During my years in active pastoral ministry a large proportion of my reading was taken up with biblical, pastoral and theological works. So, one of the goals that I set for myself in retirement was to read more fiction. I have to admit that thus far I haven’t managed to live up to that resolution in quite the way I’d hoped. But it has been a delight to be introduced to characters from a whole variety of places and periods and to share (if only for a brief period of time) in their worlds and their experiences.
One of those characters was a young French teenager named Marie-Laure Leblanc. Her story takes place in German-occupied France during the Second World War. Her world is one of darkness, not only because of the Nazi invasion and the horrors of war, but because Marie-Laure is blind. As I lived with Marie-Laure and shared in her adventures and in her world of sightlessness, I didn’t want the story to end. For me it was one of those books you wish would go on forever.[1]
In the real world, though, blindness is an affliction I hope that none of us would wish on anyone. On the other hand, I have been privileged to know a few people who were blind over the course of my ministry. And I have to say that in every case they were able to meet their circumstances with a remarkable perseverance and a determination to live life to the fullest, in spite of their loss of sight.
Sadly, such was not the case in the world that Jesus and his followers inhabited and where blindness was much more common than it is today. It could be a condition of birth, as we see in the man whom Jesus sent to wash his eyes in the pool of Siloam (John 9:1-7). It could also be the result of a variety of diseases, even something as easily treatable as pinkeye. And then there was the blindness of old age, usually due to cataracts and aggravated by repeated exposure to sand and the fierce glare of the Middle Eastern sun.
To make matters worse, no effective treatment was available to those who suffered from diseases of the eye. There were no antibiotics and no safe or effective surgical procedures. In my research for this morning’s sermon, I did come across a form of surgery for cataracts that was known in the ancient world, called couching. (If you’re at all squeamish, you may want to block your ears for a moment.) Couching involved using a sharp thorn or a needle to pierce the surface of the eye and force the lens downwards until the patient could begin to see shapes or movement. Needless to say, in the vast majority of these procedures the patient ended up totally blind.
It would not be for more than a thousand years after the time of Jesus, in 1268, that eyeglasses first came into use. Another five hundred years would elapse before the founding of the first school for the blind, in 1791. It would be nearly forty years more until Louis Braille invented his system of raised dots so that blind people could read, in 1829, followed four years later by the publication of the Gospel of Mark in raised print—the first time blind people could read the Scriptures for themselves. Another century would pass before the founding of the first seeing-eye dog school. And it was in the late 1960s—within the lifetime of many of us here this morning—that modern laser eye surgery became a possibility.
In spite of all these improvements, blindness remains a daunting affliction. But try to imagine what it must have been like in biblical times!
Bartimaeus
Which brings us to the gates of Jericho, as Jesus and his followers are making their way into the town. By now Jesus’ fame has become widespread and they are surrounded by a large crowd. The commotion is such that you might hardly notice a crouched figure sitting at the side of the road. Luke doesn’t even give us his name—and I suspect that no one in the crowd knew it either. But in Mark’s gospel we find that it is Bartimaeus.
The sound of the crowd piques Bartimaeus’ curiosity, so he tugs at someone’s robe and asks what’s going on. “Jesus of Nazareth is passing by,” comes the reply. So Bartimaeus begins to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Someone in the crowd yells at him to shut up, but that only encourages him to cry out all the louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”
Then Jesus stops. A silence descends over the crowd, as Jesus asks for the man to be brought to him. “What do you want me to do for you?” he asks. “Sir, I want to see,” comes the reply. “Receive your sight,” Jesus says to him. “Your faith has healed you.” Bartimaeus opens his eyes and there before him he sees the faces of the crowd, staring in amazement. He sees the azure blue of the sky and, flitting back and forth, the birds, whose twitters he could only hear before.
What Bartimaeus and the crowd were experiencing in that moment was a fulfilment of a prophecy spoken by Isaiah centuries before:
Then will the eyes of the blind be opened
and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
Then will the lame leap like a deer,
and the mute tongue shout for joy. (Isaiah 35:5-6)
Jesus himself had spoken about it when he read from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue at the beginning of his public ministry: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind…” (Luke 4:18-19). Bartimaeus’ healing was not an isolated incident. It was a sign that the messianic age was dawning. A new era was erupting into the old.
The apostle Paul endured poor vision for much of his ministry. Perhaps he was placing his own experience failing eyesight of into that context when he reflected to his fellow believers in Corinth, “Now we see things imperfectly, as in a poor mirror, but then we shall see face to face.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)
“Dear friends,” wrote the aged apostle John a generation later, “now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)
What happened to Bartimaeus outside Jericho is what will one day happen to you and to me and all of God’s people as we gather with that great crowd from every race, language and nation to stand before the throne of the Lamb and see him face to face. We will be freed of all our infirmities. We will be healed from all our diseases. We will no longer be crippled by the wounds that have been inflicted on us and that we have inflicted on ourselves. We will finally be the people that God intended us to be from the beginning of time, when he declared, “Let us make human beings in our image.” This is the future for which all creation waits with eager longing, what the Bible calls the glorious liberty of the children of God (Romans 8:21)—and it was what was breaking into the present as Bartimaeus stared around and the crowd back at him in stunned amazement.
Zacchaeus
It is an astounding promise. And we could contemplate it for hours. But as Jesus pushed on, so must we. As we do, we find ourselves entering the gates of Jericho. And here we come upon one of the most curious scenes in all of the gospels. Luke points our eyes upwards, into the branches of a sycamore-fig tree.
These trees were common in the Middle East. They were leafy evergreens, growing to a height of as much as twenty metres, with wide-spreading branches, and they produced a small, sweet-tasting fruit several times a year. If you wanted a tree to hide in, they were the perfect choice—and that was exactly what one person in Jericho was looking for.
I suspect that Zacchaeus’ horizontal challenge was the butt of humour in his own day—and it has been ever since. Perhaps there are some of you here who grew up with the old Sunday school ditty, “Zacchaeus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he…” But things were made much worse by the fact that Zacchaeus was a tax collector. And here we need to stop for some historical background.
I don’t think there are many of us today who enjoy paying taxes—particularly at this time of year as we go through the laborious process of assembling T3s and T4s and T4As and charitable receipts and medical receipts and whatever else to send off to Revenue Canada. But the Roman Empire had an entirely different system, and here is how it worked. Local contracts for tax collection in the Roman world were auctioned off to the highest bidder. But the government did not pay them for their work. Instead, the tax collectors charged the taxpayers an additional levy for their services. And in many cases the fees they exacted were extortionate—to the point where at least one wag called them “birds of prey”.[2]
To add to that, in Judea tax collectors were generally regarded as traitors, collaborators with the Roman occupation. Even more, because they had to have regular dealings with the Gentile Romans, they were viewed as unclean, so that in later years it was even forbidden to accept alms from a tax collector. And if all that weren’t enough, Zacchaeus was no ordinary tax collector. Luke tells us he was a chief tax collector.
Yet, all the same, Zacchaeus held something in common with Bartimaeus. For like Bartimaeus, he wanted to see. But in his case it was a problem not of sight but of height. So it was that Zacchaeus bundled together his robes and clambered up the tree. Its leafy branches would have allowed him both to catch a glimpse of Jesus and also to remain hidden from the crowd. And as they say, the rest is history.
Zacchaeus finds himself taking Jesus into his home—and here I have to say I’d love to have been a fly on the wall to hear the conversation that ensued between them. All Luke reveals to us is the conclusion. Yet, whatever the words they exchanged, it seems to me that what happened to Zacchaeus was that he began to see. Not in the way that Bartimaeus had begun to see, but in the way that Jesus wants us all to see.
What do I mean? The explanation comes in what to my mind has to be the most arresting parable that Jesus ever told. It is found not in Luke’s gospel but in Matthew’s. There Jesus gives a picture of the Son of Man seated on his throne with all the nations of the earth gathered before him. And he separates them as a shepherd separates sheep from goats, the sheep on his right and the goats to the left. Then he says to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me.”
The sheep are puzzled and they ask, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison and go to visit you?” To which the King replies, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:31-40)
Did you notice what the sheep asked? “Lord, when did we see you … ?” I believe that what happened to Zacchaeus was that he began to see in that sense: to see the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked and the sick—and to see those he had cheated for years, perhaps decades—as he saw Jesus.
And therein lies the challenge for you and for me. May Jesus give us sight—eyes to see as he sees and to discover, in the words of C.S. Lewis, “There are no ordinary people.”[3]
[1] Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
[2] “Publicans”, Oxford Companion to the Bible
[3] “The Weight of Glory”
