Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Proper 25 - Sunday, October 28, 2018
Job 42:1-6, 10-17
Hebrews 7:23-28
Mark 10:46-52
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The days are getting darker. I mean this both literally and figuratively. And I find myself wondering, as the darkness gathers, what does hope look like?
This fall the maples have been late in catching fire. Their tardiness has coincided with the UN report on climate change, which tells us that by 2040 we will see unprecedented and violent climactic events. Faced with these new realities, we must ask when, not if, the last maple will drop its fiery leaf on this land by the Hudson.
And yet, I find that this fall, I only love the maples, this land, this world, this life harder. It is all more precious for its fragility and its impermanence.
And still, I ask, what does hope look like now?
Job and Bartimaeus both shine like stars in the night sky, by which to navigate in this gathering dark.
Today’s gospel reading presents us with two surprising words. They’re so small, you may have missed them. “Again” and “regained.” When Jesus asks Bartimaeus what he wants Jesus to do for him, he responds “Let me see again.” Similarly, when Jesus has done as Bartimaeus asks, we are told that Bartimaeus regained his sight.
The clear implication is that Bartimaeus was not always blind. Like Job, he lost something he once had, something he was probably so accustomed to he didn’t know to love it until it was gone. Until he quite literally entered the dark.
And yet, when Jesus approaches Jericho, Bartimaeus remains on the side, calling out—not for healing, but for mercy. He doesn’t rush Jesus. But neither does he sit apathetically by waiting for the healer to come along. Instead, he cries out, almost in joy, for Jesus to have mercy on him. Only when Jesus asks him specifically what he wants does Bartimaeus ask to see again.
I imagine that, however his blindness descended, however he may have raged against the loss of his sight, however he may have, for a time, despaired at this loss of light, Bartimaeus came to find peace, joy, and, assurance in the dark. I imagine that he discovered there a deeper kind of hope than he had known before.
On the eve of the Velvet Revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel wrote about what it means to hope:
Hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. […] Hope is definitely not the same as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is hope, above all, that gives strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.
Real hope, as writer and activist Rebecca Solnit points out, is always dark, because the future is forever dim. And while the darkness may frighten us, in her words, it is always the dark, not just of the grave, but of the womb. For out of the darkness emerge possibilities we could never have imagined in the clear light of day.
If the emergence of hope from the dark is true in the secular world, how much truer it is for the Christian, who bears not only Christ’s life within her, but first bears Christ’s death on the Cross. We who profess the faith of Jesus, profess, not that he died and made everything okay in the world, but that having died and risen, he now lives in us, right here and now, still working to stitch back together this fractured world.
I think that what Bartimaeus discovered in the dark is that, although he could no longer see, he could be seen, seen in the depths of his being, known and loved in the very foundation of his soul, in that darkest point within that is reserved for God alone. And in that foundational place, too deep even really to call it love, for it is so much more than that, from that deepest place is where hope is born.
Having lived and having been loved in such darkness, perhaps it wasn’t so important to Bartimaeus to see the physical world. Perhaps he had learned to live with such joy and such hope that, dark or not, the world’s beauty drew him into the life of God right here and now. And I can’t imagine that, having had his sight restored, he could ever forget the fantastic condition of being seen and known in the dark. Surely such an experience changed everything for him.
So, I return to my original question. As the darkness gathers, what does hope look like now? I don’t really know. But I do know that I don’t want to wait for the maples to die to let their beauty pierce my soul. And that, whether in darkness or in light, I will go on planting tulips each fall and dreaming of their growth through the winter months.
Rebecca Solnit reminds us that “joy doesn’t betray, but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.”
Perhaps that’s just it. Hope looks much the same as it always has. It looks like love, like tenderness, like grief, like beauty and heartache and rage. It looks like wonder. It looks like joy. It looks like a room full of people, gathered at a table, remembering the life of God that flows through us, that re-members us, so that we can re-member the world. It looks like dying, and rising once more.
