Having a Super Session
- Job 42:1-6, 10-17
- Psalm 34
- Jeremiah 31:7-9
- Psalm 126
- Hebrews 7:23-28
- Mark 10:46-52
Year B Proper 25 (30), Revised Common Lectionary:
O Lord, Save your people…
HESE ARE, By themselves, more notes for our discussion than a sermon. A couple of things come to mind:
In Jeremiah, we have a brief echo of a line from Psalm, 28:9, “Save your people and bless your inheritance”. This line will be dear to those of the Eastern Rite for the hymn of the Holy Cross, which runs:
Lord, save your people and bless your inheritance;
granting to faithful Christians victories over their enemies,
and protecting your commonwealth by your Cross.
(I got that translation here. In some [Slavic?] texts the second line refers to “Orthodox Christians” rather than “faithful” ones.)
The question arrises as I read this – and as Jeremiah refers to the “Faithful remnant of Israel” – who are the people of God? It’s a hard struggle to answer for Israel says she is, and, in the west, at least, the Church says she is. The Eastern Church goes further than the west (as far as I know) and says, following St Paul, that the Church is “The Israel of God” and that “Israel according to the flesh” is an issue best left to God, himself.
I’m not sure how I feel about that, actually. Since in our Politically Correct world, we are to place no emphasis on race or ethnicity, on the one hand a “spiritual Israel” makes no never mind, but if we insist that Israel is a “race” or “ethnicity”, a specific “tribe” of people, then, in fact, claiming to be “Spiritual Israel” is rather like white, middle class folks claiming to be “spiritual native Americans” or “pagan Celts” or “Mayan Elders”. Those who *are* rightfully those things have a right to cry foul at us.
How do we define “the People of God” or the “Remnant of Israel” today, and that in ways that do not defame, or disinherit others? Or do we try? Does the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus as Messiah of God require that we name the Jewish people to have served their purpose in bringing forth Messiah, but then failed in the follow-through in their failure to recognise him?
Even while we try to answer those questions, we have to look at the Gospel today:
Notice that the blind man is not given a name: his name (in the Greek text) is listed as “Bartimaeus” which is then translated as “Son of Timaeus”. The Hebrew name “Bar-Timaeus” means only “Son of Timaeus” and nothing less. This fact seems lost in the story… where his father’s name (Timaeus) is offered, but not his own. This happens in other places as well: Bar-Abbas is the Son of Abbas who was released instead of Jesus. Bar-Navus is one of the Twelve Apostles. Like Bartimaeus, we may be so used to seeing the names of Barabbas and Barnabas that we might forget the Hebrew meaning of their names.
Following the questions raised by Jeremiah I’m tempted to see Bar-Timaeus as an echo of the Socratic Dialogue, the Timaeus. And the Son of Timaeus (with the implication of a Hellenic scientific philosopher) is really blind and he needs Jesus to see. Hellenic Platonism – like Judaism, in this read – needs Jesus to reach its fullness.
So, in this stumbling read of the two texts, we left (along with the Church) in the unenviable position of being right whilst everyone else is either wrong or, simply, not right enough.
And I’m left remembering an interesting cartoon that occasionally makes its way around the net: a person says they can not go to bed because “someone is wrong on the internet!” How often do theological discussions boil down to that – someone is “wrong” and needs to be “fixed”. An earlier post of mine… posted after these notes but posted before… needs to be highlighted here: wherein I make fun of unitarians. On the other hand, the preceding post is where I make fun of very conservative sorts.
Someone is theologically wrong and needs to be fixed…
I can even justify it in all the cited cases: All heresy is, essentially, Christological. The Jewish, Platonic, Unitarian and Conservative heresies all seem to miss a point in the doctrine of the Incarnation and, thus, fail to grasp something about the human person.
It’s fun to run around a fix people!
If, however, we want to fix people, we miss the Gospel.
In Mark 10:47, we have the seed of one of the most important Mantras in all the Christian tradition: ‘Ιησου ελεησον με. Isou, eleison me. Jesus, have mercy on me. It’s the root of the Jesus prayer, the central mantra of Eastern Monasticism, and the central point of all Christian theology, really.
We are so used to hearing “Mercy” as a cry of the tortured to the torturer. In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dr Frank N. Furter uses a bullwhip on his servant, Riff-Raff, who cries out “Master, Mercy!!!!” The implication being, usually, that we cry out for mercy to someone doing something bad to us. “Say ‘Uncle’” becomes the bully’s mirrored version of this cry for “Mercy”. God has us pinned down, one arm twisted behind our back, and he says, “Say Uncle!” and we say “Mercy!”
Bartimaeus doesn’t imagine that Jesus has any connection to the source of his Blindness…
Rather the blind man is saying something else. The Greek word ελεησον eleison, “have mercy” is linked to the word for olive oil. Far from meaning “Stop Beating Me Up”, eleison means “poor oil on my wounds, help me heal”. Since we no longer pour oil on our wounds, a more-modern reading of eleison will be “give me a massage.”
The Gospel tells us the world hurts. But God is there to “have mercy”. Not because he’s beating us up and we cry uncle, but rather because it sucks that things are like this, and here, let me give you a massage.
It may seem I’m being flip, but I’m not.
Eleison becomes the primary prayer of the church. I tried, once, to count the number of times the Church says “Lord, Have Mercy” or Kyrie Eleison or Gospodi Podmilui. In any given liturgy, well before the Gospel is read, the cry of “Mercy” has gone up nearly two dozen times. If the third and sixth hours were read first (as in the Slavic tradition), “Lord have mercy” has been prayed already over 100 times before the beginning of the liturgy itself! To every mention of trouble, from sickness and suffering, from mourning and death, from war and famine to unemployment and “evil imaginations”, the prayer is “Lord, pour oil on our wounds!”
The issue, over and over again, is “Lord, the world sucks. Give us a massage.”
It may seem I’m being flip, but I’m not.
The Gospel is not about fixing people. It is about pouring oil on their wounds: it’s about giving out massages. It’s about helping folks heal.
Lord, save your people! Save is also a word associated with healing. It’s the name of Jesus, as well: “Save” being “Yash” and giving us “Yeshua”. We cry out to God for saving, for healing. We cry out to God for oil to dress our wounds, for this massage.
Philo of Alexandria said, “Be Kind. Everyone you meet today is struggling.” If we ask God for mercy, for a massage… won’t it be better if we pass that along? Better than correcting everyone we see as “wrong” on the internet (or elsewhere), mightn’t a bit of Eleison be more in keeping with the Gospel?
