30th Sunday 2021
Jeremiah 31:7-9; Psalm 125; Hebrews 5:1-6; Mark 10:46-52
We have a change of mood this week. Last Sunday, if you recall, we heard of the suffering Christ, and were called to follow Him in receiving the baptism of blood and the cup of suffering. Today, there is an emphasis on God’s gifts, and a mood of rejoicing, indeed of exuberance.
It is something which we encounter, perhaps surprisingly, in the Book of Jeremiah. He is frequently regarded as a doom and gloom merchant: a Jeremiah is someone who prophesies disaster, an Eeyore who sees only the dark side.
In general, there is some truth in this, but only because Jeremiah was constantly facing a dark and difficult situation. Much of the book attributed to him deals with the perils of the Jewish people, who were about to undergo seventy years of exile in Babylon. Jeremiah is concerned to prepare them for this ordeal, pointing to the way of dealing with it, and resisting the false promises of the false prophets, who were misleading the people with empty promises. (Far be it from me to suggest a resemblance to modern day politics.)
All that Jeremiah prophesied came true, but today we meet a different Jeremiah both literally and metaphorically. The seventy yers of exile are coming to an end: during that time, the original Jeremiah would almost certainly have died, and the author of this part of the book must be his successor as prophet of the Lord.
The mood too is very different: there is a spirit of jubilation which is almost palpable. “Proclaim! Praise! Shout!” the people are told, and we can feel like shouting with them. God is fulfilling His promises which He made through the original Jeremiah long ago—that after seventy years He would lead the exiles home.
Two points occur to me. Firstly, the returning exiles would largely have been the descendants of those who were originally taken from their home land. Any survivors among those first exiles would have been children or babes in arms at the time, and would now be elderly, especially by the standards of those days. The majority of those who made the trip back to Judah and Jerusalem would have known them almost as places of fable, a promised land of which they had heard but which they had never seen. God, we realise, is faithful to His promises, but we, like the Jews of the 6th century BC, must be prepared to wait in faith.
Secondly, to gain some idea of the overwhelming sense of liberation which the people must have experienced, I think of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of Soviet communism. Anyone over the age of forty will have thought of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact as an ever present threat. Many of us recall the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956: still more will remember the snuffing out of the Prague spring in 1968.
Since 1961, the Berlin Wall had stood as an apparently permanent reminder of the division of Europe, a symbol of despair for so many who lived under totalitarian regimes. Suddenly, in 1989, in a matter of weeks, nay days, it was gone , to be followed by the collapse of the whole Soviet Union and the rebirth of subject nations such as Georgia and the Baltic states. Celebration was unrestrained at an apparent, or indeed, genuine, miracle.
Of course, since then, many hopes have been dashed, and there have been multiple setbacks and failures. The same was true of the exiles returning from Babylon. The same is true of us, who have been liberated by the death and resurrection of the Christ. Liberty brings responsibilities, it entails struggle and suffering, as last Sunday’s readings reminded us, but it is no less real for that. The Jewish people continued to squander many of the blessings of freedom by repeatedly turning away from God, and so do we. Like them we must, with God’s help, continue to work at our freedom.
Today’s psalm deals with the same historical event, and displays the same exhilaration as the passage from Jeremiah: “When the Lord delivered Sion from bondage, it seemed like a dream. So must the fall of the Berlin Wall have seemed to those who lived beyond the physical wall, ad the metaphorical Iron Curtain. So must the restoration of his sight have seemed to the blind beggar Bartimaeus.
In the account of Bartimaeus’ cure, we encounter that same jubilation which we found in Jeremiah and the psalm. Anticipating what is to happen, Bartimaeus throws off his cloak and jumps to his feet. Then, once he is cured, he follows Jesus along the road, an indication that a spiritual, as well as a physical, blindness has been cured. Bartimaeus too would have experienced suffering as a follower of Christ, but his blindness was gone forever.
What about us? Do we rejoice and exult that we have been liberated by Christ from sin and from eternal death? Do we recognise all the blessings which we receive in our daily lives? Do we follow enthusiastically along the road in company with Jesus, recognising that our failures, our setbacks, and our sufferings cannot outweigh the liberation, the dreamlike liberation, which we have been given?
