© 2000 by Grant M. Gallup
Isaiah 59:1-4 (9-19) Deus absconditus?
Psalm 13 Usquequo, Domine? How long, O Lord?
Hebrews 5:12, 6:1,9-12 Maturity (Madurez) = Readiness
Mark 10:46-52 The blind see, and follow
My blindness about women's ordination was healed by a priest who was breast-feeding a child at diocesan convention one day. Not many decades ago, a newly ordained mother, wearing a big red fluffy sweater pushed up over her breast, held a nuzzling infant close, and thus taught maternal priesthood as one having authority, and not as the scribes. The infant shared in the teaching and learning in the cathedral church in Chicago, in front of God the Father, Bishop Montgomery, and everybody, all of whom were astonished.
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews says that this is the way we learn first principles--by the milk which is the elementary doctrine of Christ. This is the way we learn our ABC's. So it is a right beginning for us all, that we should nurse for a while, as recipients of the gospel's basic message of liberation. The infant in Mother Church's arms was teaching in its nursing--and that bosom was a lactating parable of the way we come to madurez--to maturity, to the ripeness we're intended for. More than most mammals human beings hang helpless upon their mothers long after birth, and for even twelve or fifteen years are not ready for independent living. Eventually the time comes for a change in diet.
Grown up food, the Scripture says, is for grownups. Once I sat at my sister's northwoods home, where she served a grown-up meal of walleyed pike, baked with herbs, lettuces from her dooryard garden, and potatoes from her bin. Meanwhile, across the table, my niece fed her month old baby from her bosom, and I asked her how long that baby would be dining there, and how long before she could have baked walleye instead. Four months, she said, and it could leave the breasts of her consolation, and graduate to Gerber's. "Solid food", says the epistle, "is for the mature." It is for those who have their perceptions trained to discriminate between good and evil. A baby will crawl around on the floor and and put everything into its mouth that it comes across, just as person looking to distinguish truth from falsehood will go from CNN to NEWSWEEK to the Thatcherite ECONOMIST on line, with no luck, and finally come to HARPER'S, or the Socialist MONTHLY REVIEW for a taste of veritas. The time comes when we will be called upon to use our learned skills as adults.
We are spoken to by the Magisterium (the teaching authority) of the Church today in the epistle, which says by this time we ought to be participating in the Magisterium itself. Contrary to papist opinion, Magisterium does not belong exclusively to the Pope, but to the whole church, which is a teaching as well as a learning church, Mother as well as Nuzzler. We ought to have been weaned from our breast feeding mode, hanging on to Big Momma only for weekly consolations. We ought to be functioning as those who are skilled in the public discourse of right and wrong, the dialectic of justice-doing, the "word of righteousness". We ought to be working out our growing-up, and not having to repeat our very first developmental tasks. It's time we were all taking part in the revolutionary project which we call the New Arrangement, the Maternity of the Mother of God, which is why we were weaned.
There's a world here on Planet Earth that needs our energy, our ideas, our devotion. We need to break a sweat, and not just from pulpit fulminations. (Some sweaty TV preachers carry a large handkerchief now, like Luciano Pavarotti singing a rambunctious role). What ministries have you picked up and grasped and run with? Your neighborhood, your city, your nation, your hemisphere, our world: all invite us from the cradle to the cross, to identify, claim, and own the ministries the Spirit has for each. "We feel sure of the better things that belong to your liberation," says the writer to the Hebrews. To all of us, intimidated by such a charge, the writer adds: "God is not so unjust as to forget everything we have done, and are doing, for the love of his name" when we do nice things for each other, but calls us to strive for greater things, for larger challenges. The full assurance of our hopes. Don't retard yourself into hanging onto breast feeding now that you're walking around. It's time to walk on to find some meat, not teat. Nourish yourself with more appropriate provender, adult study and dialogue. Sit like a Quaker in the Meeting for Worship and listen for a prompting of the Spirit, or rise like an Episcopalian and advise the rector he's out of his league, and hasn't explained the big budget for entertainment and the little budget for the soup kitchen. Why do you think God let you live so long? So you can get off breast feeding and start on solid food of justice doing and Kingdom politics. Get a job.
The Word of God today is also a prescription for new vision, but before the prescription comes the diagnosis. You can't see the face of God, Isiah says, not because God is hiding, but because your sins have hid God's face from you. What's more, your other senses are a problem as well. God is not hard of hearing, nor is God a short-handed gimp. It is that the hands of you Americans are defiled with blood and gore. You are murdering infant Palestine in its cradle. You are strangling the holy children of Iraq in their beds. Millions of people have died, and many more millions condemned to lives of misery and torture, as a result of US interventions in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Kosovo, Iraq and elsewhere. Over a million died when the U.S. and Britain supported Suharto's blood letting in Indonesia, and the West winked at the mayhem and cheered the slaughter and the hijacking of the government in Yugoslavia in the last weeks. "Justice," says Isaiah, "is far from us. Like the blind we feel our way along walls, we stumble as though noon were twilight. Truth is forced to her knees in public." Along with Monica Lewinsky.
The Liberator today comes to Jericho, not the old Jericho where Joshua fit the battle, but a new military garrison town, near Jerusalem. The Liberator Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem--the gospel lessons for the last number of weeks have told us so. We are almost there--this is the last stop before the Entry. Jesus is confronted here by a man who is physically blind, but Mark will use this story to tell us something about Jesus, and his Vision. The story is obviously about someone known to Mark's audience, for it's as if he was saying, "You all remember Bartimaeus. . . You all remember him? from Jericho? Well, this is how it happened that he came to be one of us." Up till now in Mark's gospel nobody but the disciples has known who Jesus really is, that he is for them MESSIAS, "Pretender to the Throne of David." Here, in this garrison town, where the Roman occupation soldiers would be everywhere, it is a blind man who has the vision to see that the future of his country, the nation's hopes, the people's future, indeed--his own wholeness--depend upon the Liberator who has come to town.
Like so many of us, Bartimaeus is immbolized. In the midst of a massive military build-up, he like us sits on the side of the road, deprived of the vision necessary to move. Jesus is passing us by, the world lumbering on to destruction, and we sit on our hands. But this one at least--this Bartimaeus, calls for help: "President-Elect, have pity on me." He is asking for his own liberation, but is doing it by using a forbidden title, a scandalous invocation. It would be as if a Puerto Rican nationalist stood at the Pentagon shouting "Che Guevara, have mercy on me." Or, "Fidel Castro Ruz, come and save us Puerto Ricans." Or if a poor Hebron Arab were to shout at Ariel Sharon in Arabic "God is great!" " Naturally, they'd expect to be scolded. Why? Because they were polite people who didn't believe in shouting? Because they revered the religious personage passing through town in the Popemobile? No indeed. They wanted him to shush because it was dangerous to call upon the name of a national liberator, dangerous to call for an end to national apostasy and blindness.
But Jesus stops and counsels, "Call him here to me." He sees the suppliant is blind, but instead of going over to him across the dusty road, Jesus insists that the man at least make the first steps towards his own healing. So they called the blind man, and say "Take courage, come along." He throws off his cloak and jumps up and goes to Jesus. Whatever would slow his progress in those important few steps, that short run to Liberation, is forgotten; he goes to Jesus, who asks, "what do you want me to do do for you?" "Rabbuni"--a particularly affectionate and respectful title--"Rabbuni, that I may see again." Jesus says, "Run along now. Your faith has already healed you." And at once his sight returns and he enters discipleship. He follows Jesus on the "Way", the code word for joining Jesus' revolutionary cadre. What my friend Dorothy Granada, medical missioner in Nicaragua, always calls "The Correct Path."
Healing in the gospels is always a political act, and sometimes a medical miracle. Miracles happen in the midst of politics, frequently.
Recently, some members of the Congressional Black Caucus visited Cuba--a seditious act for a Gringo. (I've done it myself, without your permission.) Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz wrote about it afterwards and told how as he was telling a lawmaker from Mississippi about Cuba's health maintenance programs, a Black congress person said: "Listen, there are a lot of places in my district where there isn't a single doctor." Castro said: "What! Ah, now I see: you are the Third World of the United States. And we are prepared to send you a few doctors free of charge, the same as we do for other countries of the Third World."
Dr. Castro suddenly realized that the U.S., with a gross domestic product of over $8 trillion, was a Blind Bartimeaeus at the dusty roadside of Cuba. It can't figure out how to get up on the road to liberation. It's blind. He also offered to take 250 young people a year and give them an education, and a bilingual one at that. Sharing a vision.
Our individual or national blindness, our cowardice, failure of vision, timorousness--all of this is healed when we can get ourselves even to the edge of the road where Jesus is passing by (and it ain't on Pennsylvania avenue) and we can yell into the procession for healing, using the seditious appeal of the desperate. Especially here in U.S. garrison mentality culture, we need to shout sedition.
The letter to the Hebrews goes at this from another angle. It is the gospel according to Joan Rivers: "Oh, grow up!" You've still got milk on your breath! One of the things that children need to be taught is justice: the infant is so enormously self-centered that good and evil are not a concern; satisfaction of appetites is what they're about. One day not long after my release from hospital in June, a ten year old boy ran past me in a Chicago supermarket, shouting in high glee and knocking shelves of canned goods to the floor. I snapped at him, "Stifle yourself!" and waved my walking stick. Almost at once a kindly adult pursued the boy, but stopped to say to me, "Sorry. He's autistic." That explained it--one can expect such heedless self-centeredness in the autistic, but in a normally maturing child, it's not acceptable. We expect more. That's the whole point of Bar Mitzvah, the Bas Mitzvah, in Scriptural faith. The sacrament of entering adulthood, and the ability and skill to read and teach the tradition, to handle the Word of God, the Word of Justice. For and in the community, not alone in your room, but standing up in Temple. "Solid food is for the mature, for those who have their faculties trained to distinguish good from evil."
The purpose of God's healing our blindness is not to instill guilt, or invite to a guilt trip--but to take us off the shoulder of the road and put us on the highway to liberation.
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