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And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart, get up, he is calling.” You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear saints, we have great comfort from our Lord this morning, especially in the gospel lesson. But on the way there, I want to underline one lesson from the epistle, one verse from the epistle, just to make sure we don’t leave without drawing some attention to it.
I’m asked all the time, especially the children ask me this question: they say, “Pastor, what is Jesus doing now? Like, right now, what is He up to?” There are a lot of verses in the Scripture that speak of the Lord’s work at the right hand of the Father, but this one, Hebrews chapter 7, verse 25, is one of the most beautiful and one of the most important.
“Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.”
What is Jesus doing now? He’s interceding for you. He’s praying for you. He’s right there at the right hand of the Father, and he’s bringing all of your needs, all of your troubles, all of your difficulties, all of your worries, all of your distress, all of everything that you need; He’s bringing it before God the Father and He’s praying for you. And you can be sure that God the Father hears the prayers of His Son Jesus for you at this very moment.
We should write that verse in gold and treasure it, knowing that even when our prayers falter or we don’t know what to pray, that Jesus is there in heaven praying for you, for your salvation, and He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God. God be praised.
One more word to warm us up. This is from Martin Luther, who wrote a little tract about what to expect when we read the Gospels. And I just want to put this in your minds and your imaginations, not only for this Gospel text—it’s really helpful for this one—but for every Gospel text, for every time we read the Gospels on Sunday, for every time you open up your Bibles and you read the Gospels and you ask yourself, “Why am I reading the Gospel? What am I to expect here? Why did I come to this place?”
Because, and Luther knows that this is always a danger, when we open the Bible and we read about Jesus, we’re tempted to think that Jesus is there as our example to follow. This was a big thing a few years back. Remember the bracelets, the WWJD? “What would Jesus do?” The idea that we are studying Jesus so that we know how to live. And that’s true, actually. He is our example, especially in His suffering and endurance.
But before He is our example, He is our Savior. And this is what we expect when we open the Gospels. Let me give you this paragraph from Luther. This is really helpful.
“When you open the book containing the Gospels, and read or hear how Christ comes here or there or how someone is brought to Him, you should therein perceive the sermon or the gospel through which He is coming to you, or you are being brought to Him. For the preaching of the gospel is nothing else than Christ coming to us, or we being brought to Him. When you see how He works, however, and how He helps everyone to whom He comes or who has brought to him, then rest assured that faith is accomplishing this in you and that he is offering your soul exactly the same sort of help and favor through the gospel. If you pause here and let him do you good, that is, if you believe that he benefits and helps you, then you really have it. Then, Christ is yours, presented to you as a gift.”
So when we’re reading the Gospels, we are being brought to Jesus, or maybe even better, Jesus is coming to us to bless us, to serve us, to save us, to forgive us, and to heal us.
Now, that’s what we have this morning with blind Bartimaeus. Jesus, passing through Jericho, the oldest city in the world, coming out of Jericho on the west side and heading up the mountain through the wilderness to go into Jerusalem for the last time. As he’s leaving the city, there at the city gate, on the side of the road in the ditch is a blind man, Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, and he cries out to Jesus, “Lord, have mercy on me.” That’s the beggar’s cry, Kyrie eleison. “Lord, have mercy on me. Son of David, have mercy on me.”
And the crowd tries to make him quiet down, but he cries out all the more until Jesus calls and invites him. “Son, what would you have me do for you?” And he said, “Rabbi, that I might receive my sight.” Jesus gives it to him. Matthew, you, and Luke tell us that Jesus touched him in the eyes, healed his blindness, and gave him sight.
Now I want to spend some time talking about spiritual blindness and spiritual sight, but before we skip to that, we should speak first of physical sight and physical blindness, or all of the troubles that we have in this life. Because Jesus is strong to heal. He is able to give sight to the blind. He is able to open the ears of the deaf. He is able to give cleansing to the lepers. He is able to heal the paralytic. He is able to set free all those who are troubled by demons. He is able to even say to the paralyzed man, “Stand up, take up your mat and walk.”
Jesus can heal all diseases. This is as true now as it was when Jesus was walking on the earth. Jesus can heal all that is wrong with you. And you, no doubt, are praying that the Lord would heal your trouble, would rescue you from your affliction, and He can. Keep praying, keep knocking, keep asking, keep seeking, and who knows whether the Lord will grant relief.
But this is important, not only while we wait for healing and we wait for rescue, but it’s also important while we suffer under our afflictions. This is, I had to learn something a couple of years ago when I got sick, and I think this might be the thing that I had to learn. And that is that if the Lord wants us to be sick, then we will be sick. And if the Lord wants us to be well, we will be well.
If the Lord has not healed your blindness or your deafness or your diabetes or your cancer or your dementia or whatever it is that troubles you, if the Lord has not healed that yet, if he has not answered your prayer, it’s because he wants you to have this affliction, in his wisdom and according to his ways.
Now healing will come. It might be today, it might be tomorrow, it might be in a year, it might be in the resurrection. Healing will come. Jesus cannot abide by the sicknesses and the things that afflict us. He will heal us according to his own time. But in the meantime, his strength is made perfect in weakness.
Remember how it was with St. Paul, who prayed three times that the Lord would take the thorn out of his side? Three times I prayed to the Lord, he says, and the Lord responded and said, “My strength is made perfect in weakness.” And so, if the Lord has you weak and afflicted and suffering, this is why: so that his strength would be made perfect and so that you could rest in his care. He has not forgotten you. He has not cast you off. He is working in each one of us to bless and to keep us.
But there is also, I think, a spiritual application to the text, especially when we consider that blindness in the Scripture is often contrasted, blindness of the eyes is often contrasted with blindness of the heart. This is especially true in the Gospel of John when Jesus heals the blind man who actually can see better than the Pharisees, and the Pharisees whose eyes work just fine are in fact blind. They can’t see what’s right in front of them, namely Jesus.
Saint Paul, in his epistles, will compare the unbelieving heart to blindness, not only of the Jews but also of the Gentiles. Because we, according to the wisdom of our own fallen flesh, cannot see what is true about the world, about ourselves, and about God. So the Lord must open our eyes.
This is the work of the Holy Spirit, who calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies us through the Word of God. You are Christians, which means that the Holy Spirit has given you eyes to see things that the world cannot see, and two things in particular—and a third, but two which are most important. Number one, heaven; you can see that you are a sinner, which is something that the world cannot see.
Jesus says the Holy Spirit will come and convict the world of sin, and this is why: because apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, we can’t even know that we’re sinners. I think I’ve told you about the time when I went out interviewing people on the street with a video camera, and we were asking them various questions, and we asked people if they thought they were going to heaven. Even the people who didn’t believe in heaven thought that they were going to go there, which is—I could never figure out how that actually worked. But you’d ask, “How are you going to get there? How are you going to get to heaven?”
And the answer was, for the non-Christians, the answer was 100% the same: “I’m a pretty good person. I’m a pretty good person.” That is what we think of ourselves apart. That is what we think of ourselves in the blindness of our fallen state, in the blindness of our sin. We cannot see how we have broken God’s law. We cannot see how we have deserved His wrath. We cannot see how God is angry with us for our sins, as we confessed earlier here, that I’m a poor, miserable sinner, that I’ve deserved— we deserve God’s temporal and eternal punishment.
The depth of our own sinfulness is hidden from us. The best we can do is this: “Well, I know I’ve made mistakes, but everybody makes mistakes. I know I’ve messed up here and there, but to err is human.” We’ve got an excuse for everything. That is our natural wisdom, our natural blindness that is hidden from the depth of our own sin.
But here’s the spiritual insight: it’s not only that you’ve broken God’s law, that you’ve sinned against the holy name of God, that you’ve taken every commandment and torn it up and spit on it and stomped on it; but that God is mad about that. That He does not take such offense lightly.
The wrath of God is revealed against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. It’s true what we said earlier, that not only are we poor miserable sinners, but that we have deserved His temporal and His eternal wrath. That’s true. And to see that is to be healed of our blindness by the Holy Spirit.
But that is only the first thing. Can you imagine if the Lord only let us see the depth of our sin and then He didn’t reveal to us the most important thing to know next? Then we would walk around in despair without hope at all. But at the same moment that the Lord opens our eyes to see the depth of our own sin, He also opens our eyes to see the height of His love, the depth of His compassion, the width and breadth of His mercy and grace.
He opens our eyes to see not only the darkness of our own sin, but to see the glory of Christ, who dwelled eternally in the presence of God, but for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, not only to take on your flesh and your blood to become your brother, but also to bear your sin as the Lamb of God, so that everything that you’ve done wrong, every commandment that you’ve broken, every act of love that you’ve failed to do, every unholy word and thought and desire and action and step, everything that you’ve done wrong, every single bit of it, Jesus carried Himself to the cross.
And He there on that cross suffered God’s wrath in your place as your substitute for you, for you, so that the wrath of God and the anger of God that should be on you is completely spent on Christ. Every single bit of it. He drank the cup of the wrath of God to the very dregs. There’s not a single drop left. There’s no more anger for God left to be spent on you. All of it was spent on the Son, so that now, heaven—the face of God is smiling at you.
Oh, I know you don’t deserve it, but this is the most important thing that you must see, that God the Holy Spirit uses the Word to open your eyes to see this: that on the face of God right now, if we could peel back the curtain and see the throne of God and the radiant glory of the Father sitting there on his face is not a scowl, it’s not a frown, it’s not a look of disappointment or of disinterest, but on God’s face for you right now is a smile.
Because He loves you. He delights in you, and the righteousness of Christ, His perfect obedience, is covering you. God does not see your sin, your failures, the stench of your own efforts, none of it. You are covered in the blood of Jesus, perfectly clean without spot or blemish or wrinkle or any such thing. You are adoringly beautiful to God the Father.
Now you can’t see it in yourselves, not with your natural eyes, but with the eyes of Jesus. Oh, if we could see ourselves how Jesus sees us! The radiance on His face, the glowing smile, the great tremendous love that says that nothing will be able to separate you from Him because He loves you that much.
He spent His life, poured out His blood, gave His only begotten Son so that He could have you, call you His own, and you could be His. And this is what it means to see, to be healed of our blindness, to know that we are sinners redeemed by the blood of Jesus.
And these eyes healed from spiritual blindness—these eyes start to look at everything quite a bit differently too. This is the third benefit of having our eyes opened by Jesus. You start to look at your neighbor differently. Husbands look at their wives and wives look at their husbands differently when they have spiritual eyes. Instead of seeing all the flaws, they see the gift that God has given: what God has joined together, let no one separate.
Children look at their parents differently with spiritual eyes, knowing that God has given me my mom and dad to honor. He’s crowned them with His glory, and parents look at children differently as gifts from the Lord. With spiritual eyes, we start to look at our neighbors differently. Not the people who, you know, let their dog dig under the fence and make a mess in the backyard, but in fact as those who God has given me so that I might begin to keep His commandment to love my neighbor and serve them and bless them.
We look at each other differently as the children of God, that we’re part of the same family, that the Lord has united us to one another. We look at the government differently, knowing that the Lord has not given the sword in vain, that He’s the one who appoints rulers among humanity. We look at death differently; now it’s no longer the end, it’s only the beginning. We look at sickness differently, suffering differently, poverty differently, riches differently, time differently, heaven differently; we look at the stars differently, and the ground.
Everything looks different when we have the eyes of Jesus. Because everything now comes to us as His gift, His kindness, and His love.
They called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart, get up, he is calling you.” His prayer, “Lord have mercy,” is answered. And so is yours. God be praised.
In the name of Jesus, amen.
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
