Take Heart: I Will Gather Them In

Scripture can be found here

Today we read a healing story, and it’s time for a true confession: I have been frustrated with stories like this, stories in which someone’s disease, or disability, or symptom is just vanished, in an instant, because of their contact with Jesus. It’s beautiful and frustrating.

I would love to see that kind of healing for so many people. People I know and love, people I’ve never met. I’d like to see that healing for people with Covid, with cancer, with incurable conditions that they have learned to live with as they advance and worsen.

A friend of mine was in training to be a chaplain in a big hospital in another state, and she was called to the emergency room where a young girl had died. The reason they called my friend was that the little girl’s father couldn’t accept her death. He stood over her praying that she would be brought back to life. “Heal her Jesus,” he kept saying, over and over. My friend was called in after about an hour of the man refusing to leave, refusing to give up, and she stayed with the man for more hours still. She prayed with him. She cried with him. Finally, broken, the man was pulled away from his daughter, still distraught that God hadn’t performed a miracle.

What’s the deal with healing? Is it that God used to heal miraculously, and does no longer? What is healing, anyway? 

We meet Bartimeus on the road. There are several things I’d like us to notice about him. The obvious, the big things: he is blind, and he is a beggar. This tells us that he is at the lowest rung of society, the poorest of the poor, and his place at the side of the road tells us—there is no place for him in the community. There is no job he can have to support himself. Without any means of support, marriage and a family are out of the question. He is forever an outsider.

When Jesus passes by, Bartimeus calls out to him. He’s heard of Jesus—he refers to him as Son of David, so he knows the stories that are told about Jesus. And he cries, “Have mercy on me.” See me, even if I can’t see you. Do something for me—help me. He doesn’t specify what or how, but he calls out, even after people try to quiet him. In fact, then he calls even more loudly. 

And though there are people who try to silence Bartimeus, there are also encouragers in the crowd. When Jesus turns his attention to him, the people tell him: “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.”  

Here’s another interesting thing about Bartimeus. He has one possession, and one only: his cloak. A cloak is incredibly important for someone like Bartimeus. Without a home, a cloak protects him from bad weather. It is the last vestige of dignity he has. At least he has a cloak, people probably said, as they walked by him. 

But what does he do when he hears that Jesus is calling him? He shrugs the cloak away—throw it off, and springs up, making his way to Jesus. (How? Does someone help him? Does he follow the sound of Jesus’ voice? Does the crowd part for him, like the Red Sea for the Israelites?)

Once the blind man presents himself, Jesus asks Bartimeus: What do you want from me? What do you want me to do for you?

His answer is quick: “Rabbi, let me see again.”  Jesus’ answer is just as quick: “Go; your faith has made you well.” Bartimeus has demonstrated his confidence that Jesus can help him, from the first moment he realized Jesus was nearby. “Go,” Jesus says. Everything is as it should be.

This is one of those squirmy, uncomfortable moments. So, Bartimeus had faith enough for Jesus to heal him. What about us? If we pray for healing, for the cancer to go away, for the diagnosis to be reversed, and it doesn’t, or it isn’t… does that mean we didn’t have enough faith?

In her book Searching for Sunday, Rachel Held Evans offers a distinction between healing and curing. What we often seek is a cure—removal of symptoms, to be cancer-free, for example. What God offers us—even in Bartimeus’ story—is healing, and that is a more complicated matter. Evans writes,

… there is a difference between curing and healing, and I believe the church is called to the slow and difficult work of healing…[Healing] takes time. It is relational. It is inefficient, like a meandering river. Rarely does healing follow a straight or well-lit path. Rarely does it conform to our expectations or resolve in a timely manner.[i]

Curing is about getting rid of the problem—the disease, or the condition, or the symptom. Healing is the deep work of accompanying someone in pain—whatever kind of pain that might be—and remaining faithfully engaged with them. Healing is about the heart, though the body benefits, because we are whole beings, not just parts. It is about the peace with which we are able to go about our lives. It is possible to be cured of disease but not healed; and it is possible to be healed and whole, but not cured. Evans quotes another writer, Sara Miles, who says,

Jesus calls his disciples, giving us authority to heal and sending us out. He doesn’t reliably show us how to cure a molar pregnancy. He doesn’t show us how to make a blind man see, dry every tear, or even drive out all kinds of demons. But he shows us how to enter into a new way of life in which the broken and sick pieces are held together in love, and given meaning.[ii]

Let’s look again at Bartimeus, at the end of his story. Jesus says, “Go!” But Bartimeus stays. He came for the cure, he came for his sight. He stays for the healing. Bartimeus follows Jesus from that moment on.

So many of the healing stories of Jesus follow this pattern—the person in need of healing is someone who has been made an outcast by their condition. The lepers. The possessed. The blind. The woman with the flow of blood. Each of these people is unable to be a part of community because of the nature of their illness, or symptom, or condition. They can’t touch other people or be touched by them. They often can’t live in the same home as their family; they may not even have connection to family any longer. Jesus cures, but he also heals, because healing is what restores them to community. Watch for this in the gospels. An essential part of healing is that no one has to go it alone. This is what undergirds our first reading, from the prophet Jeremiah: I will gather them in, God says through the prophet. God gathers us into community for the purpose of healing, just as God gathered in God’s covenant people in from their long exile. Bartimeus becomes a disciple of Jesus, ready to hit the road with him, to continue to his journey of healing from the years of isolation and sorrow and darkness. 

I’ll wager that not many of us have confidence that we could administer a cure to someone who is sick. But every one of us can take part in healing, whether our own or that of another. My friend the chaplain offered healing to the man who was grieving his daughter. In the very actions of staying with him and praying with him, she helped him to begin his journey of healing—a long journey, sometimes a hard one. But one on offer to all of us.

We are invited into the community of those who are healing, no matter their diagnosis. Every one of us can follow in Jesus’ way of inviting people out of their isolation. Every one of us can do that hard and holy work of holding together the sick and broken pieces of a life. Every one of us can be present with love and attend to the heart, because that is what truly heals us.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

[i] Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2015), 208.

[ii] Sara Miles, Jesus Freak: Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead (San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, 2010), 11.