“And it so happened that as Jesus came near Jericho, there was a certain man, who was blind, begging by the side of the road” (Luke 18.35).
In the crush and noise of the crowd in Jericho, a nameless figure sits on the roadside. Cloaked, hunched over, legs crossed beneath him, he holds, perhaps, a small bowl to capture the coins given by those who pass him. He hears that the commotion and excitement is about Jesus of Nazareth. And, so, he begins to call out to him. His cries, we learn, are so loud—he must have been screaming—that those around him began to tell him to shut up, to keep it down. But he doesn’t, and Jesus hears him. He tells them to pass the word for this nameless man to come close.
You know how the rest of the story goes. The man throws off his cloak, leaps up, and is healed by Jesus. Once again, the blind are able to see. Here near the close of his ministry, Jesus continues the work that reveals him to be the One. He continues in those acts that he spelled out in response to John the Baptizer’s question, the blind see, the silent speak, the deaf hear.
And, here, as the story winds toward its most tragic hours, we find that Jesus, as usual, wasn’t speaking about what we thought he was.
Eight people were murdered this past week in the Atlanta area. Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, Daoyou Feng, Paul Andre Michels, Soon Park, Suncha Kim, Yong Yue, and Hyun Jung Grant died by violence on Tuesday.
I mention their names to commemorate lives snuffed out by the plague of violence for which we seem to have no vaccine. I also mention them so that they, unlike the blind man in Luke’s story, are not left nameless.
Mark’s Gospel tells this same story, but in that story the man has a name and a history. He is Bartimaeus son of Timaeus. Luke, deliberately I think, refers to him as a certain blind man. He was nameless. And, without a name, he is invisible.
This brings to the forefront what Jesus is really doing. Sight is given to one without it, but it is not the nameless man from the roadside. It is to those all around him. The ones who were blind and deaf. Those who were silent. They were the ones healed. They could see and hear and speak.
We are surrounded by nameless figures. Some are disabled as this blind man. Others are crippled and silenced by the systems we have put in place that have pushed them to the sidewalk, cloaked them so they remain invisible. They have become easy to pass, simple to ignore. They are the ones the crowd steps over, never thinking to help them stand, draw them closer to a place of healing and wholeness.
If only there were someone like Jesus who could help them, who could hear them calling, yelling, screaming when everyone else cannot. If only someone could see them. If only.
Because, that person might speak and give them names.
Christ our Healer, only you can open our eyes to see the invisible; only you can open our ears to their voices; only you can open our lips to speak so they might be named.