Hi everyone, and welcome to Weekly Homilies with Father Mark Suslenko, Pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. We are part of the Catholic Archdiocese of Hartford. I'm Carol Vassar, parish director of communications, and this is Episode 34 of Season 7 for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time  - October 27, 2024. Our Gospel reading is from Mark Chapter 10, verses 46-52. 

As Jesus was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a sizable crowd, Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus, sat by the roadside begging. On hearing that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, "Jesus, son of David, have pity on me.” And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent. But he kept calling out all the more, "Son of David, have pity on me.” Jesus stopped and said, "Call him.” So they called the blind man, saying to him, "Take courage; get up, Jesus is calling you.” He threw aside his cloak, sprang up, and came to Jesus.  Jesus said to him in reply, "What do you want me to do for you?" The blind man replied to him, "Master, I want to see."  Jesus told him, "Go your way; your faith has saved you."  Immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way.

The Gospel of the Lord 

“Pivotal Questions: Through the Eyes of Bartimaeus,” by Father Mark S. Suslenko, Pastor, SS. Isidore and Maria Parish, Glastonbury, Connecticut

I always keep coming back to some basic questions that we all are asking about ourselves, need to ask about ourselves and continue to ask about ourselves. These types of questions can be put into the grouping or the heading of existential questions. They're questions who define us. And what's really cool about these questions is that they get asked at every stage of our life. And to live life fully means to pursue these questions and to continue to pursue them as life unfolds for us as we age and as we grow, and as we develop. They're questions that are always looming within us. Whether we realize it or not, we are asking them, and we answer them by the way we live our lives. So, if we're not explicitly dealing with these questions, they get expressed anyway in the choices we make and how we live our life. And there are four basic questions.  

The first one is, who am I? Who am I? It's a pivotal question that every single human being has to ask and answer about themselves: ultimately, who am I? The second: what is my purpose? What is my purpose? In short, why am I here? What is my purpose? And younger folks deal with these questions quite intensely. I suspect that some of our older altar servers have these questions in their minds and hearts right now as I speak. Who am I? What is my purpose?  

The third one can be asked in a couple of ways, but it usually gets expressed as either this: is this all we have? Is this all there is to life, what I see around me, or is there more? Another way to rephrase that is to be more blunt: what happens to me when I die? What happens to me when I die?  

So, who am I? What is my purpose? What happens to me when I die? And the fourth question is, to whom do I belong? To whom do I belong? It may seem like a very simple question, but if you've grown up and you've been kind of jostled all over the place, passed from one to the other, you can easily get very confused about where do I belong. Where are my real roots? Where do I settle myself and find my greatest self-expression? Pivotal questions.  

So, I suppose, if we take somebody like Bartimaeus, a blind man back in the time of Jesus, sitting by the roadside, I would suspect that in one way, shape, or form, those questions were pressing on his mind and heart as well. Think about it for a moment. He's a blind man growing up in a society that has no use for him. He'd been blind from birth. How do you suppose people have taught him about those pivotal questions about who he is? Who are you, Bartimaeus? I'm a blind man.  What is my purpose? Bartimaeus, you have no purpose. You are a nuisance to be cast aside. Go along your way and get out of mine. "To whom do I belong?" asked Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus, you belong to no one. You have no value, you have no worth, and you have no place.

Maybe some of us here today, at one point or another in our lives on some level, have kind of felt that way, too, that we may not have any value, that we may not have a place, that we may not have a purpose. But if Bartimaeus is living with this reality of being a nobody, of being cast aside, and a nuisance, and then often the distance he cannot see, but he can hear a voice preaching, a voice that is speaking a different narrative, a voice that is speaking of God's kingdom of healing. He's hearing that this voice is doing powerful things, that this voice is saying that folks are not useless, but that everybody has value and everybody has a place. Can you imagine how Bartimaeus, who's been knocked down his whole life, must have been somewhat perked up, intrigued, and had that message touch his heart in a very powerful way that he knew only one thing: he needed to meet this guy. He needed to have an encounter. 

We're bombarded in our world today with information like we’ve never been bombarded before. We have so much before us all the time, and it all flashes constantly. If we wanna know something, we look it up, and we get the answer. Do we ever stop and wonder if what we’re reading and what we're seeing is true? When it flashes by your screen, or you see it in a Google search, and it comes up, do you automatically assume that what you're seeing and what you're reading is true? How do you know? How do we know today the information that we get, whether it is true or whether it is false? But here's a very interesting experiment you can do sometime when you have some time to kill is look at what comes before you. Look at all that invades your space, all that is available to you. I will guarantee you that, in great measure, all of that stuff is trying to answer those questions that I began with today. They're all messages, and sometimes subtly so, about who you are, about what your purpose is, about what happens when you die, and about to whom do you belong. They're all messages trying to convince you that this is the truth. This is what you need to know. This is what you need to follow. And those voices loom large, and we listen to them, even if passively so, and they influence us. 

And so Bartemaeus finally gets to meet Jesus and he pleads with Jesus. Pity me, have pity on me. I want to see. I wanna see. And there was a meeting of love there between Jesus and Bartimaeus, and that's when faith begins for us when there is a meeting of two persons, us and God, in love, and that sparks faith. So Jesus reached out to Bartimaeus, and he healed him of his sight. So Bartimaeus listened. He heard. He pleaded, and then what did he do? He followed.  

Now, I suppose Bartimaeus, who's never seen a thing in his life before, could have gone skipping down the street trying to figure out all the new things that he can do now that he could never do before. But he doesn't do that. He turns, he looks at Jesus, and follows Jesus. Why? Because Jesus opened more than just Bartimaeus' his eyes. He opened Bartimaeus, his heart, and his soul, and unlocked something in Bartimaeus that made him feel radically different, and it's called conversion. And all Bartimaeus could do was to then follow Jesus. Why? Because he realized that the voices he was listening to all his life were nothing but a bunch of lies and that the only truth was to be found in the cross, in Jesus, in this man whom he met in love along the side of a road in a very simple, humble way. 

And yes, we can listen to what the world tells us about who we are. We can listen to what the internet tells us about who we are. We can even listen to what people around us tell us about who we are. But is that really who we are? At the end of the day, is that all we are? What others tell us, or is there something more? If we turn our vision away from others and to Jesus here, then we find the truth. Here, we learn exactly who we are, what our purpose is, whom we belong to, and, most importantly, what happens when we die. That biggest worry Jesus takes away from us in faith and assures us of life eternal and life with God if faithful to God here on Earth. 

And so all of those big questions with which we struggle and we always are asking, the only true place to get an answer to any of them is in God. And that's what Bartimaeus realized and it healed him completely and wholly, and it can heal us as well.  

So here's the takeaway: we all live in a world, a world that's gonna continue to bombard us with information, a world that can easily confuse us. But here's the thing that we have to realize about ourselves:  sometimes we like the untrue. Sometimes we like the untrue. Why? Because it makes us feel good, and it pleases us, and it satisfies us. And so, therefore, we cling to it not knowing that, at its base, it's a lie. 

And so we have to continue to come back to Jesus,  who is the way, and the truth, and the life, and the only place that we can find those answers to those pivotal questions and follow the right path.  So we need to do what Bartimaeus did: learn how to listen not to the voices of the world but to the voices of God near. How to learn how to hear them so that they take root in our hearts and souls,  always plead with God and run back to his mercy, his unconditional love, and the open arms that it will always accept us,  reorientate ourselves, ask for God to give us strength so that we, too, can follow him, not ourselves and not the ways of the world.  It is then and only then that we will be healed and we will find ourselves with full sight, not only physically but of heart and soul as well. 

Father Mark Suslenko is the pastor of SS. Isidore and Maria Parish in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Learn more about our parish community at www.isidoreandmaria.org. And follow us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Our music comes free of charge from Blue Dot Sessions in Fall River, Massachusetts. I’m Carol Vassar. Thanks for joining us.