This is who Blind Bart meets on the road, and who meets you at Christmas.
In Luke 18 we discover how Jesus handles the person who feels like life has thrown them away.
We meet a beggar in a wealthy city, a throw-away who reveals what we’re all begging for. In the other gospel accounts he has a name, blind Bartimaeus.
Before you decide this isn’t you, you need to know some of the most successful people I know feel like throw-aways. A poverty of connection and heart has driven them to beg success for a better life.
To grasp the story you need to see the frame around it. That frame is the entire canon of Scripture and the entire canon of the human experience.
The canon of Scripture
In Genesis 1 & 2, out of the Trinity’s boundless delight, creation is spoken into being. All is pronounced good. A fundamental harmony and joy hum beneath the created order with beauty everywhere you look. Every nook, every corner, every cranny is overflowing with delight and fertility. Man and woman are together, each a vital part of the other. Connection and love flow without intrusion.
In Genesis 3, humanity violates the created order, and chaos and shame and sadness enter the human story. Toil and strain become the norm. Difficulty and disconnection enter the chat.
Bartimaeus was made—like you were—out of Genesis 1 & 2 delight, but his experience of life was Genesis 3 pain. Can you relate?
The canon of human experience
I wonder sometimes as an adult if sadness is now a permanent part of the story. Deep challenges arise, bad things happen, loss comes in a multitude of forms, and a sadness creeps to the foreground of the heart.
You more readily recognize both other people’s frailty, and the more honest you become, your own. Your own mistakes loom large. Regrets speak to you as specters from their graves. Failures screech like loudspeakers in the auditorium of your life. You are left in some sense sitting beside the road of life waiting for something better to come along, stuck in your ailment, mired and wired to the difficulty and disconnection happening in the chat of your heart. Begging—God, yourself, your history, your genetics, anyone—for something else to happen to you.
This is Blind Bart; aware of how his own violations of the created order and those of others have in some terrible sense created his adult reality of sadness and disconnection and desperation. And so he is left, mired and wired as it were, to his own incompleteness. Begging.
Blind Bartimaeus is us, if, ironically, we can see it.
Then along comes Jesus.
The name Jesus—you likely know—is an English transliteration of the Hebrew word for “God saves”; Yeshuah. You can almost hear Mary whisper it with anticipation in Jesus’ ear as she lays him in the manger.
Notice the boldness of Blind Bart. He calls out.
With a God like Jesus, here is the best heart strategy when you feel like a throw away. Call out.
Whenever anyone calls out, it is from a setting and a context, a setting and context that on any given day could prevent them from calling out. But this day, Bartimaeus is not stopped. Wired to his story, he calls out anyway.
“Yeshuah, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
This phrase from Blind Bart has famously become known as “The Jesus prayer”. This cry of profound naming and deep desperation has been embedded in Church history and practice as a doorway to freedom because of what Jesus does next. Jesus stops and calls for him.
Jesus answers a call with a call.
Notice what this means. The God who saves stops and calls for someone who thinks their story is permanently stuck to Genesis 3 pain. Someone whose religious canon and life canon both seem to tell him a story of condemnation and quiet despair.
The Lord interrupts his narrative with mercy.
Divine mercy is what picks us up off the roadside of life. God’s mercy has a wideness that spans further than the edges of our life story and covers our gaps. It rewrites the story of what should have been and what was with who God is—someone who saves people begging for a better life.
This is who Blind Bart meets on the road, and who meets you at Christmas.
Pastor Scott Marshall, Wichita First Church of the Nazarene