30th Sunday, 1997

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Thirtieth Sunday, 1997

I am not yet there

The figure in the Gospel passage from Mark of the blind beggar, was a great favorite of the early preachers in the church, the so called Fathers. They used the figure constantly as a kind of metaphor for the human condition. They basically saw all human beings, standing in the world, as blind beggars, and they would ring all sorts of changes on this theme. And so I would like to imitate them by using it also as a metaphor and talking not so much about the notion of blindness as the business of beggary.

They chose the Jeremiah text to match this metaphor in which God is depicted as a healer of peoples’ blindness. Historically, Jesus was probably known as a wonder-worker. The wonder-worker was not an unfamiliar figure in the Mediterranean world and so Jesus was not that extraordinary for being able to do remarkable things for people. But I think it is possible to look more closely into this and see that it is the man’s faith that was the leverage for the cure. This is the case throughout the New Testament. The miracles are never a means to faith but always a response to faith. So we can ask, "Well, what is it that he believed?". Did the man who was in need of a cure believe that Jesus could do this good thing for him? I doubt it. That would be contrary to most of the rest of the New Testament. I would like to suggest, and this is where I kind of make a metaphor of this figure, that the extraordinary thing about Jesus is that he is the person before whom this man could say, "I am blind". I think that this is a greater miracle than having your sight restored. For one human being to stand before another human being and say, "I am needy, I am deficient". This does not sound like very much but look at the way that life is typically carried out, for example, by putting our best foot forward, by continuously refurbishing our image. Public relations have taken over the world in one way or another and we are all our own little public relations managers. But to be able to say, "I am not the perfect human being" - - no matter how grandly I am dressed, or how extensive my vocabulary is - - to be able to say, "There is something wrong with me" to another human being; how often do we do this? How often can this be safely said in the church? Is the church the place where one can do that most fully, most honestly, even spontaneously? For example, we start Mass routinely by saying we have failed, but that is a safe sort of proclamation. What I am getting at is that the central human problem, as defined in the New Testament, is that of self-righteousness. We all think that we are doing just fine and that we have no weaknesses. We go through extraordinary lengths to convince ourselves, and even more, to convince everybody else of that. The fact that we are on the way, that we are pilgrims toward our own humanity, is not something we very readily acknowledge. And there are not too many places in the world where we can acknowledge that. The world is a competitive place and competition of necessity says that you cannot reveal yourself as an individual who is anything less than omni-competent. To be able too say to somebody else, "I cannot manage, life is unmanageable", is a greater miracle, and to carry the metaphor further, the great illumination. To be able to say this gives you greater vision than ocular vision.

At this point in the New Testament the New Testament writers did not believe that Jesus was divine, certainly not the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews. That came later as people deepened their understanding of who this man was. The idea that he was precisely confronting this other human being became the leverage that, in time, moved people to think that Jesus was more than human. But we know, for example, to get back to the passage from Hebrews, that Jesus was tempted. All three of the Synoptic Gospels begin with the temptation narrative, (although interestingly enough John’s Gospel does not contain the temptation of Jesus, so far along has this process of the recognition of the divinity of Jesus has gone). What does it mean to be tempted, to go through some kind of trial and to come out on the other side of it? And what happens to most of us when this takes place? For me, when that happens, I think I inevitably develop a kind of crust of being pleased with myself. I think to myself, "By God I did it, I am here!". And the beauty of that position is that we can look at others and say, "What is wrong with you? I did it, can’t you?". I do not think it is a particularly cynical or jaundiced view of things to say that most of us operate this way. A lot of people think, "I paid my debts. I am here and you can do it too". This is the problem of self-righteousness because it basically detaches us from each other. To be self-righteous is to be absolutely impermeable to anybody else. The beauty of Jesus is that he was tempted too but he came out with a larger heart instead of a crustier one, which is quite extraordinary. This wonderful text exemplifies this: "He can deal gently with the ignorant and the wayward since he himself is subject to weakness". But being battered by his own weakness, surviving, moving beyond his own weakness, and this is a constant, day by day, endless process. He did not achieve some kind of sense of superiority which made him unavailable to people so that people could not approach him and say, "I am blind, I cannot see, I really cannot see, I really am needy".

Finally, I think that the extraordinary thing of being able to admit that to another human being is probably one of the most profound bonds that human beings can forge with each other. At least in my experience this is true. I am talking about being able to say to somebody else, that "I am not all there, I am not yet there". I am also talking about receiving the unfinishedness of another human being. This is a strange thing that precisely moves us toward being more finished. But we are so busy defending our turf and convincing everybody else that we have it all together that admitting that we are weak becomes very difficult to do. So the blind beggar is the patron saint for all of us.

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RT 19/10/97