When We Open Our Eyes

A few weeks ago many Chistian churches that follow the lectionary (the agreed-upon

three-year schedule of weekly Bible readings) read the story of Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46-52). The blind beggar that was healed by Jesus is allegory for spiritual blindness and insight. Recognizing that in the Bible, clothes are symbolic of spiritual defenses, Bartimaeus "threw off his cloak (garment)" and approached Jesus. Asking not for pity as he had done previously but for his sight, he received it; Jesus told him that "your faith has saved you". The story gives us an insight into the nature of faith and of vulnerability.

Even as clothes are associated with (spiritual) defensiveness and nakedness with vulnerability, so is "opening our eyes" associated with reception of spiritual insight - for good or bad. The serpent's lie to Eve was that her "eyes would be opened and you would become a god". When she and Adam transgressed their "eyes were opened" - but they saw only their nakedness (spiritual vulnerability); and their need of clothes (spiritual defenses). In Bartimaeus' case he, fully clothed, pleaded for pity (New Jerusalem translation), an act that creates a boundary between the pitier and the pitiee. In other words he celebrated his victimhood. But in throwing off his garment he opened to Jesus, who said this action of vulnerability was faith on his part, and his (spiritual) sight was restored.

Now to be sure, institutions aiding the blind in the First Century, physical and for that matter spiritual too, were few and far between. It was easy to simply lapse into victimhood. Today, notwithstanding all our institutions for the disabled of many kinds, all too many of us remain in victimhood. The path from that rut is, and always has been, accepting some degree of vulnerability and taking risks. On the CNN show a few days ago about heroes around the world, I heard story after story of those who had been beaten down into victimhood, but rose out of it and then created structures to help others beaten down to likewise rise. Each one of these heroes claimed that they had not done all these things thinking of themselves as a hero; but rather from some inner motivation, arising from the vulnerability that they had initially accepted from their place of victimhood: an inner motivation having all the characteristics of faith.

There is Betty Makoni, a Zimbabwean woman who was raped repeatedly by men who, in that chaotic and undergoverned country, believed the urban legend that raping a virgin would cure one of AIDS. No matter that she was obviously soon not a virgin any more; when one believes one lie it becomes much easier to believe other related lies. She rose from that to found GCN, a series of international battered women shelters and support groups to help women who had suffered similarly. She was honored, and had to be told that she was a hero.

The place from which we rise, our "bottom", is that from which we first get vulnerable, "open our eyes"; and step up to some sort of plate. What we do then is nothing that we really "have to" do; regardless of how we may feel at that point about that. Many factors, such as what we hear, the arrangement of others, or in Bartamaeus' case the approach of whom he thought was God, influence our decision. But there is always a risk to take when we make it.

Copyright (c) 2009 Dave Smart

by: Dave Smart

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