Bartimaeus and Our Limits
Reflections on the Lectionary for October 27th
The gospel reading found in this week’s lectionary, Mark 10:46-52, is a seemingly straightforward one. It follows a familiar pattern. Jesus is traveling, surrounded by his disciples and a large crowd, and his presence draws the attention of the people in the areas he’s passing through. One person in particular—in this case, a man named Bartimaeus—calls out to Jesus and asks for Jesus’ attention and his mercy. Jesus asks the man what he wants, and Bartimaeus—who is blind—asks to see again. Jesus grants the request, and Bartimaeus’ sight is restored to him.
It's a familiar story, with a lot of elements in common with other stories of people encountering Jesus and stories of Jesus’ healing interventions into various illnesses and predicaments. We are used to seeing Jesus, in all four canonical gospels, healing and restoring and interacting with people who call out for his attention—and sometimes with people who don’t call out for him at all. The story of Bartimaeus doesn’t stand out, especially, but because of that it’s an interesting case study for how we think about this whole class of stories, and especially for how we think about the intersections of gospel stories and disability.
In most of these stories, after all, there is some physical or mental ailment or condition that prompts the interaction with Jesus. There is usually some pathology, if we are following the logic of the text, that draws the person’s attention to Jesus or draws Jesus’ attention to the person. Think, for example, of the man (or men) with the demon (or demons) in Gerasa (or Gedara, or Gergasa, depending on the gospel and the manuscript tradition) in the synoptic gospels. Or think of the man healed of blindness in the Pool of Siloam in John, or the woman with the flow of blood and the synagogue leader’s daughter, the intertwined stories found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Lazarus is another good example—his sisters send for Jesus as Lazarus is dying, and after a delay Jesus dramatically raises Lazarus from the dead. There are tons of these kinds of stories—stories of how someone was in need of Jesus, and Jesus showed up and helped. And most often in these stories, the need for Jesus is expressed in the form of some mental or physical disability.
In the last generation or so of biblical scholarship, a number of people have begun to point out patterns in the ways these kinds of stories are told, and patterns in the ways they are interpreted and theologized. This has happened in conversation with the field of disability studies, which pays sustained attention to questions of human embodiment and the ways differing embodied abilities show up in physical environments and in the ways we talk about people. Biblical scholars who have been in conversation with disability studies have noticed, for example, how a physical disability in a gospel story often represents or stands in for sin or moral deficiency of some kind. Sometimes, disability works like a code for other kinds of limitation; in stories of blindness like the story of Bartimaeus for example, physical blindness often means that someone in the story is intellectually or ethically “blind,” or that they cannot see truth. Disability scholarship helps us see the ways embodied ability and disability gets used in biblical texts to further some other kind of message or agenda. And it helps us see that sometimes the stories about Jesus as a healer—which many Christians have tended to accept as obviously good and right—often depict Jesus as taking actions toward the bodies of people without their permission or consent, and intervening to “heal” them in a way that might not have been welcome and that the people themselves might not have understood as restorative.
In the story of Bartimaeus, Jesus’ healing intervention is invited by Bartimaeus himself, which is good. But there are still some things about this story that should give us pause. Scholars have noticed how this story is one part of a section of the Gospel of Mark that is bookended by stories about blindness. In 8:22-26 Mark tells the story of Jesus healing a blind man at Bethsaida, and here in 10:46-52 Mark tells the story of Bartimaeus. In between these bookends, Mark returns to the theme of sight, in the visual glory of the transfiguration and in the command to tear out one’s own eye if it causes you to stumble. And all through this section, we find a theme that’s pervasive in Mark: a lack of recognition or understanding on the part of Jesus’ disciples about who he really is. By pairing stories about physical sight and blindness with stories about recognition and lack of understanding, the Gospel of Mark invites the reader to think about sight and understanding together, and to conflate the two, in a way that can do a lot of harm to people with visual disabilities. Even though we all know that sight and understanding are not linked (it is possible to have perfect sight and imperfect understanding, and vice versa), “blindness” slinks into our language as a way to talk about a lack of knowledge or wisdom. Stories in which Jesus addresses a physical condition almost inevitably slip into interpretations that center on spiritual deficiency.
So how else might we read this story of Bartimaeus? I think there are at least a couple of ways. I like a recent article by M. John-Patrick O’Connor in which he argues that Bartimaeus is presented by the gospel as an exemplar of economic injustice, and as a reminder in the text of the ways everyone around Bartimaeus has marginalized him. Bartimaeus is a beggar, in Mark’s telling, and O’Connor points out that in the context of the ancient world, being a beggar would have been more salient than being visually impaired. “Readings that center blindness-as-vice,” O’Connor writes, “overlook an equally important moral theme in Mark regarding gross mistreatment of those on the margins.” When we read Bartimaeus’ blindness as the central feature of this story, we might miss other aspects that are equally or more important.
I had the pleasure of having one of my friends and colleagues, Dr. Debbie Creamer, in one of my classes this past Friday to discuss disability studies and disability theory as it shows up in religious and theological studies. Her comments have me thinking about another way to read this story of Bartimaeus. Dr. Creamer walked us through a few different models for thinking about ability and disability, and one of those—which she calls the “limits model”—caught my attention. The limits model begins with the observation that all human beings are limited. None of us can fly, for example, in her signal example, and insofar as we can fly, it is because we have received accommodations to make it possible (like airplanes). We experience limits on our ability to move (even the fastest among us can only run so fast), to jump, to think, to see, to make sounds, etc. Everyone experiences limits, and that helps to put the limits that we call “disabilities” in context with all the limits that are a normal part of everyone’s life. The experience of limited eyesight, then, begins to function differently when we recognize that everyone’s eyesight is limited (none of us can see through mountains or read 12-point font on the moon).
How does that limits model of disability help us read the story of Bartimaeus? It’s an interesting question. We quickly notice Bartimaeus’ limited eyesight in the passage from Mark (not least because the narrator calls our attention to it), but we might be slower to notice that Bartimaeus has very good hearing (verse 47) and mobility (he “sprang up” in verse 50). And as it turns out, Bartimaeus was possessed of understanding that Jesus’ own disciples did not have, and the placement of this text within Mark’s gospel highlights that he understands more than anyone else about Jesus. Bartimaeus was able to recognize that Jesus was the “Son of David” in a section of Mark in which very few of Jesus’ followers really understand him. In that article that I linked above, O’Connor points out that far from being equated with ignorance or lack of knowledge, Bartimaeus is actually lifted up by the Gospel of Mark as an example of understanding, grasping Jesus’ identity in a way that Jesus’ own disciples do not grasp. Perhaps this is part of the artistry of the gospel writer: that Bartimaeus, who is blind, is more insightful than anyone else. But if that’s true, then we are in danger of losing this detail among all the focus on Bartimaeus’ blindness. The limits posed by Bartimaeus’ eyes might have been different than the limits on the eyes of others in the story, but those limitations didn’t get in the way of Bartimaeus engaging with Jesus or becoming the only person in his village to understand what was at stake with Jesus’ appearance. This despite the ways Bartimaeus had been pushed to the periphery of the village’s economic life, as O’Connor points out, and the ways economic injustice inflected his life and everyone else’s.
This is an ordinary and a familiar story, but because of that the story is a nice, clean template for thinking about the kinds of assumptions we bring to biblical texts. Why do we center Bartimaeus’ blindness, and why do we use blindness as a way to think about ignorance, even when the text itself does not demand that? What are the consequences, in the 21st century, to those of us who live with differing limits and differing abilities, and who watch our embodied experiences get turned into spiritual lessons? What happens if we read this story through Bartimaeus’ economic marginalization instead of through Bartimaeus’ eyes? It may seem like a small or ordinary thing, but shifting our readings slightly can help us see entirely new aspects of a familiar story.