Fr. Roger J. Landry

Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

October 24, 2021

Jer 31:7-9, Ps 126, Heb 5:1-6, Mk 10:46-52

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.24.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* What do you want me to do for you?” Which one of us would not want the Lord to ask us the question he asks Bartimaeus in today’s Gospel? Bartimaeus’ response is one that has become a common aspiration of Christians through the centuries: “Lord, I want to see!” The early saints saw in this expression more than a cry from a physically blind man. They have seen in it the plea of all those in every generation who have been in any type of darkness. “Lord, I want to see!” See what? We learn from Bartimaeus the purpose of our sight. The Gospel tells us, “Having regained his sight, he followed Jesus on the way.” Just like St. Peter’s mother-in-law, as soon as she had been cured of a severe fever, used her health to serve others (Mk 1:30-31), so Bartimaeus, now that he could see, used the gift of his sight to follow the divine Giver, the Light of the World (Jn 8:2). Our eyes — both our physical eyes and the eyes of our heart — are gifts of God so that we might see Jesus and follow him. Our whole nature has been created by God so that we might say, like those Greeks in the Gospel who had not yet met the Lord but presented themselves to Philip: “We want to see Jesus!” (Jn 12:21).

* We want to see Jesus in prayer. We want to see Jesus in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. We want to see Jesus in others, in the faces of those we love, in the faces of those we find difficult to love or like. We want to see Jesus behind the distressing disguises of the poor, the sick, the lonely, the homeless, the abandoned, the blind. We want to behold Christ’s face in the beauties of creation. We want to see him behind each of the commandments, teaching us how to love. We want the eyes to see his will in our daily life, in the present and for the future. Ultimately we want to see him forever face-to-face in heaven, smiling on us with love. But so often we’re blinded. Sin blinds us. Worries blind us. Pain and suffering blind us. Hatred and prejudices blind us. Others, including those we love, can sometimes get in the way and remove our line of sight. Today, the Lord comes to us and asks us, as he asked Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?” As we enter into the scene, we behold not only how Jesus interacted with this particular beggar who was blind, but how he intervenes in each of our vocations and how he seeks to transform us to minister to others. Let’s ponder the various elements of this rich scene together.

* “As Jesus was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a sizable crowd” — Jericho is the lowest place on earth, more below sea level than any other location. Jesus was passing through the depths of the human experience in order to ascend the 15-mile road up hill that leads to Jerusalem, where he would suffer and die to lift us up. There’s no abyss into which Jesus wouldn’t descend for us.

* “Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus, sat by the road side begging” — Bartimaeus was not born blind, but had become blind over the course of time. We see that in the verb he uses later — anablepo —asking Jesus in the Greek to “see again.” He hadn’t just lost his sight, however. To some degree, he had lost the dignity he would have had. He was sitting by the roadside begging. He could not rely on himself anymore. He needed help. He had hit rock bottom. He was in the depth of the valley of darkness in the lowest place on earth. But it was precisely in that spiritual poverty that Jesus ...