Recently, I was thinking of my late PawPaw. Maybe it’s because All Souls’ Day is approaching, but I also thought of him when reading about Bartimaeus. PawPaw had a way of seeing life that I always admired. My maternal grandfather grew up dirt poor in south central Louisiana. Cajun French was his first language, and he was no stranger to tragedy and life’s difficulties. At the height of the Great Depression, his father took his own life when PawPaw was just fourteen years old, and from then on, he had to pull himself up by his bootstraps and carry on. When you’ve reached rock bottom, there’s only one place to go other than death, and that’s up.
PawPaw worked hard on a farm even while attending school. Even as a teenager, he had a role to play in the survival of his family, and there was no question that they were going to survive. Eventually, PawPaw moved to southeast Texas, where I grew up, to start a new life and find a career as a carpenter in the oil refinery business. He was a brilliant carpenter. He could make beautiful things out of any scrap of wood.
I didn’t know much about my PawPaw’s sad childhood until later in life, which said a lot about him. He never complained about his life. He never wallowed in self-pity. He just got on with things, because I think he loved life. Watching him cook and build everything from cabinets to houses, I would never have known how much despair my grandpa must have had to rise above to survive. PawPaw didn’t just have a natural inclination to work hard; I think he had a profound sense of faith in God. He saw possibility where others would have seen only impossibility.
I’m convinced that PawPaw’s belief in what was possible was both the direct result of his faith in God and his experience with poverty. The two go together. He had a favorite saying to redirect discouragement or despair. If someone started to fret or worry (as my grandmother was wont to do), or if something wasn’t going your way, he’d say, “don’t fuss; call Gus.” Gus was his father’s name. I’m not really sure what that saying meant, but I understood the “don’t fuss” part.
PawPaw was generous. He would fix things for widows who had no one to help them. He built the house I grew up in. And since he lived next door to us, he was constantly cooking up Cajun dishes and bringing them next door for us to enjoy: crab stew, etouffee, and beignets. But given his background, he would also make dishes out of things we wouldn’t normally want to touch. He would bring over gamey venison sausage and one time, a turkey stew, with a note left on it that said, “Don’t knock it until you try it.” He knew that my family and I would wrinkle our noses and try to dump the food down the drain. I’m sure he knew that was just our privileged perspective, not having lived through a depression or through the challenges he had, where you simply didn’t throw out food.
I thought of my PawPaw when reading about blind Bartimaeus because my PawPaw had a way of seeing things. I don’t think my PawPaw saw the world from a perspective of scarcity. I think he saw abundance where most of us would have been afraid of scarcity. I don’t think PawPaw really complained all that much because growing up on the poverty line in south central Louisiana, he didn’t have time to complain. His own personal story and his own faith in God, allowed him to see as others couldn’t see. And in hindsight, that’s a gift to me.
Of course, the story of blind Bartimaeus is all about seeing. But Mark the evangelist, for all his terse and breathless style of storytelling, isn’t content simply to present Bartimaeus as a raw example of Jesus’s power to heal. Jesus does heal Bartimaeus, but in typical Markan fashion, there’s irony at work, too. Bartimaeus is healed on the verge of Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem, the final stretch of his earthly life. Bartimaeus is healed as one on the margins. Bartimaeus not only regains his physical sight; he sees spiritually in a way that most people in the Gospel have been incapable of until this point.
Bartimaeus pleads for Jesus’s mercy after James and John have arrogantly asked for seats of glory in the kingdom. It’s precisely because Bartimaeus is poor and blind and on the margins—literally sitting by the roadside—that he can see in a way no one else can see, just like my PawPaw could see possibilities in a life that would seem limited and impoverished to others.
Bartimaeus is the one that no one else could see or would want to see. His is the voice that is silenced by the crowd because he’s a mere distraction to Jesus’s journey forward. His is the voice of so many in our own day who cry out, although most people don’t hear them. His is the voice of those we speak over because they challenge our comfort or distract us from pursuing greatness. His is the voice of the refugee who sees the potential for freedom in this nation—in a way that we might not—but who faces potential deportation. His is the voice of the store clerk who barely receives minimum wage and works three jobs but always has a smile for you because she doesn’t just look at you; she sees you. Bartimaeus sees in a way that many in his own world can’t see.
And it’s for him that Jesus stops dead in his tracks. It’s this blind beggar who’s literally on the margins who finally sees in the way that Jesus has been inviting everyone to see. Bartimaeus sees not with rose-tinted glasses of pollyannish optimism but with cross-tinted glasses of hope. A beggar by the roadside has no choice but to see everything through the lens of the cross, even if the cross is still in the future.
Finally, it all makes sense! All Jesus’s talk about dying to self and about suffering and self-denial and about the first being last and the last being first finally makes sense, and we learn it from the faith of a blind beggar sitting by the roadside. Following Jesus isn’t about a willing acquisition of suffering. It’s about looking up at the world from the lowest vantage point imaginable. It’s about kneeling at the foot of the cross and looking up at our Savior there, suffering so that we might live. It’s about seeing him look at you and really seeing you and also reaching his arms out wide to embrace the entire world and not just you. It’s about seeing all of creation through cross-tinted glasses.
It's no wonder that when we go to the poor, we find Christ. And when each of us recognizes our own poverty, we can’t help but see differently. Because each of us is poor, no matter how much we wish to stifle that thought. We’re all poor in different ways, but being poor, whether materially or spiritually, is one way in which we find our shared humanity.
The more we run away from the poor, the more we run away from our truest selves, and the more we’ll try to look at the world with rose-tinted glasses rather than with cross-tinted glasses. But everything changes when we see through the lens of the cross. We see gratitude rather than disappointment. We see failures as opportunities for spiritual maturity. We see scraggly scraps of wood as a beautiful house for someone. We see money not as something to hoard but as something to give. We see our own parish’s struggles as yet another opportunity to notice where God is redirecting our gaze to do the work he’s called us to do.
When we see with cross-tinted glasses, we learn that loss and poverty aren’t so much misfortune to be avoided but the very heart of the Gospel’s good news. It’s out of death that life comes. It’s on the cross that we find glory. It’s on the margins that we find our Lord, redirecting our gaze to the manifold possibilities for resurrection life in our midst.
I can’t imagine my PawPaw without his sad and difficult past, even while I wouldn’t wish that past on anyone. But because of that past, he could see with cross-tinted glasses in a way that I couldn’t as a child who had everything I needed and was privileged in so many ways.
And then there’s Bartimaeus, a visible sign—a sacramental one, if you will—that believing is seeing. Bartimaeus shows us how to see the world through cross-tinted glasses. Seeing through cross-tinted glasses is seeing through the eyes of faith that even when our voice is silenced, God always hears us and sees us. Seeing through cross-tinted glasses is trusting that when everything seems to have fallen apart, God can and will build something new.
In every moment of our lives, in our prayer and in our work and in our play, the risen Christ asks us, What do you want me to do for you? And of all the things we can ask of him, there’s yet one thing that we all need. And so, with Bartimaeus, we ask him, “Master, let me receive my sight.” And we jump up from our place of despair, we leave everything we have behind, and we follow him, all the way to the cross, and then all the way to glory.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost
October 27, 2024