Everything we profess in faith is a way of saying we believe in God

Bartimaeus, the blind beggar, is one of only a handful of people Mark names in his gospel. (We’re even told his father’s name, Timaeus.) Such detail should alert us to the episode’s significance in Mark’s narrative. The last of Jesus’ miracles, it comes at the end of a long section that begins with the healing of another blind man who, unlike Bartimaeus, remains unnamed. But sandwiched in-between these two episodes involving physical blindness, are Jesus’ so far unsuccessful attempts to cure the spiritual blindness of his closest followers, the disciples.

The healing of Bartimaeus, however, is much more than a miracle-story: for all its raw immediacy, it is an intriguing and subtle dialogue about the meaning and consequences of prayer and faith. Yet again, Mark points to an outsider, someone without status, position, or possessions, as a model of prayerful, trusting faith. Bartimaeus may be without physical sight, but he possesses prophetic insight in abundance.

Mark is drawing an uncomfortable contrast between the abundant faith of the blind, deprived beggar, and the lack of faith on the part of his disciples. He drives the point home by having Jesus ask the blind man exactly the same question – precisely the same construction and words are retained – that he had asked James and John a little earlier, when they had shamefacedly asked him for positions of power and influence: “What would you have me do for you?” Whereas James and John had asked him in last week’s gospel for glory, blind Bartimaeus asks him for sight. The contrast between his humility and their arrogance couldn’t be clearer. The blind beggar’s acknowledged helplessness enables him to see more clearly than the two disciples, who are blinded by their venal ambition and hunger for power and privilege.

This is conveyed by another detail in the encounter. Nothing is going to deter Bartimaeus from approaching Jesus as he passes by: his actions are those of a desperate man who sees and seizes his only chance to recover his sight. In a vivid expression of trusting faith, he casts off his cloak, which in his indigence must have been his most needed possession, because he believes that he will be cured if only he can reach out to Jesus.

The dialogue that ensues makes it clear that Bartimaeus didn’t believe because he was healed: on the contrary, he was healed because he believed. As on so many other occasions, Jesus tells Bartimaeus that it is his faith that has healed him. It was faith that afforded him insight into what he needed most and assured him how that need would be met. In his faith, he knew that Jesus would not refuse him what he needed most.

Mark clearly thinks that we have much to learn from the blind beggar about both faith and prayer. First, counterintuitively, God always answers our prayers, albeit often in ways we don’t at the time recognise as the answer we wanted. He often gives us not what we think we need most, but what we really need most, without realising it. Paradoxically, it is often only in and through prayer that we come to know what we really need.

Secondly, as with Bartimaeus, faith consists, first and foremost, in trusting in God’s unconditional love for us, trusting that nothing we can do or that can happen to us, especially our death, can ever stop God loving us. We unavoidably articulate our faith in language, but the object of our faith isn’t, ultimately, those propositions, but what they seek, inevitably inadequately, to give expression to. The object of our faith is God, who is beyond all language and thought. Everything that we profess in faith is a way of saying that we believe in God, who is love.

Though God’s existence and God’s love can be formally distinguished – that is, we can be convinced that the world doesn’t account for its own existence, from which we infer that there is something that does, namely the referent of the word, “God” – we don’t, in practice, arrive, first, at the conviction that God exists, and then, discover that he loves us. We believe in God, as opposed to becoming rationally convinced that “God” exists, in response to God disclosing himself as love in Christ. To believe in God is to believe that there exists a love that will never fail, that can never be withdrawn, that will sustain us through life and death.

Here and now, to believe in God is to set our hearts on that Love, which is the source of all the love that we experience in this life, as well as the desire written into our very nature for a love that will never end. To live in this changing world in the presence of that love is what it means to live in faith. To live endlessly in the presence of that unchanging, utterly fulfilled and fulfilling love, is what it means to live in Heaven.