The Healing Of Bartimaeus
(By Fr. Dexter Brereton)
The healing of the Blind man Bartimaeus is one of my favourite bible stories not just because of the audacity of Bartimaeus himself but because of what that healing must have meant for him on a personal level. You see Bartimaeus begins the story as a person who has lost his “agency” – his power to act on his own behalf. The story begins by describing him as follows: “As Jesus left Jericho with his disciples and a large crowd, Bartimaeus (that is, the son of Timaeus) a blind beggar, was sitting at the side of the road.” There are many people today whom the misfortunes of life has left “sitting at the side of the road” – people who have been laid off, persons who have not been able to work because of a terrible illness, men or women who are crippled by the fear brought on by an abusive relationship, people who see themselves as not being worthy of respect or even love.
His healing is largely effected by his own act of rebellion and later, by the words of Jesus. There is an interesting exchange between Bartimaeus and the people around him: “When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout and to say, ‘Son of David, Jesus, have pity on me.’ And many of them scolded him and told him to keep quiet, but he only shouted all the louder…”
The various persons today who have lost their agency, those who have been left sitting at the side of the road, must overcome serious obstacles in order to emerge out of the situation in which they are trapped and helpless. These obstacles are like the voices which ‘scold them and tell them to keep quiet.’ For example, people may be badly treated in some store, they may have bought faulty merchandise or been denied some service and the management refuses to listen, a friend of mine once had his daughter work for a business place and at the end of three weeks, they refused to pay the young woman. Every once in a while, however, people manage to rebel against the situation that oppresses them and resist the crowd ‘shouting all the louder…Son of David, Jesus, have pity on me!’
Going back to my earlier examples, the voices may come from the norms of the society itself. In Caribbean society it is not considered socially acceptable to ‘make a scene’ in public. Most people would be too ashamed. In Trinidad, with its slavery past, this would be labeled ‘ol’ nigger behaviour’. Yet, the rude, impolite people that ‘made noise’ like Bartimaeus, are precisely the ones who create social advances for society. We think here of Trade unionists – people like the late T.U.B. Butler or before him social activists like Captain Arthur Andrew Cipriani, who refused to accept that West Indians, labourers, were created simply to be ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water.’ These were the people who began the modern Trade Union movement or the independence movement here in Trinidad.
Here is a story of my own where I had to struggle with those voices that told me to ‘keep quiet’ and to ‘behave myself’. I had just moved from the countryside to the capital in Haiti and I was invited by a senior confrere of mine to go to a dance recital somewhere in Port-au-Prince. When we got there, we discovered that too many tickets had been sold. My confrere was offered one of the few remaining seats while I was ushered to sit on the ground. I immediately left the theatre and returned home and soon as I got there penned a letter to the producers in French and in Creole demanding my money back. It was a socially risky move for me – especially as a foreigner and a young priest, but I was quite upset by the incident. Well, my superior, instead of scolding me, congratulated me for standing up for myself. Not only did the producer refund my money but he paid me “three times” the price of an admission ticket! For me this was an important occasion, when I discovered my own ‘agency’, when I refused to be cowed by those voices telling me to be polite and submissive.
