Thirtieth Sunday

Thirtieth Sunday Ordinary
October 29, 2006


"They departed in tears, but I will console them and guide them. I will lead them to brooks of water, on a level road, so that none shall stumble." (Jeremiah 31: 7-9). "Immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way." (Mark 10:46-52)
The prophet Jeremiah expresses the people's hope of relief from their captivity. These were dark days for our spiritual ancestors. The Temple was in ruins, their leaders dragged away in chains to a foreign and hostile land, all possibility of their return apparently gone. Jeremiah maintained his hope in deliverance, with nothing but the invisible presence of Yahweh.

In the gospel Jesus heals the blind Bartimaeus, an obscure beggar, who cried out to Jesus from his "home" beside the road. This poor man probably had very little reason to expect anything great to happen when he called out to Jesus. Perhaps he acted out of desperation rather than from any heroic faith. His deliverance came, as it did for the Israelites, because he held out for something better in spite of all the odds. This poor beggar was given his sight, but it seems that the physical miracle was the least important part of his whole experience. Like him we see without seeing. "Seeing" is realizing what has been right in front of us all along, although we could not recognize it because we were in the darkness of our desperation. This man's whole experience of life was changed by his encounter with God and there was nothing left for him to do but follow him.

Hope is as blind as faith can be. The most effective prayer may be just like the cries of Jeremiah and Bartimaeus, when we are at the end of our hope, but insist on continuing anyway. I remember as a young child being taught from the Baltimore Catechism that "the three theological virtues are faith, hope and charity". We had very little idea of what this meant, but the words were there for us to ponder later. My friend, Billy, the smartest kid in the second grade, could not pronounce "virtues". I have thought lately that hope is the most often neglected of the three. St. Paul tells us that "hope is the confidence in things unseen". Hope is what we have when there is no tangible reason to expect that things will ever be different than they are right now. Hope is what we have when nothing else is left. It is a sign of mature spirituality in every religious tradition. We are all blind. We all at sometime or other have had, or will have, experienced the desperation of darkness when we can only "hope against hope". It may be the only way that we can be brought to real faith by the touch of the Holy Spirit.