Following the Lord in the Wondrous Light of Life, Eighth Thursday (I), June 1, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Leonine Forum NYC Chapter, IESE Business School, Manhattan
Thursday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Justin Martyr
June 1, 2023
Sir 42:15-25, Ps 33, Mk 10:46-52

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following thoughts were attempted in the homily: 

• In the Book of Sirach today, Ben Sira, helped by the Holy Spirit, tries to “recall God’s works” and does so even though “even God’s holy ones must fail in recounting the wonders of the Lord.” He describes with wonder God’s creation at his word, his capacity to plumb depth and heart, his knowledge, wisdom, beauty. We continue that praise in the Psalm, trying to sing God a new song since “by the word of the Lord the heavens were made” and since all God’s works are trustworthy. That spirit of praise is meant to influence our entire life. With regard to the redemption, however, we must go, as the Church’s prayer on Christmas day bids us, from “mirabiliter” to “mirabilius,” from wondrous to more wondrous: “O God who wondrously created man and even more wondrously redeemed him.” We see the whole pattern of the even more wondrous redemption in the extraordinary Gospel scene with Bartimaeus, the blind man.
• Jericho is the lowest place on earth, more below sea level than any other city on the planet. Jesus was passing through the depths of the human world in order to ascend the 15 mile road uphill that leads to Jerusalem, where he would suffer and die to lift us up.  St. Mark tells us, “Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus, sat by the road side begging.” Bartimaeus was not born blind — like the man at the Pool of Siloam in John 9 — but had become blind over the course of his life. We see that in the verb he uses later — anablepo — asking Jesus in the Greek to “see again.” But he hadn’t just lost his sight. To some degree, he had lost the dignity he would have had. He was sitting by the road side begging. He could not rely on himself anymore. He needed help. He had hit rock bottom. He was in the depth of the valley of darkness in the lowest place on earth. But it was precisely in that spiritual poverty that Jesus would come to meet him, as many times he has likewise come to us. When he heard that Jesus was passing by, he didn’t cry out for alms, which would have been small. He didn’t cry out at that point for a miracle. He cried out simply for mercy: “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me!” He had doubtless heard of Jesus’ reputation for working miracles to the north in Galilee and was responding in faith. The fact that he called him “Son of David” was a sign he believed Jesus was the Messiah. The word St. Luke uses for crying out means basically an animal cry, something coming from the depth of his woundedness. And his prayer would be answered. Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.” Like rabbis were accustomed to do on all their pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the major feasts, Jesus was teaching the crowds along the journey. But when he heard Bartimaeus’ pleas, he stopped in his tracks and ordered that Bartimaeus be brought to him. For Jesus, caring for this man was more important than what he was teaching at that moment, because he was about to show the Gospel rather than just verbally describe it. He was also going to show how he responds to persistent prayer. They said to Bartimaeus, “Take courage; get up, Jesus is calling you.” It would have been very easy for Jesus to come to meet Bartimaeus exactly where he was begging. But Jesus loved him too much and understood the human heart too well to do that. Instead he drew near, he got close, but then he had Bartimaeus get up to come to him, to exercise Bartimaeus’ freedom, to stoke his desire, to give him greater participation in the miracle Jesus himself was about to accomplish. It takes courage to get up and leave our comfort zone to respond to the Lord. Bartimaeus had that courage and did. “He threw aside his cloak, sprang up, and came to Jesus.”  The cloak was his outer garment that kept him warm at night. It was in a sense his security blanket. It was quite valuable to him and part of his life. But he was intentionally embracing a new life and establishing a new security. He left it behind, which is not just a fact but an important symbol of how he was thinking more about clinging to Jesus and the new life for which he was hoping than clinging to the past. And even though he was blind, he got up immediately. He raced to respond to his being called by the Lord. Unlike the excuse makers in other sections of the Gospel who said that they would follow Jesus after they had buried their father (perhaps decades later), inspected their oxen, enjoyed their honeymoon, etc., Bartimaeus responded with alacrity. “What do you want me to do for you?,” Jesus asked him. “Master, I want to see.” The Latin words for this have become a very popular Christian aspiration, “Domine, ut videam!” Bartimaeus said, “I want to see! I want to live in the light. I want to see things as they really are. I want to see you!” The verb used here in Greek is “I want to see again.” He wants to live in grace again. He wants to live anew in the light. He knows what he lost and he knows where to find it. To say to Jesus, “I want to see!,” is not just to turn to a healer and ask him to restore his vision. It’s to say I want to live in your vision. St. John would write in his Gospel, words that we have for our Gospel verse today, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will have the light of life.” That’s the gift for which Bartimaeus was begging. But Jesus gives something even more. “Go your way; your faith has saved you.”  The Lord not only gave him his wish to see but heard his initial cry to have mercy on him, and Jesus’ generosity far outdid Bartimaeus’ imagination to ask. Faith in response to God leads to salvation, and even though Bartimaeus didn’t dare ask for that, God gave it.  St. Mark tells us, “Immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way.” Bartimaeus used his freedom to follow Jesus. He left the depth of Jericho behind and followed him up to Jerusalem, he followed him on Palm Sunday, he followed up on the Way of the Cross, he followed him. And St. Luke comments, “He immediately received his sight and followed him, giving glory to God, and when they saw this, all the people gave praise to God” (Lk 18:43). He spent the rest of his life glorifying God in such a way that others joined him in that divine praise. This doxological sequela is what the Christian life is all about!
• This journey is something each of us is called to make as a disciple. Jesus is constantly passing by and he’s calling us. He asks what we want. And we respond we want to see things in his own light. And then he wants us to help others to learn how to live in the light of Him who is the Light of the World, spreading that light, spreading that desire to praise God for all his works.  Today at this Mass, after having cried out for mercy at the beginning, we respond to Jesus’ query, “What do you want me to do for you!,” by asking for the grace to see Him in the Eucharist, to see him in those we serve, to see him in all those crying out, and finally with them one day to see him face-to-face forever, where we hope to join in the everlasting praise of Sirach, the Psalms, all creation and all of those more wondrously redeemed!
• Someone who lived in this light and sought to help others to be cured of their blindness so they could as well is the great and influential martyr the Church celebrates today. St. Justin was born about the year 100 in what is now the city of Nablus, which is one of the now West Bank cities in the Holy Land, about 35 miles from Jericho. He was born of pagan parents and received a decent pagan education as a child. During his later teenage years, he began to feel a hunger within to know what made the world tick, to know what made him tick, to know whether there was a God and what his nature was. He started out on a search for the light. He placed himself as a disciple under a well-known local Stoic philosopher — the Stoics were famous for their self-control and morality — but after some time found that he had learned nothing about God and that in fact his master had nothing to teach him on the subject. He then went to a Peripatetic philosopher, but after a short time this Aristotelian wanted money from him, and to Justin this showed that he was not a real philosopher, a seeker of wisdom, but just a philosophical mercenary who wasn’t living the truth that he claimed to had been seeking. Still searching for truth, he sought out a Pythagorean, but this Pythagorean refused to teach him anything until Justin had mastered music, astronomy and geometry. Justin didn’t want that likely-fruitless detour. Finally he found a Platonist and for a while Justin delighted that at least someone sought eternal truths and the real meaning of human life. He began to delight with his Master and fellow students. One afternoon, however, when he was in his late 20s, he was walking along the beach and, as he says in his autobiographical writings, met an old man with whom he began to converse. This Old Man listened intently to Justin pour out his heart in seeking the truth. The wise old man turned to Justin and said to him, “You’re not really in love with the truth. You’re in love with talking and discussing the truth, with philosophy, with thinking about thinking. If you’re in love with truth, you’ll live the truth.” Then the old man challenged him to read the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, bid him adieu and left. Justin was stung and intrigued at the same time. He reflected for a while on the old man’s contention that he was not really a lover of truth, but just a lover of intelligence, of being smart, of knowing more than others, and thought that the old man was reading his soul. His life did not depend or had not even much changed on the basis of his meditation upon Plato’s “eternal forms.” He was also captivated by the sage’s challenge to “live the truth.” Plato had always thought that if you knew the truth, you’d live it automatically. But spurred on by the old man, Justin reflected on his own experience and saw that knowing the truth and putting it into practice were two different things. Finally, convinced that the old man had a wisdom for which Justin yearned, he poured himself into the study of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. He left his security blanket and started a new journey.
• Study of the Christian Scriptures brought him into contact, naturally, with both Christians and Jews. The Christians were the ones who fascinated him, because they took the search for truth to all new levels. Justin wrote his first series of impressions. He wrote of men and women who had no fear of death, who preferred truth to life and were yet ready to await the time allotted by God; of human beings who have a great devotion to their children, charity even towards their enemies, and a desire to save their enemies. He noted their patience and their prayers in persecution, their love of mankind including their enemies, their chastity and their courage. These Christians, he concluded, were not hypocrites. They lived the words they preached, and they actually loved and joyfully prayed for those who were persecuting and killing them. Justin concluded either that it was the most benevolent, joyous and holy craziness he not only had ever witnessed but could possibly conceive, or the truth for which he had been searching all his life. The more he got to know the Christians, the more he became convinced that the truth for which he had been searching for most of his life, the truth which had captivated him and taken him through so many stages, a truth worth living for and a truth worth dying for, had a name, and that name was Jesus. “Seek and you shall find, ask and it shall be given to you, knock and the door will be opened to you.” These words of Jesus were, in a certain sense, Justin’s motto. He searched for the Truth and found Him, and once he found him, he accounted everything else as loss in comparison with the treasure he had discovered. And St. Justin followed all the way, seeking to live the truth he had come to know. And he didn’t shirk Christ’s command to deny himself, pick up his Cross and follow him. He wrote several years before his martyrdom, “I, too, expect to be persecuted and to be crucified by some of those” whose arguments he had publicly refuted. While Christianity was still illegal and punishable by death, he wrote a book to the emperor, refuting all of the attacks on Christianity, and proposing the Christian truth in a clear and understandable way, trying thereby to convert the emperor, Antoninus Pius, and through the emperor’s conversion, the Roman empire. That, of course, brought him to the clear attention of the Roman authorities as a very influential and persuasive Christian. He was rounded up with six of his disciples and brought before the prefect, Rusticus, in the year 165 AD. The actual record of his trial was kept in the Acta of the Roman authorities and has survived. We can see in it clearly that Justin’s lived his love for the truth, for Jesus. Under interrogation, he said, “I follow the Christians because they have the truth” and “Nobody in his senses gives up truth for falsehood.” When he was threatened, he stated, “If I suffer as you say, I hope to receive the reward of those who keep Christ’s commandments. I know that all who do that will remain in God’s grace even to the consummation of all things.”
• St. Justin’s words about worthiness to receive Holy Communion have always guided the Church. He said, “No one is allowed to partake [in the Eucharist] except one who believes that the things we teach are true, who has received the washing for the forgiveness of sins and for rebirth, and who lives as Christ handed down to us.” He points out a doctrinal, sacramental and moral communion as the prerequisite for Holy Communion, to the importance of a life that seeks the light, strives to live in that light, and longs to pass that light on. The Eucharist is the greatest and most beautiful of all God’s works, in which we are able to enter into communion with God and each other and experience the redemption Christ enfleshed himself to make possible. Today the Master is calling each of us to get up to come to him. He asks us what we want him to do for us. And we respond, like Bartimaeus, that we want to see him again, to see him here in Holy Communion, to see him with us always, including in the most difficult situations of life, so that we may one day see him in eternal light, together with Justin Martyr and all the saints!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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