Bartimaeus

Due to computer illness this week, Rome Improvement is not available and this short story is only a first draft. Keep watching; as time is available, I will be posting finish copy.

It seems like such a longtime ago and yet, it also seems like yesterday. Some friends brought me to an itinerant rabbi who was making some noise around Bethsaida. Everybody was saying to me, “Come meet Jesus.” People said that he could restore my sight. I said, “How can he restore something I never had?” They chided me saying, “You know what we mean. He is healing everyone else, why shouldn’t he heal you too?”

 

I told them that I thought that sight was a good thing to have in this world, but I had been doing just fine, “Thank you very much,” and I didn’t want to be the latest “miracle child” to be fawned over and then forgotten. But they were insistent, and, after a few days of persistent begging, I succumbed to their pleas and went with them to meet the rabbi.

 

Once we got to the place where this rabbi, Jesus, was teaching, I stood around and listened to him talk. He had a nice voice. He was easy to listen to, and he said some things that really made me think. He said that we needed to think about the world differently, that we should change the way we were living with one another, that this world of some having everything and others having little, or nothing, was not the way that God intended us to live. He said that although we didn’t fully appreciate it, the kingdom of God was not something that we had to wait for but that the kingdom of God was actively engaged right now. He said that he had come to speak the words of good news. He said, when we were able to live in a world where all were included, that the blind would see, the deaf would hear, the lame and the maimed would move around with the rest of us. He said we needed to think of ourselves as being one, as God is one, because we are all created in the image of God.

 

That upset a few people. They shouted at him, “We are the Chosen People—favored of the One who led us through the wilderness. We are the ones who have been given the Promised Land that has been restored to us by God’s work in Cyrus. We are the ones who are loved by the Lord. The rest of the world doesn’t get it and Is damned as far as I am concerned.”

 

There was a lot of cheering and some booing along the way, but eventually people stopped trying to trip the rabbi up with their hypothetical posturing that let them make themselves sound important. One guy stood up and said, “Suppose now, just suppose, that a man married a woman and then he died without any children, and just suppose, his brother married her, as he should, and he died and there still wasn’t a child. And suppose then the next younger brother married her, and he died, and there still wasn’t a child. And on and on it went until the woman had married the seven brothers of the family. Finally, the seventh son died, and the woman died, and there still weren’t any children. Just suppose for a minute, whose wife will she be in the afterlife since all seven brothers married her?”

 

We had all heard the story of blind Tobit and how Tobit’s son Tobias marries Sarah, who has been married to six men before, and how each of them died on their wedding night because the evil Asmodeus had fallen in love with Sarah and didn’t want to have anyone else be with her, and how Asmodeus was found out and banished, and how Tobit got his sight back, and everyone lived happily ever after. So, everyone laughed when the rabbi asked, “Is your name Asmodeus or Tobias?”

 

It was clever of the rabbi to put that moment of levity in the conversation because it really got the people on his side. When he told everyone that marriage was something that we needed in order to keep order in our world but that in heaven our relationship with Godself was the relationship that mattered. Heaven was the place where we could truly live out the first commandment. In heaven, we neither married nor worried about worldly marriages. We all would experience the oneness of God and that would be enough. People started arguing with one another and started drifting away.

 

It was then that my friends took me up to have Jesus lay his hands on me in order for me to see. There was a moment when I thought that he was just going to tell all of us to go home and quit bothering him. Really, that was what I was hoping for, but then, he took me by the hand and led me away from the others. When we had gone a fair distance, Jesus told me to look at him, and then he spit in my eyes. He spit in my eyes! I was thinking, “Rude, dude.”

 

He asked if I could see anything and then, I had the most amazing vision. I saw people, or I think they were people, but they walked around with their arms outstretched like trees. It was like a dance. It was like a prayer, and, when the people came together, with their branches intermingled, it was like a choir of peace. I said, “I see people. They look like trees walking around.” Then he laid his hands on me and held my head in his hands and shared his vision with me. I saw God’s plan for the world from the distant future all the way back to the dawn of everything. I saw the world possibilities far beyond the cross all the way back to the Garden of Eden when God was speaking with Adam and Eve. God looked sort of like Jesus. It was…amazing. It was way beyond amazing, but I don’t know what that might be. And then Jesus told me to go home and not even to go into the village.

 

After that vision of the world, home no longer seemed enough. So, I started wandering the roads. People would stop and ask if they could help, and I traveled with them. When we got to a village, I had them take me to the village gate, or just outside the marketplace, and I would beg there for a while. I would tell the people of my vision, but since I was still blind, people usually walked away, and I was left talking to emptiness. When they stayed long enough to hear my story, they laughed at me. “No one can see to the end or the dawn of everything, not even a blind seer can see that far. Only God has that kind of vision. People, like trees, lumbering around? Please, tell us another.” After a few days of that, people would tell me to move on since I had no relatives to care for me and I would find my way to another town.

 

Each place I went, I listened to hear if Jesus was going to be in the area, but no one knew where he had gone. Some said that he had gone up north into the Roman cities; others said he was out in the countryside teaching. There were stories of people being raised up from their sick beds; children who were all but dead, knowing good health and inclusion; a man who was deaf who was able to understand the people around him and speak with them; and a time when thousands were fed. As time went on, I decided that the vision was just that—a dream, a hallucination, a trick of the mind. I sought out the comfort of other beggars and started building relationships with them.

 

I met Abner one day, his body was quite twisted. He could hardly walk. We became fast friends almost immediately. He listened to my vision story and though he didn’t really believe it, he thought that the idea of the story was nice, even desirable. I volunteered to carry him on my back, and he told me where to go. He introduced me to many of the other beggars and at night we gathered in the house provided for the “unfortunates”, our little Bethany. There I learned that we weren’t supposed to beg inside the city and those who were caught would be treated badly, but outside the city, it was safe. Many travelers entering or leaving the city often stopped to toss a coin or two our way, even soldiers tossed a broken quadrans, although they oftentimes intentionally threw them beyond us just to see us scramble for the crumbs of society. .

 

Finally, one day, when I was sitting with the other beggars outside of Jericho, with my cloak laying over my lap to catch any coin tossed my direction, a crowd of people came down the road. When I asked what the commotion was about, people said the rabbi, Jesus, was coming with his disciples on his way to Jerusalem. I knew then, if I was ever going to have the vision again, that I would need to do something right then. Despite the danger of bringing Roman attention to what was happening, and the political implications, I called out claiming Jesus for who I was positive he was—the one whom I would always pledge my loyalty, beyond Herod and certainly above Tiberius. As the volume of the crowd increased, I started shouting, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me! Jesus, teacher, Son of David  have mercy on me!”

 

Some of the people in the crowd kicked at us and told us to get out of the way, but I refused to move. Instead I shouted more loudly. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me! Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” And when I had all but given up, the crowd stopped. There was this eerie silence and then I heard his voice again. “Bring him to me.” Then the crowd grabbed at me and said, “Quick. The Master is calling for you. Why do you continue to sit there like a marker stone along the  road?”

 

I threw off my cloak, not caring about coins I might receive from the crowd and worked my way toward Jesus’ voice. People moved out of my way and pushed me toward him and then I felt his hand on my shoulder  and I stopped. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

 

“Lord,” I said, “Let me see again. Let me see what I saw before. Let me have the vision of the trees and the dance and the choir of peace. Lord, please, I long to know that the vision was not a dream but a reality of hope. I beg of you, let me see and know the joy of that vision again.”

Jesus reached out and put his hands on me. He took my hands and raised them up into the posture of prayer and he said, “Your faith has made you whole.” And immediately I saw the vision again. I saw people, like trees walking around, like trees dancing with joy and singing songs of praise. I saw people gathering together with their arms spread out in prayer and when the choir of peace gathered I saw the arms of the people making Xs, making crosses, building communities where all could eat and drink with enough to give away. And the vision continued to the end of everything. It was amazing. Ten I joined the crowd and followed him on the way.