30th Sunday Year B

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Have Pity On Me

What level of courage does it take to shout out amidst the biggest of crowds, “Son of David, Jesus, have pity on me!” Or to put it a different way, what level of faith would you need to have, to shout out this request, this demand, this plea?

And to put this into some context, you are a beggar, the lowest of the low. Worse still, you are an invalid, a blind cripple – so, obviously at odds with your Lord. You, who have no right to mix with decent God-fearing people: who are bad enough daring to be seen, never mind having to be heard. Who are you to disturb the Master, the Rabbi while he is trying to teach and to preach to the crowds, the faithful?

And yet, you do dare. You dare so much that you even repeat your cry, your plea to be heard, to be seen, to be noticed. You defy local and accepted practice and speak up. You stand up and come forward. You speak when invited and you make your request. You dare to ask for what you so sorely want and need. You dare because you believe. You dare because you have faith. You dare because you want to be saved and you know that your meeting with Jesus is your meeting with your Saviour and that this meeting will bring you much more than your sight. It will bring you salvation!

All of our readings for this week speak about salvation. Jeremiah speaks about the Lord saving His people and bringing them back from the North. He mentions specifically those sections of people who if not completely estranged are nearer the edges of society than not: the blind and lame, women with children or in labour. People who their society avoids or deliberately doesn’t mention. Salvation was there for all of them.

Our Psalm continues this theme, singing about Zion being delivered from bondage and being better because the Lord worked marvels for them. The Lord brought them salvation and they were full of song and rejoicing.

In our gospel, Jesus says to Bartimaeus, “Go, your faith has saved you.” Salvation is yours because you believed. Salvation is yours because you believed.

How do we know the strength of our faith? It is only when we are tested, when we are tried, that we can then say with any surety and confidence, “I believe. I accept or do not accept this.” This test or trial may come in the form of an illness or a dramatic change in our personal circumstances but hopefully these things do not come to everyone. Hopefully, everyone’s lives are much more mundane, predictable and free from such challenges.

But if this is so, then how can we know the strength of our faith? Where do we go to check out our faith-levels? How do we get his reassurance that we, at times, so desperately want and need?

Well, how often do we put ourselves out there, out into the public space, where we can check and challenge what is going on in society? Where things are being accepted and taken as the norm by everyone and where society is slipping and sliding away into dark, dismal decay, slowly but ever-so surely.

This weekend we pray for World Missions: for the success of missions throughout the world. And we can take this as the easy option, where we are praying for people ‘out there or ‘over there’. Basically, people who are not us, generally not in our country and generally over in those ‘Third-World-Countries’. Don’t we? Isn’t this how we honestly see and view ‘Mission Sunday’?

And yet, it is us, here in the Wester World and specifically, here in this country, in these Isles, who are at the biggest risk; who are in the greatest need of prayer and sustenance in faith; who are struggling against the quiet but insistent creeping dilution of our faith and our faith-practice, It is we who are the ones in real and desperate need of prayer and help and assistance. It is we who need to be crying out, “Son of David, Jesus, have pity on me!” And when we hear Him say, “What is it you want of Me? What do you want me to do for you?” – we can then ask Him for wisdom to recognise the issues of our day; courage to speak up; and strength of purpose and depth of faith to demand change; to halt the erosion of what we believe and accept to be true.

For example, we need to challenge the onward rush toward an acceptance of euthanasia, assisted dying which is going through parliament at the moment.

We need to check and challenge the growing demand for abortion at earlier times and against the selection process that allows babies with potential deformities to be aborted up to the given birth-date.

For evil to prosper, all that is necessary, is for good people to do nothing.

What level of courage does it take to shout out amidst the biggest of crowds, “Son of David, have pity on me!” What level of courage or faith is needed to shout out from the crowd, “No! I do not accept this. This is not right!

This weekend we pray for Missions across our world and rightly so! But can we also take time to look at what is going on in our own country and cry out in whatever way is most effect for us – speak out, Tweet! Write, Facebook or whatever. We need to rail against the attacks on our faith, on our faith-practice. We need to pray for a new missionary zeal to run through us and our society to enable us to preach, live and example the salvation that we believe to be ours.

“Son of David, Jesus, have pity on me!” Amen