Sunday, October 27, 2024

Homily: Thirtieth Sunday of the Year B

The crowd wants Bartimaeus to shut up, but he refuses and shouts out all the more insistently, “Son of David, have pity on me!” My sisters and brothers, Bartimaeus may be blind, but he has clear insight - for he calls Jesus, Son of David, thus acknowledging Jesus’ royal lineage, and he knows what he wants, as he shouts out his confidence in the One he is sure can heal him.

Truth is Bartimaeus had grown accustomed to the sidelines, accustomed to ridicule; being shunned and looked upon with pity and derision. His blindness, after all, revealed that he or a member of his family had done something really bad. Sickness, deafness, blindness were after all, the direct consequence of sin; everybody knew that; all decent Jews in Jesus’ day believed it. It had to be someone’s fault. Bartimaeus is trapped. Case closed. Dead end. But today Jesus, Son of David has come to break the barrier with his mercy. 

For Jesus is magnetized by the urgency of Bartimaeus’ pleading; he draws near, and with great authority and majesty he stands still and commands that the blind man be brought to him. Bartimaeus the blind immediately throws off his cloak, for he is eager to leave his old life behind. And he rushes toward the Lord, probably stumbling, his hands feeling the air. And then almost comically Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?” Why else would this man be crying out to you, Lord? Jesus wants to hear Bartimaeus speak his desire. And so two desires meet. For Jesus has been longing to encounter Bartimaeus. He always makes the first move. 


“Master, I want to see,” says Bartimaeus. And immediately his eyes are opened. Then and there, all of Bartimaeus’ expectations are surpassed beyond all telling. A seemingly generic desire to see becomes, through Jesus’ desire to heal and console, a great epiphany. For Bartimaeus’ first sight is the blessed face of Jesus. Bartimaeus sees the Beauty of God there before him. “How truly blessed are your eyes, O Bartimaeus, because they see.  Truly, many prophets and righteous people for ages upon ages have longed to see what you are seeing but did not see it.” And having asked only to see, even better, Bartimaeus sees that he is seen, he sees that he is seen, looked upon with love by the Lord Jesus. And the beauty of this vision, the ecstasy of the encounter transform him.  


For the Promised One of God is present. God’s reign of compassion has begun. The healing of this once blind man signals God’s open welcome to all the sick and the marginalized and the inauguration of the kingdom. The people, this one man, who walked in darkness for far too long have at last seen a great Light. And so this once-blind beggar will now follow Jesus on the way; this is ultimately the way to Jerusalem where Jesus will be tortured and crucified. And it seems Bartimaeus wants nothing more.


As Jesus himself declares to Bartimaeus this morning, “Your faith has saved you.” Our faith will save us too, faith articulated in desire, urgently expressed. For our need, our poverty make Christ Jesus happy, not because he wants us to feel bad, but because they will allow him to save us. The admission of our need is an act of faith in him whose delight is to give himself away to us. Like Bartimaeus we are often so blind. For which one of us sees enough, sees clearly enough? 

We need faith to see and notice more and more the thinness of reality – thinness for that the Lord always here, drawing near, his beauty hidden behind and within ordinariness. Jesus has come to search for us endlessly. Eternity is always interrupting. And ordinary things - the beauty, the sorrow in human experience and in all of creation - beckon us to draw near to him, who is constantly seeking opportunities to engage us. For from “the very beginning God's intent was nothing other than this world,” a world that he longs to heal, transform and sanctify more and more. 

He longs to open the eyes of our hearts so that we see that there is more, always more- God’s beauty thinly veiled but truly present, precious things right in front of our eyes if we dare to notice. For the relentless, loving gaze of the beautiful Lord Jesus is upon us always. We need courage and faith to bear the disconcerting, relentless magnitude of it. We are seen, we are heard. 

One last thing. You know, several years ago a friend spent a summer ministering in a village in Bavaria. The feast of Corpus Christi came. There was a procession through the streets, he carried the monstrance with the sacred Host. Little girls tossed flowers, there were hymns and clouds of incense. The next morning a young reporter from the local newspaper came to interview him. “Father,” he said. “Why were you carrying that little mirror through the streets yesterday?” Mirror? My friend had to explain. Not a mirror at all. On second thought, perhaps a Mirror indeed. What did that German newspaperman know that perhaps we’ve forgotten? The beautiful, very fragile Bread we are to receive, is a mirror indeed in which we can see our own Beauty in Him, and the beauty of one another if we dare to gaze at Him gazing at us. What do you want? Who do you want? If we want him, want his presence, we must know that he wants this Holy Communion with us more than we can imagine.

Friday, October 25, 2024

Seeking and Finding

We ruin our life of prayer if we are constantly examining our prayer and seeking the fruit of prayer in a peace that is nothing more than a psychological process. The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God; and we seek him successfully when we realize that we cannot find him unless he shows himself to us, and yet at the same time he would not have inspired us to seek him unless we had already found him.

THOMAS MERTON Thoughts In Solitude


Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Prayer Irrigates Our Being

When our heart prays, it breathes. Prayer makes us joyful, strong, and courageous. Prayer makes our heart beat and provides oxygen for our whole body. Prayer irrigates our being. Perhaps we are here putting our finger on the cause of so much sullenness in the Church and in society: the fact that the practice of prayer has reached a very low level. When that happens, the heart is weighed down by a dead weight. A Church that does not pray is like a batch of dough that has collapsed. No other leaven can raise it from its apathy. The Spirit prays in us. Surrounded by chatter, it whispers “with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8:26).


CARDINAL GODFRIED DANEELS, Le Consolateur: Paroles de vie, Noël, 1997

Monday, October 21, 2024

The Bread of True Life

The cross, suffering, all that is wrong with the world: (Jesus) transformed all this into ‘thanks’ and therefore into a ‘blessing’. Hence he fundamentally transubstantiated life and the world, and he has given us and gives us each day the bread of true life, which transcends this world thanks to the strength of His love.


POPE BENEDICT XVI

Saturday, October 19, 2024

Loving and Knowing

Every lover is a knower; he “knows God…for God is love”, whereas the one who does not love is in ignorance.


HANS URS VON BALTHASAR Prayer, 215 

Friday, October 18, 2024

Avoiding Anxieties

To avoid the anxieties which may be caused by either regret for the past or fear of the future, here in a few words is the rule to follow: the past must be left to God’s measureless mercy, the future to his loving providence; and the present must be given wholly to his love through fidelity to his grace.


JEAN PIERRE DE CAUSSADE Letters, Book VIII, 1/433 

Thursday, October 17, 2024

Spiritual Joy

I know no greater joy than to discover some weakness in myself that I did not realize before. I often taste this joy and shall always have it when God gives me his light when I am examining my conscience. I firmly believe, and in this I find joy, that God guides those who give themselves up to his leading and that he takes care of the least things that concern them.


SAINT CLAUDE DE LA COLOMBIÈRE Retreat Notes, Lyons, 1674