An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Standing Up to the Silencers

A sermon on Mark 10:46-52 by Nathan Nettleton

Far too many people get silenced. We’ve been hearing a lot in the news about the sexual abuse of children in churches and other institutions, and in most cases, the victims had been threatened or shamed into keeping silent about what had been done to them. The average length of time before a childhood sexual abuse victim speaks up is apparently 23 years. That’s a pretty powerful silencing. We have also been hearing a lot about domestic violence, and again, the victims are frequently silenced by the fear of further and worse violence. The documentary “Ka-ching” on the ABC last Tuesday night told some scary stories about the pressure exerted by the poker machine industry that successfully silenced the politicians who sought to limit the amount of money that people could lose on the machines.

Those examples are all quite obviously evil, but there are other types of silencing that don’t have the same criminal overtones. Many people find themselves pressured to keep silence if they start expressing a wish to break free from conformity with their current social situation. I know a number of people who were subjected to all sorts of ridicule and hostility when they aspired to be the first person from their family or community to go to university. It was as though everyone around them took their aspiration as a personal insult, as a put down. “Are you too good for us? Pull your head in.”

I also know a number of people at the other end of the socio-economic scale who copped very similar ridicule and hostility when they had climbed to the top of the corporate ladder and decided that it wasn’t worth it and wanted to walk away and seek a simpler life. The abuse, especially from those who were still on the way up was often quite ferocious. “How dare you question the value of what we are still reaching for.”

Sometimes there is also a similar ridiculing or patronising move to silence those who think they can make a difference in the world on some of the big social issues that everyone else has concluded are too hard and given up on. People are dismissed as naive dreamers and head-in-the-clouds optimists, and subtly pressured into falling into line with everyone else’s jaded cynicism. Or not so subtly. Just ask Adam Goodes.

There was an attempt to silence someone in today’s gospel reading too. The crowd try to silence Bartimaeus as he begins crying out to Jesus for help. I want to look at this silencing, but first I need to make some more general observations about this story so that we can properly understand what is going on in the silencing attempt.

One of the questions that the biblical scholars ask about this story is whether it is really a miracle story or a call story. Clearly the story has a miraculous healing in it, but it also results in a man leaving his old lifestyle and following Jesus on the way, so where does the emphasis fall? The reason this matters, is that often the most significant things about particular stories in the gospel jump out more clearly when you see how they make a twist to the conventional structure of that type of story, so you need to decide which category it is playing with. The consensus on this story is that it is a call story, and therefore we should interpret it alongside and in relation to the other stories of the calling of the disciples. In fact it is an important summarising call story. One of the big themes of Mark’s gospel is the difficulty that Jesus has getting his disciples to see what he is really on about. All those stories we’ve been hearing in the last couple of months about the disciples failing to understand what Jesus meant by saying he would end up crucified, and those stories about them arguing over who was the greatest and trying to shoo away the children, etc; all those stories have been grouped in between two stories of Jesus healing blind people. In the first one, Jesus had to have two goes, because at first the blind person could only see vague outlines of people who looked like trees walking, and Jesus had to have a second go before the man could see properly. It’s hard work opening people’s eyes and getting them to see properly. So then we have several chapters of Jesus trying to open the eyes of his disciples and get them to see properly, without a lot of success, and then finally we get to the story of Bartimaeus, the final story before Jesus heads into Jerusalem for the last time. And Bartimaeus immediately becomes the model disciple. He recognises who Jesus is, his eyes are opened, and he leaves his old life behind him and follows Jesus on the way. If only it had been so easy to open the eyes of all the other disciples.

But one of the things that this story adds to the usual features of a call story is this attempt by the crowd to silence Bartimaeus when he first calls out to Jesus. Mark tells us that when ‘he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” many sternly ordered him to be quiet. But he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” and Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.”’

So what’s going on here? Why are the people trying to silence him? And does this shed any light on what’s going on in some of the attempted silencings we witness or experience. There is probably no one simple answer that explains it all. Many have suggested that it was simply because Bartimaeus was considered a nobody, and the crowd didn’t want a nobody interrupting an important somebody like Jesus. Stay in your place and shut up. He’s got more important things to do than listen to nobodies like you. There is no doubt that this is at least part of it because it fits naturally with lots of what Mark has been telling us prior to this story. It would be another example like the disciples trying to shoo away the children who came to Jesus. “Will you nobodies please stop interrupting. Something important is going on here.” Yes, says Jesus, something important is going on here, and nobodies like these beggars, slaves and children are right at the centre of it.

I wonder too whether some of it is a bit like the city cleanups that go on before hosting an international event like the Olympic Games. We try to get the beggars off the streets because it is so socially awkward to have our important overseas guests seeing that we have such desperate people in our wannabe perfect society. Let’s not allow such sights to intrude on Jesus’s view of our community. Silence, Bartimaeus.

But I wonder even more whether the attempts to silence Bartimaeus are a bit more like some of those silencings that some of us experience if we try to turn our lives around and break with the status quo. Remember that Mark is holding up Bartimaeus as the model disciple, the one who shows us what it really looks like to have our eyes opened to reality and to follow Jesus on the way. And there is often a part of us that doesn’t want to allow the model to be seen, or the alternative narrative to be heard. We might not be entirely happy with our lives, and we might yearn for something more, but we desperately hope it is a little add-on, and not complete break with the status quo. When someone begins crying out for a much more radical change, and models for us the message that we really need to take Jesus a whole lot more seriously than we have been and turn our backs on life as we have known it to follow him, we don’t want to hear it. Silence, Bartimaeus! We’re doing okay here. We are obviously fans of Jesus. We are here in the crowd, cheering him on, trying to keep the riff raff out of his way. We’ll sing our songs and wave our bibles and shout his name, and we don’t need anyone suggesting that that’s not really what following Jesus is about. We don’t want anyone making it look like we are still blind to what Jesus is really on about. We’ve learned to cope okay with the toxic bits of our present reality, and we’ve learned to accomodate ourselves to the harsh realities of this present world and to save up a little and get a house and a car and few comforts, and we get along to church on Sundays, and we’re keeping our heads above water in difficult times, and we don’t need anyone breaking ranks and showing up the shallowness of our aspirations and the defeatedness of our coping mechanisms. We don’t want anyone crying out for a greater freedom that would suggest that we ourselves are still imprisoned to the ways of death. Silence, Bartimaeus, silence!

But Bartimaeus will not be silenced. He knows his need, and he knows that in Jesus he has met the only one who can meet him in that need and lead him on the way to freedom. So Bartimaeus cries out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” And Jesus stops on the spot and says, “Call him here.” Jesus steps through the attempts to silence him and invites him to follow on the way of life. And if the cry for life and freedom inside you is being silenced – whether it is being silenced by the disdain and ridicule of others, or by your own fears and uncertainties – if you will speak up anyway and cry out to Jesus, willing to have your eyes really opened and your life really turned around, he will stop for you too. Nothing else is too important, and no one is going to be silenced or shooed away. Jesus will welcome you and all who cry out, and stop and ask you, “What do you want me to do for you?” That might seem a bit obvious, but note that it is the exact same question he has just asked of the disciples James and John when they stopped him with their request, but their answer was that they wanted him to put them at the top of the hierarchy, to give them the places of greatest honour. That’s not a request Jesus can fulfil, but if, when he asks you, you respond more like Bartimaeus, “Teacher, let me see, really see,” then your request will be granted for sure, and nothing will ever be the same again. You will see and hear the truth that so many are intent on covering up and silencing, and you will see that the path of freedom leads on in the footsteps of Jesus, all the way to the cross and beyond into the wide open spaces of God’s love and life. “Teacher, we want to see, and follow you on the way.”

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