “saving faith” in the modern sense is an impossible task. How much faith is enough? Is it the right kind of faith? Whose faith even is it? I struggled for years over the idea that I was supposed to have faith in a perfect God while realizing that as an imperfect being, my faith couldn’t help but be also imperfect—and therefore inadequate—either. However, faithfulness is something I can watch happening—it’s something I prove not just to others but to myself as I work to follow Christ and realize God’s Kingdom in the lives of those around me.
Like the missile test I saw over the Organ Mountains yesterday morning, faithfulness leaves a wake. My path may twist and turn; I may hit multiple areas of turbulence in my life. But I can still see the cloudy trail of my overall arc of faithfulness. Even if I don’t understand, I can be faithful. Even when I doubt, I can still be faithful. Whether I’m feeling confident or discouraged, if I sin or make a mistake—when I sin and make mistakes—the path of faithfulness is always open for me to follow.
With faithfulness, there’s no need to worry or be afraid for the future. In following Jesus, you’re already living the story of a saint of God. It doesn’t matter how remarkable or mundane your life may be. You prove your sainthood—you realize your faithfulness—every moment you choose to honor God, every day you bring hope to the world around you, and every time you fall but get back up to follow Christ. After all, like Abraham, like the prophets, and even like our hyperactive friend Bartimaeus,
“your faithfulness has already restored you.”[2]
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Mark 10:52a (my translation)