Homily for 24 October

We are on our plenary council journey which is an exercise in synodality for the Australian church. But our particular path intersects with a larger synodal journey which the Holy Father has called the whole church to make. Synodality is way of being church which involves listening to the Spirit who speaks to the whole church. It is a listening and a discussion which involves all of us. And as we launch on this new journey, I can think of no better inspiration than Bartimaeus. I love Bartimaeus. He is blind, and this in a time when there is no braille, or guide dogs, when to be blind was considered by most to be a punishment from God.

Bartimaeus is a man who listens. He would have heard a lot as he begged by the side of the dusty road. People going about their daily business mainly ignoring him. He would have the heard the bustle of people going in and out of the town, selling, buying, bartering. He would have heard the occasional clink of a coin tossed his way. Others cursing him for being in the way or talking about him as cursed. Perhaps there were some kinder people who would greet him. And at some point he would have heard about this man, prophet perhaps, Jesus, and all that this man was said to have done. There had been other so-called prophets, or messianic figures who had come to a sticky end. But the stories around Jesus may have been different. How did he hear them? Did his heart perhaps lift when he heard about all that Jesus said and did… filtered, of course, through others? Did he wish or pray, cursed as he was, that he might meet him? It would have been a distant hope.

Then Bartimaeus hears that Jesus may be coming his way. Still there is crowd around him, he cannot hope to intercept Jesus. What leads him to cry out, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!’ He yells it out into the dark and the noise with all his might. What gives him the courage, what inspires him? And then he hears angry voices – ‘Quiet!’ ‘Shut up’ He is under God’s punishment after all, who is he to call on a prophet? Yet to these voices which he hears, he does not pay heed. There is another voice within him which gives him voice, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me’.

How long does he shout out before he hears a sudden hush and astonished voices, their tone changed, saying, ‘He is calling you.’ Here he is in the dark and the hush and he is called. He listens and he throws off his cloak – his one possession, his security – and he walks into the dark towards the voice which calls him; which asks him, o so gently, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ He listens and he speaks his prayer, ‘Let me see again.’ And the voice lifts him up, ‘your faith has saved you’, not cursed after all, his faith has saved him. And he can see. And the first he sees is the face of Jesus, the one who spoke to him.

And then Bartimaeus chooses to follow Jesus, to keep listening to his voice, to be his disciple.

We hear many voices, some which pull us down, others which puff us up, some which speak in love and truth. As each of us journeys within a journeying church, how do we listen to and pay heed to the voice of Jesus, the voice of Spirit in the clamour? To what do we give our attention, our energy? How do we know that this voice carries a message from the Spirit? We need to learn to listen like Bartimaeus, our brother, to sift what we hear. To not give our energy to that which lies and is destructive. The voice of the Spirit can be challenging, but it is never controlling. We learn to listen by reading prayerfully the Gospels, letting Jesus teach us how to hear his voice in our lives. We learn to listen by praying over events of our day. And sometimes we have to call out into the dark insistently, loudly, like Bartimaeus, our brother, insisting that the Lord hear us and answer us. Take courage, get up, the Lord is calling you.