I Want to See

Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see;
But Microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.—Emily Dickinson

This is how most of us see faith.  We want to believe, but we want to have proof.  I guess that’s why so many of us can relate to the story of Doubting Thomas, the disciple who refused to believe in the risen Christ until he could feel the crucifixion wounds on Christ’s body.  It’s hard to believe when everything you know and everything you see tells you otherwise.  It must be very hard for blind people to believe in anything, don’t you think?

I mean, assuming that I am blind, and have been blind, I would have to trust your description of a sunrise.  And even having heard your description, if I’ve been blind since birth, I would have to take your word for it without understanding, for I never would have seen the shapes or colors you’d be describing.  Stevie Wonder has to trust his band and manager for the size of the audience or the appearance of the theater.  He’d have to take it on faith that his dressing room was okay.  If I’m blind, I’d have to trust somebody, be it dog or stranger, that the street was safe to cross.

As far as that goes, we all take the word of science on truth.  None of us has seen the actual data that proves the earth has a magnetic field.  We’ve read it in books.  We may have seen the data in books in school, but we weren’t there when the measurements were taken.  We wouldn’t know how to operate the machines that make the measurements if we had them.  Moreover, we would have to take on faith that the information the machine displays truly indicates the presence of a magnetic field.

Truth be told, when Columbus sailed from Spain, he had some logical proof in mind that the world was round.  The ancient Greeks believed the world was round.  They had reasoned that it must be so because of the apparent movement of the stars when traveling to Asia Minor and Africa.  But they had no tangible proof.  They could have been mistaken.  Lucky for Columbus there weren’t.  Columbus was traveling on faith—faith in the arguments of great thinkers.  He reasoned that the world had to be round, so he set sail for Asia, and in doing so, re-discovered a new world.  We take a lot of things on faith.  In many ways, we’re a lot like blind people.

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.”
And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent.
But he kept calling out all the more,
“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.”
Jesus told him, “Go your way; your faith has made you whole.”
Immediately he received his sight
and followed after him on the way. (Mark, Chapter 10)

Bartimaeus is one of the few people healed by Jesus to be named.  As a matter fact, he is even designated as the Bartimaeus who is a son of Timaeus.  As one who has read a good deal of literature, as I read this story, I immediately begin to wonder why this guy gets named.  Why is this guy so important?  He never shows up again in the story.  He would seem to have no other role to play in the drama.  So why name him?

Well, there’s a reason for that, a good logical reason, too.  Mark was written about twenty years after the death of Jesus on the cross.  He’s trying to convince people that Jesus was God’s guy on earth.  So he tells this story.  And if you consider it, this guy, this Bartimaeus, could very well still have been alive when this story was first written down and shared.  You all know Bartimaeus, don’t you?  The son of Timaeus?  Go ask him, if you don’t believe me.  I can’t say for a fact that that’s the reason his name is given, but it wouldn’t surprise me, and it makes a certain amount of sense.  The Gospel According to Mark was written for first century Judeans.  The story has to be seen from their point of view.

The Jewish people had their great story of Abraham, of Moses, of Joshua, of David and of Ezra and all the great prophets. They had a great sense of their God who has sent them such men to inspire and sustain them!! Was this Jesus another one of such men? Would his words and deeds speak to them of God?

The purpose of Mark’s gospel is to answer this question. And Mark’s answer is clear. Jesus was one who spoke with authority, not as the scribes and the pharisees speak, but ‘mighty in word and deed’. We get so preoccupied with seeing Jesus as the son of God, the icon, the little plastic statue on the dashboard of the car (I don’t care if it rains or freezes…) that we lose sight of the fact that the people in the first century saw him as a prophet, a teacher. Even today, many Jews believe Jesus was a prophet who spoke clearly the mind of God, even if he wasn’t the messiah.

There are a lot of Christians today who spend all their time dwelling on the divinity of Christ, and forget that what Jesus called on people to do was to follow his teachings about love, faith, and service to others. Bartimaeus calls out to Jesus, “Son of David!”  He acknowledges Jesus as a holy guy, as a prophet of the divine.  And he keeps on calling out to him.  Now keep in mind, he’s never “seen” any of the other miracles ascribed to Jesus.  He only knows what he hears, and he believes.  And like many of us, Bartimaeus has the same request.  “I want to see.”  Oh, how I want to see!  How I want to understand!  I want to see, too.

And Jesus tells him it is his faith that has healed him.  He doesn’t say that God healed him because he’s such a good guy or because he has a lot of faith even.  He says his faith had made him whole.  We all want to be made whole.  We all want to fill that missing piece, that whatever it is that keeps us from feeling complete.  The faith of Bartimaeus had made him whole, and so he followed after Jesus on the way.  The word translated as way is the Greek word for journey, or for mode of conduct.  In other words, from that day forward, he followed the teachings of Jesus.  Early Christians were known as “the people of the way”.

As Christians, those of us who see Jesus as a divine being, we all try to be people of the way.  And we are people of the way when we live those teachings, when we love one another, when we comfort one another, when we take care of one another.  This blind guy, Bartimaeus, called out to Jesus out of faith.  He had to get up and go to Jesus.  Jesus didn’t come to him.  He called to him.  It must have been pretty tough for a blind guy to get up and cut through the crowds to get to Jesus.  But he did.  And it opened his eyes.

It was reading the teachings of Jesus that opened my eyes.  The meaning of life is nothing other than loving all of creation.  Opening the heart and mind to the love of whatever you want to call that energy that underlies all things, or however you want to think of it, is what makes us whole.  Feeling that love is what opens our eyes.

And like all those other forces in nature, love is invisible.  Like electromagnetic fields, you can’t see it.  But, like atomic particles, you can see the evidence of its existence.  You can see the love and power of God in the loving trustful eyes of a child in its mother’s arms.  You can see it in the way a father prepares lunch for his daughter.  You can see it in the way a hospice nurse lovingly bathes a patient dying of cancer.  You see it in the way firefighters run into burning buildings in the face of all good common sense. In fact, you and I have a lot more evidence of the power of love than we have of the presence of an electromagnetic field around the earth.  We’ve all seen the power of love in our lives.

So I guess that Emily was wrong.  Faith is really for those of us who CAN’T see.  And even microscopes can’t see atomic structure.  They can’t see love, either.  But that doesn’t mean that love isn’t just as real as the atom—maybe more real.  According to modern physics, atoms only exist for a nanosecond of time before they evolve into something else.  Love is forever.  When it comes to science and religion, I guess we’re all blind.  Faith helps you to see.