broken things
Reflection for October 25
The Rev. J. James Derkits
Trinity by the Sea
Context: I was away from Trinity by the Sea on October 25 at the Inner Journey Retreat at Kanuga, NC. I wrote this reflection for the worship leader to read.
Greetings everyone--I feel a little like St Paul might have, writing you a letter to be read in the context of worship. Only a few differences:
- It’s in English
- I’m typing on a laptop and back then they wrote on tiny pieces of papyrus or clay
- Your worship leaders received it by email, not carried personally by a messenger
- And, most importantly, I’m not writing to address major problems as St. Paul often had to, I’m just writing to give you a reflection on this amazing story and to let you know I love you and will be lifting you up in prayer...from the mountains of North Carolina at our Episcopal Conference Center called Kanuga on the final day of an Inner Journey Retreat
Imagine the moment in the Eucharist when we elevate the perfect circle of the host. It’s got a perfect cross pressed into the unleavened bread, for an instant it is perfect, but then it must be broken to be received, as Christ’s body had to be broken so that he could give his life to us.
In the church, and on our spiritual journey, things are broken. The old, fixed things in our lives are broken only to be made new again in God. Our hearts of stone are replaced with hearts of flesh.
This has been one of my favorite stories from Mark’s Gospel, but it wasn’t always. I had to struggle with Blind Bartimaeus before I became his fast friend and companion. Remember in this story he was sitting by the roadside and he knew that Jesus was coming and he very rudely interrupted what was going on to get Jesus’ attention. Finally, Jesus heard him going on relentlessly about him being the Son of David, which is to say, the heir of the kingly throne of Israel and Jesus called him over.
Names mean something. Especially in Mark’s Gospel, which is the shortest. Whenever there is a name mentioned it is worth paying attention to. Bartimaeus is a strange name because it is a hybrid of Hebrew and Greek. Bear with me here--but we need to look at what this name means.
Bar, in Hebrew, simply means “son of” which we learn just from reading the story. Bartimaeus, Son of Timaeus. So why would Mark include that name in his Gospel?
The Timaeus is one of Plato’s great works. Yes, that Plato. It would have been available to the people of Jesus’ time, and more importantly, it is Plato’s cosmology: the comprehensive understanding of how the world works. Cosmologies explain why things are the way they are, and how we fit into that picture of the world. It was a worldview that would have been known by the Greeks and Hebrews because they were mingling their philosophies at that time. Read the Timaeus sometime if you want to know more about it, but here’s where the rubber hits the road: Like other philosophies before and since, the Timaeus proposed that the senses were of utmost importance, and that sight was the absolute highest sense, and the most important. To have sight meant one could observe the world, and have visual possession of it, and understand it. Not to have sight was to be imperfect, broken, unworthy of the world, an outcast, and one who did not fit into the worldview of the T imaeus.
And here, right in the middle of the Gospel, we find the “Son of the Timaeus” and he is blind, and he is stuck on the edge of town begging. As the Timaeus foresaw, he did not fit in, and was cast to the side: imperfect, broken, unworthy of the world, an outcast.
This one who does not fit in has the guts to call out to the Jesus and call him the Son of David. If Jesus had subscribed to that fixed worldview, then he should have kept walking, looking for more complete, perfect, worthy people to attend to, but instead, he stops.
This is where it gets personal, because we are all, each one of us, Bar-something. We are all the inheritors of some worldview that will resist inclusion of some group that is deemed unworthy of inclusion. We have all received, our whole lives, some worldview that holds up certain values and rejects others. We are all seduced by ideologies.
And at some point, we will run into someone--some incarnate human being who doesn’t fit in. And that is the time to break the ideology in favor of the human being in need of healing and relationship.
From John the Baptist to St. Paul, we are called again and again to repent. The Greek word that we translate “repent” is METANOIA. It means to change one’s mind. We are not just asked to change our minds once, what the Gospel calls us to is a life of metanoia--a life of changing our minds. We are called to seek out the outcast at the edge of town--maybe even our own broken, imperfect selves, and to allow the Holy Spirit to transformation us. Allow our heart of stone be turned to a heart of flesh, and to be healed: to be given new sight.
Blind Bartimaeus asked to be made to see again. Do we have the courage to ask Jesus to let us see again as well? Whatever we hold as the perfect worldview; whenever we think we have it all figured out, may God send us blindness, break our old view of the world, and give us new sight. Blind Bartimaeus didn’t go back to Timaeus, or back to his old life after he was healed, he continued to follow Jesus on the Way. He continued to be on the move with his savior. He chose to follow a life of metanoia, of transformation, the way of Jesus.
Some books that helped me with this:
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