The Leap of Love

‘What do you want me to do for you?’ Br Augustine wonders how we might begin to answer Jesus’ question.

Readings: 1 Peter 2:2-5,9-12; Mark 10:46-52

The following homily was preached to the student brothers during compline. You can watch here or read below:

Have you ever fallen in love? Do you remember the first time you did?

Were you ‘head over heels’ in love, your heart aflutter? Or were you silent, still, in perfect peace, being swept up into the other and remaining secure there? Perhaps it was both, both movement and rest – perhaps this love was such a part of you, so inside yourself, that it lifted you far outside yourself. It was, you may say, insatiable.

I think we can say that God becoming man is like this falling-in-love. Christ humbled himself from the splendour of heaven to the dust and clay of earth. But he remained at rest, not leaving the light of the Father’s heart. Christ is God and man, human and divine, having two natures, two wills. This does not mean he dwells safely in the world of dogma, of theology. But it does mean God is no stranger to the curious and conflicting ways of the human heart. He is our man on the inside.

On earth Christ walks about and prays in silence – he moves and rests. In today’s Gospel he does both. He’s moving away from Jericho when Bartimaeus stops him in his tracks. When Christ was walking, Bartimaeus was seated; when Christ stands still, Bartimaeus springs up to him. There is a drama at work, a dialectic at play. He draws Bartimaeus into this pattern of movement and rest. Christ turns the tables on Bartimaeus, so to speak. Bartimaeus begins by asking for mercy. Christ asks him to specify his desire. ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ (Mark 10:51)

The blind man can’t look around. He can’t look at all the lovely created things God has made, or get drawn into them. He is free of that distraction, however superficially I’m expressing it. He can only look inside, and he must ask himself what he really wants.

But this brings up another dialectic. Bartimaeus knows Jesus is the Son of David. He knows something, at least, of the prophecies of old. He knows that no man may see God and live. Yet if he is to see, he will find himself looking straight into the face of God. Does he believe Christ to be God? We don’t know, but having put it like this, we know his cry is all-too-familiar. You and I, we are mysteries to our selves. By the fact of living each day we enter a mystery not of our making and far beyond our measuring. If we rummage through the recesses of our heart we might fear what we find. In those choppy seas we look for an anchor. We look for God. ‘O Lord, I seek your face: it is your face, O Lord, that I seek’ (Psalm 27:8).

Think of Moses. Like Moses, Bartimaeus speaks with God, face to face, as a man with his friend. Like Moses, he speaks to God in the darkness. The emotions that follow our falling in love can sometimes drive us to do things attributable to ‘blind faith’. When the emotional ecstasy of falling in love has dried up, what’s left? What do we really want? The expression ‘blind faith’ is redundant, because faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1). What we want is to see.

‘Lord, let me see again.’ Let me see what all this is, what it all means. ‘Let me know you, O you who know me,’ says Augustine.

Here the play picks up again. Jesus calls. Bartimaeus springs up. In that small step he makes a leap of faith.

Of those who have answered the call of faith, Peter says, ‘You did not see him, yet you love him’ (1 Peter 1:8). But why? How?

‘It is not that we loved God, but that he loved us first’ (1 John 4:10). That love was there to begin with. It was the light shining in the darkness. And it was the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in Jesus Christ, our Lord (2 Corinthians 4:6).

When the tables are turned on us, let us remember that God is within and he cannot be shaken. Bartimaeus, in his faith and frailty, is an earthen vessel. So are we. This treasure, this immortal diamond that is God in our hearts, we keep in earthen vessels, so that it is clear that the extraordinary power belongs to God and not to us (2 Corinthians 4:7). And when God decides to fire that earth, to test it in the kiln, to charge it with himself, to shine across this foundering deck, know that he is calling you out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9). He moves us to delight in praising him, for he has made us for himself,and our hearts are restless until they rest in him. ‘Take heart; rise: he is calling you’ (Mark 10:49).

Image: Augustine in the Garden, Augustine Chen OP. The sketch is of the garden-scene in Confessions VIII.8.19.