• Job 42:1-6, 10-17

All the sophisticated explanations and arguments about good, evil and God by Job and his friends crumble.  Job now acknowledges to God, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me….”  He then delivers the ‘aha’ line of the whole drama, when he says to God, “I had heard you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you….” Job repents for his pretentiousness and anger.  When Job finishes, we are told the Lord not only restored all that had been taken away from Job, but the Lord doubles everything Job has!  Job’s family and friends rally around him, each giving him some money and gold.  Job was also given “seven sons and three daughters.”  He lived to 140 years old and saw four generations.  “And Job died.”

• Psalm 34:1-8, (19-22)

The psalmist has discovered that, “When the lowly call/God listens/and rescues them.”  “Happy” is the person who trusts/takes refuge in this God.  The Lord is “near to the brokenhearted….”  Not a single bone will be broken.

OR

• Jeremiah 31:31:7-9

Jeremiah lives through dramatic ups and downs in Israel’s history.  At first Assyria, a constant threat to Israel’s survival, seemed about ready to collapse.  But even in Assyria’s weakened state, Israel is threatened.  Jeremiah worries that there is more to come.  Babylon will be the next threat.  In 589, the Babylonians captured Jerusalem and leveled it to the ground, and Jeremiah was among those taken prisoner  to Babylon.  A collaborator/disciple of Jeremiah paints a moving picture with words about restoration.  Praise the Lord, he writes, who will gather all the displaced back to Jerusalem, even the blind, the lame and pregnant women with young children.  The Lord will lead them along paths easy and pleasant to travel; “I have become a father to Israel, and Ephraim [Joseph’s younger son whose tribe became the strongest in Israel] is my firstborn.”

• Psalm 126

The Lord’s restoration of Zion is/was/will seem like a dream, accompanied by easy laughter and spontaneous singing, the psalmist imagines.  Other nations will say, “What great things their Lord has done for them.”  This wonderful time of restoration can be compared to parched water beds full of water again.  Then comes the promise: “they who sow in tears/shall reap in glad song….”

• Hebrews 7:23-28

This excerpt from the “Letter to the Hebrews” continues the comparisons read last Sunday.  Human priests come and go, but the priesthood of Jesus is “permanent,” “because he continues forever.”  Jesus, therefore, makes continuous “intercession.”  He is “holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens.”  Unlike human priests, who are continuously making sacrifice for their sins and the sins of others, Jesus’ sacrifice was “once for all….”  Jesus is that “Son who has been made perfect forever.”

• Mark 10:46-52

This is the last episode in Mark’s narrative before Jesus enters Jerusalem for the final, fateful week.  With his considerable skills as a storyteller, Mark has brought his reader/hearer to the point where by now, literally, we should “see” things we did not see before.  So, Mark tells us about a blind man who attaches himself to Jesus and can see for the first time in his life.  Mark tells the story in a way that is quite distinct from Matthew and Luke.  Mark gives the man a name, Bartimaeus, and an identity, that pesky “blind beggar” who always sits by the road to Jericho.  For the first time in his entire gospel, Mark uses the powerful title “Son of David” for Jesus in the cry Bartimaeus makes at Jesus.  While all three gospels say the crowds chastised him for shouting at Jesus, only Mark says the mood of the crowd suddenly shifts when he comes closer to Jesus.  “Take heart,” they encourage the blind man.  And only Mark reports a spontaneous, animated response from him– And throwing off his cloak, he jumps up and comes to Jesus!  When Jesus asks the blind Bartimaeus what he wants, only Mark says he began by addressing Jesus as “my teacher”, or rabbi.  Jesus quickly responds, “Your faith has made you well; go on your way.”  But instead of leaving, Mark says, the man followed Jesus.

Mark’s distinctive storytelling genius is on full display in this short incident, packed with meaningful details.  That pushy blind man every traveler from Jerusalem to Jericho had to pass shouts out to Jesus, “Son of David,” a title Mark has reserved to this pivotal point in his narrative.  Immediately and out of nowhere, the blind man “sees” what others have not seen; this is the One for whom Israel has been longing as a new breakthrough of God’s love and saving work.  When  Jesus asks him what he wants, Bartimaeus, whom we have never seen before nor will again in Mark’s narrative, uses another revealing address; he call Jesus “my teacher,” or rabbi.  The announcement Jesus makes next is the key to this entire episode: “Your faith has made you well….” Jesus tells him he got what he asked for and now he can be on his way.  But Mark pointedly says that Bartimaeus made the snap decision to follow Jesus “on the way.”

The drama of Job reaches its final scene in today’s excerpt.  After Job recovers from God’s blasting him with questions he cannot answer, he confesses, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me.”  And then the long drama delivers its crucial line: “I heard you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you….”

Continuing the stimulating work on the phenomenology of the human senses by Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida and others, Jean-Louis Chretien explores the connection between hearing and seeing.  He writes in The Call and the Response:

          “Rather than figure out how sight and hearing are opposed, the task is to think how one is included in the other as its most intimate surplus; how we truly see only by listening and speaking….”   Chertien favorably  quotes Aquinas  who privileges hearing over sight for ‘seeing’ the “truth”:  “thus when Saint Thomas Aquinas studies the place, in prophecy, of visionary imagination, which is distinct from purely intellectual illumination, he starts by positing the primacy of hearing.  The prophet who ‘hears words that express an intelligible truth’ is superior to the one who ‘sees things that signify a truth,’ since words are signs more deliberate and expressive than what presents itself silent to the eye.”  (p. 38)

Anyone who reads/hears Mark’s narrative is in the same place as Bartimaeus.  We are not “eye” witnesses, we only know what we have heard (and read) about this Jesus and his message.  But also like Bartimaeus, what we have heard/read is enough to enable us to “see” what cannot be seen in any other way.  In Chretien’s useful phrase, “how we truly see only by listening.”  Which, in turn, converts us into “speaking” witnesses, followers, repeating, owning the words/testimony of others as our own.

By this point in his narrative, Mark has described all  that Jesus has said and done before his final week.  The words of his gospel are enough for the reader to “see” the love of God in action; (the alternative is, of course, to turn a ‘blind’ eye).  And this is enough for us to open our eyes and to “see” what is about to be described in the last week of Jesus’ life for what it truly is.

The next move for us to take is the same move made by Job after all his fussing and fuming at God: Finally, I “see” the whole picture; I get it!  In the same way we say everyday, “I see” when we finally understand something someone has tried her best to describe in words, we can finally say, I get it.  Joining such an unlikely witness as the “blind” Bartimaeus, who “saw” what others had missed, relying only on what he had heard, we, too can declare this “Son of David” as “my teacher.”  I (finally) begin to “see” how God works in the world.  I am no longer “blind” to God and God’s unique ways.  I am now ready to follow “in the way.”