Bartimaeus and the Cloak Thrown Aside

Audio is being recorded. The full script is below.

Full script

Imagine a road in the late morning, in a country where the sun has been at work since sunrise. The road is dry and pale and a little dusty, and on both sides of it are date palms, standing very tall and very still, as if they were waiting for something. The air is warm. There is the sound of sandals, many sandals, and under that the lower sound of people talking all at once, and under that again, a thin voice that has begun to shout.

We will come to the voice. But first, let us put on the lamp and settle down, because it is a long road, and a very short story.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story comes from the Gospel according to Mark, chapter ten, which Christians of both traditions read as Scripture, and we will tell it as it is told there. A few small things, the weather, the dust, the coins, and the quiet conversations, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Mark has been telling a long journey. If you have been listening to the stories of the gospels on these nights, you will know that Jesus has spent a great deal of time in Galilee, in the green north, among the lake and the hills and the fishing towns. But in the tenth chapter of Mark, he has turned south, and he is on his way to Jerusalem. Mark says that they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and that Jesus was walking ahead of them, and that the disciples were amazed, and those who followed were afraid.

That is a strange thing to say about a walk. Why were they amazed? Why were they afraid? Because Jesus has just told them, for the third time, what is waiting for him in the city. He has told them plainly that he will be handed over, and mocked, and put to death, and that after three days he will rise. And they have not understood. Mark is honest about that. Right after, two of the disciples, James and John, come to him and ask for the best seats in his glory. And the others hear of it and are cross. It is a very human moment, and Jesus does not shout at them. He sits them down, and he tells them that the one who wants to be great must be a servant, and that even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life.

So the disciples are walking behind him, a little bewildered, and a little afraid, and with a great many questions they have not asked. And it is into this mood, Mark says, that they come to Jericho.

Jericho is a very old town. It is one of the oldest in the world, and it sits in the valley of the river Jordan, low down, lower than the sea, in a warm green place where the palms grow, and where the springs make a garden in the middle of the dry hills. It is a pleasant town to arrive in. In the time of Jesus it was also an important one, a place where roads met, and a place where pilgrims stopped.

Because here is what you must know about Jericho. It is the last town before the climb. From Jericho, the road to Jerusalem goes up. It is about fifteen miles, and it climbs the whole way, up through the bare hills and the dry gorges, with the heat on your back, and it goes from the lowest place to the high city on its ridge. Pilgrims who were coming to Jerusalem for the great feasts, from Galilee and from beyond the Jordan, would often come by this road, and they would gather at Jericho, rest the night, fill their water skins, and then set out in company for the climb.

So when Jesus comes to Jericho, in the days before the Passover, there are crowds. It is not just Jesus and his twelve friends. It is a great crowd, Mark says, which is going out of the town with them. There are families and farmers and old people and children on their fathers' shoulders. There are donkeys, and bundles, and the clatter of everyone getting ready. It is the kind of morning when the road is busy and loud, and everyone is thinking of where they are going, and nobody is looking much at the side of the road.

Nobody, that is, except one person. And he is not looking, because he cannot. But he is listening.

Mark tells us who he is in a single line. He says: And as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a great crowd, Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the roadside.

We should stop at that, because there is a small thing in it that is worth noticing. Mark gives him a name. Mark does not do that very often. In this gospel, a great many of the people Jesus helps are not named at all. There is the leper, and the paralysed man, and the woman with bleeding, and the man in the synagogue with the withered hand. They are described and not named. But here Mark gives us a name, Bartimaeus, and then, as if he wished to be sure, he explains it. The son of Timaeus. That is because the first part of the name, bar, is the word for son in the language that Jesus and his friends spoke. So Bartimaeus means the son of Timaeus, and Mark is saying: the son of Timaeus, the son of Timaeus. It is a little like writing a name twice, to make sure that you have it.

Why did Mark do this? We do not know. People have guessed that the man was known to the early Christians, that his name was remembered because he went on to be a part of their story. That is a reasonable guess, and perhaps it is right, but Mark does not say so, and we should be careful of building too much on it. What we can say is that, whatever the reason, this man is remembered by name. Out of the whole crowd on the Jericho road, a crowd of hundreds, whose names are lost, the name that is kept is the name of the man at the edge.

That seems to us to be a kind of lesson in itself.

Let us sit with Bartimaeus for a while before anything happens, because it is the right way to hear the story, and Mark gives us only a few words and we have all the night.

He is a blind man, and he is a beggar. In the world of the gospels, those two things went together, because there was no other way for a blind person to live, in a town with no hospitals and no pensions. If a family could look after you, then you were looked after. If not, you sat. You sat by a gate, or by a road where people passed, and you asked for what they could spare.

And the law of Moses, which was the law of all those people, was clear and kind about this. It said that the poor were to be remembered. It said that you were not to put a stumbling block in front of the blind. It said, over and over, that the stranger and the poor person and the widow were God's own concern. So a person who sat by the road was not, in principle, an outcast. He was someone to whom the whole community owed something. In practice, of course, it did not always go that way, and a good many people hurried past with their eyes on the road. But the law was on his side, even if the crowd was not.

We can imagine Bartimaeus's day, and we should say that we are imagining it, and that none of it is in Mark. We can imagine that he has a place, a particular place, where the road is wide and the traffic slows, and that he has sat in it so long that he knows every sound of it. He knows the sound of a camel, which is soft and slow. He knows the sound of a soldier, which is heavy, and the sound of a child, which is quick. He knows the sound of a rich man's sandals, which are good leather, and the sound of a poor man's, which are rope. He knows the market sounds from one end of the street, and the water carriers from the other. He knows when it is noon by the way the shade stops, and he knows when it is evening by the way the air cools on his face.

And we can imagine that he has a cloak. Mark mentions the cloak later, so we know that he has one, and we can guess what it was for. A beggar's cloak is his whole house. It is his blanket at night, and his shade at noon, and very often it is spread on the ground in front of him, for coins to land on. So on the morning we are telling about, we can picture the cloak laid out in the dust at his knees, with a few small coins on it, and the man himself, sitting very upright, with his face lifted a little to the sun, listening.

We can also imagine, though Mark does not say, that he has been listening for a long time to the talk of a man called Jesus. Jericho is a town on a main road. News travels along it. News of the man from Nazareth who has been teaching in the villages, and healing the sick, and stirring up the crowds, would have come up and down that road a good many times. A person who sits by the road hears everything. He would have heard it all, a piece at a time, from travellers who stopped to rest. We cannot know what he had heard, or what he made of it. But when the moment comes, he knows enough to know what to shout.

And now the moment. It is the sound of the crowd that changes first. Bartimaeus, who listens for a living, would have noticed it at once. The noise of the road, which was a general busy noise, has a different shape. It is coming nearer, and it is bigger than usual, and it has a direction. It is a great many people, moving together, and talking about someone in the middle.

Mark says that when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out.

We should think about what that means. It does not say that he asked quietly, or that he waited for a good moment, or that he put out a hand. He heard, and he began to shout. And what he shouted was this: Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.

Two things are in those words, and both are worth a moment.

The first is the title. Son of David. That is not an ordinary way to address a man. It is a title with a great weight behind it. David was the great king of Israel, the shepherd who became a king, and God had promised David that one of his descendants would rule for ever. And so, for a thousand years, the people had waited for a son of David, a king from David's house who would set things right. When a person called someone the Son of David, they were saying something large. They were saying, you are the one we have been waiting for.

And this is an interesting thing, because up to this point in Mark's gospel, nobody has said it. The disciples have called Jesus the Christ, once, in Caesarea Philippi, but they were told to keep quiet. Demons have cried out about him, and he has silenced them. But a blind beggar, by the road, in the dust, who has never seen his face, is the first to call him the Son of David aloud. It is as if the man who cannot see has seen something that the people with eyes have not.

Mark does not say that in so many words. But Mark has put the story here, in this place, just before Jesus enters Jerusalem, and the reader is meant to notice. A blind man sees who he is. The people who can see are still arguing about seats.

The second thing in those words is the plea. Have mercy on me. It is the oldest prayer there is. It is not a request for something in particular. It is simply the cry of a person who knows he has nothing to offer, and who throws himself on the kindness of someone who has everything. In the Orthodox Church, it has become the heart of what is called the Jesus Prayer, and in both traditions, it is said at every service, over and over: Lord, have mercy. Kyrie, eleison. Some of the oldest words in the Christian prayer are the words of a blind man at the side of a road.

Now, a crowd is a powerful thing, and a crowd has opinions. And the crowd on the Jericho road did not like what it was hearing.

Mark says: And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent.

We should say this plainly, because it is easy to rush past. Many people told him to be quiet. They were not cruel, perhaps. Some may have been embarrassed. Some may have thought, this is a great man on a great journey, and he does not need a beggar shouting at him. Some may simply have been irritated, because they were trying to hear the teaching, and here was a voice shouting across it. Some may have been protecting Jesus, in their own way, from the nuisance. We can understand all of that. We have all stood in a crowd where someone was making a noise, and wished they would stop.

But think what it must have been like, to be the one shouting. To have a hundred people turn on you at once, and say, hush. Be quiet. Stop that. Who do you think you are? When a person has been told to be quiet by the crowd for all of his life, it does not take much to make him stay quiet again. He had every reason to sit down, to shrink, to say sorry, and to take his coins and go.

And here is what Mark says, in the very next line, and it is our favourite line in the story. He says: But he cried out all the more, Son of David, have mercy on me.

All the more. Not less. More.

We will not make a speech about that. But if you are in bed tonight, with the lamp low, and there is something you have been asking for, quietly, for a long time, and a number of voices around you have been telling you to give it up, then you might like to keep that line in your pocket. All the more. It is allowed. It was allowed for Bartimaeus. Nobody ever told him he was being too loud.

And now we come to the thing that happens next, which is the most beautiful moment in the whole story, and which is easy to miss because it is so small.

Mark says: And Jesus stopped.

That is all. Jesus stopped. He was on the way to Jerusalem, to the cross, with the disciples bewildered behind him and a great crowd pressing at his back, and he was walking ahead with a purpose that nobody could have turned aside. And a voice on the roadside, among all that noise, a single thin voice, reached him. And he stopped.

We can picture it. The crowd is moving, and suddenly the front of it halts, and the people behind bump into the people in front, and there is a sort of ripple of confusion through the whole road. Why have we stopped? What is happening? And the answer is that the one at the front has heard someone calling, and has turned his head.

Think what this says. Of all the voices that morning, the praising ones and the arguing ones and the ones asking for the best seats, the voice that stops Jesus is the voice that nobody else wants. That is the whole gospel in a single word. Jesus stopped.

And then he does something that is very kind, and very clever, and very easy to overlook. He does not go to Bartimaeus. He does not shout across the crowd, or send a servant with a coin. He says: Call him.

Call him. He turns the crowd into the messengers. The same people who had told the man to be quiet are now told to fetch him. Think about what that does to them. They have just been rebuking him, and now they have to turn, and walk across to him, and say to him something quite different. It is a bit like someone who has told a child to be quiet at a gathering, and then is told by the host, please bring that child over, I want to talk to him.

And so they do. Mark says: And they called the blind man, saying to him, Take heart. Rise, he is calling you.

Three small sentences, and every one of them is a gift.

Take heart. That is a phrase we hear often in the gospels, and it means something like be of good courage, be brave, do not be afraid. It is what you say to a person who has been frightened for a long time. And the crowd, which a moment ago was telling him to be quiet, is now telling him to be brave. They have changed their tune, and we do not know exactly when, whether it was a moment's shame, or the sight of Jesus standing still, or just the way a crowd moves when a leader moves. But they say it, and it is kind.

Rise. Get up. After a long time of sitting, the word must have been a strange one. He has been sitting by the road, perhaps for years, and now somebody is saying, stand.

And: he is calling you. Those are the words, we think, that would have gone into him like a bell. He is calling you. Out of all the people on that road, out of the hundreds, you. By name, or by need, or by the sound of your voice, you are the one being asked for.

Mark says: And throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus.

Throwing off his cloak. We have been waiting for the cloak, and here it is, in a single word.

Think what that cloak was. We said that it was his whole house. It was his blanket, his shelter, and his collecting plate. It was the one thing he owned that kept him warm, and if he threw it off in the dust of a crowded road, there was a real chance that he would not find it again. A blind man cannot easily look for a thing he has dropped. The coins on it might be trodden on or picked up. The cloak itself might be taken by anyone.

And he throws it off. Not carefully, not folding it, not asking a neighbour to mind it. He throws it aside, and he springs up, Mark says, which is the word of a person who has been waiting a long time for permission to move. And he comes, in the dark, with the voice to guide him, toward the one who has called.

We do not know why Mark mentions the cloak. He may simply have been remembering the scene as someone had told it, with the little details that stay in the memory of an eyewitness. But Christians have loved this detail for a very long time, and it is easy to see why. A person who has been called does not carry everything with him. A person who is going toward the light does not want to be wrapped in what he has been. He throws it off, and he runs.

We will say that again, gently, since it is all we are going to say about it. We are not told that the cloak was a bad thing. We are not told that it was a sin. It was simply what he had, and he let go of what he had, because something better was calling.

So he comes. Imagine the crowd parting. Imagine the quiet that falls, because everyone is looking at him now, this man whom they had told to be silent, moving towards the middle of the road with his hands a little out in front of him. Imagine the stillness. Jesus stands, and the disciples stand, and the dust settles. And the blind man comes to a stop in front of the one he has been calling, who is, as far as he knows, only a voice, and a presence, and a sense of someone very near.

And Jesus speaks. And what he says is a question.

Mark says: And Jesus said to him, What do you want me to do for you?

We have to stop and notice how strange that is. It must have seemed strange even to the people standing there. Here is a blind man. Everyone knows what he wants. A blind man wants to see, and it is obvious, and he has been shouting for mercy for several minutes. Why would you need to ask?

And yet Jesus asks. It is the same question that he asked James and John only a few verses before, when they came to him for the best seats. Mark has put them side by side on purpose. In the one case, Jesus says, what do you want me to do for you? and the answer is, sit us at your right hand and at your left, in your glory. In the other case, Jesus says, what do you want me to do for you? and the answer is, let me see.

The same question, and two very different answers. The disciples, who could see, asked for glory. The blind man asked for sight. You could read the whole gospel of Mark, and keep that pair in your hand, and understand a great deal.

But there is also something simply tender in the question. Jesus does not assume. He does not treat the man as a case, or as a category, or as a blind person to be dealt with. He asks, as you would ask a friend, what is it that you want? He lets the man say it. He lets him say it aloud, in front of all those people, the thing he has been wanting for years. And to be asked, after a lifetime of being told to be quiet, what you want, is already a kind of healing.

And Bartimaeus answers. Mark gives us the words. He says: Rabbouni, let me receive my sight.

Rabbouni. It is a word of respect, and a warm one. It is a form of rabbi, which means teacher, but it is more personal, something like my teacher, or my master. It is only used twice in the gospels, and the other time is on Easter morning, when Mary Magdalene hears her name in the garden and turns and says Rabbouni. It is a word that is kept for the tender moments.

And notice that he has changed his title. On the road he shouted, Son of David, which was the big public word. Now he stands face to face, and he says, my teacher. It is the word one uses for someone close.

Let me receive my sight. A very simple request, in very plain words. He does not make a speech. He does not list his sufferings. He does not ask for money, which was the thing he had been asking for all his life. He asks for the one thing that no one else on that road could give him.

And Jesus says: Go your way; your faith has made you well.

And immediately, Mark says, he received his sight and followed him on the way.

We should slow down, because the ending of this story is so short that it is easy to fly past.

Immediately he received his sight. There is no long scene. There is no description of the light coming in, or of the first thing he saw. Mark, who loves to tell a story with a lot of movement, tells this one in a single clause. He could see.

We are free to wonder what he saw. We are free to imagine, and we will say plainly that it is imagination, that the first thing was not the palms or the sky or the faces of the crowd, but the face of the man who had stopped. After all that time of voices and footsteps, here is a face. We do not know what it looked like, and Mark does not tell us. But we can guess that it was a face worth waiting for.

And then the last words. Jesus has said, go your way. He gives him freedom. The man could go home. He could go back to his family, if he had one, or to the town, or anywhere in the world. He is free, after years of being fixed in one place at the side of the road, to go his own way.

And what does he do? Mark says that he followed him on the way.

On the way. It is the same word, the way, the road, that Mark has been using all through this part of the gospel. Jesus was walking ahead on the way to Jerusalem. The disciples were afraid on the way. And now the man who had been sitting beside the road is walking on it. He has gone from the side of the road to the middle of it. He had been a person who sat by the way, and he is now a person on the way.

And where is the way going? Up. To Jerusalem. Into everything that Jesus has been telling them about, the handing over and the mockery and the cross. Mark does not say that Bartimaeus knew that. But he is going the same way, with his eyes open, and this time he can see where it leads.

That is the whole of the story. It is seven verses long.

Now we should say a little about what we do not know, because it matters, and because a bedtime story should be honest.

Mark's story has two cousins in the other gospels. Matthew tells of two blind men on the road near Jericho, not one, and does not name either. Luke tells of one blind man, who is not named, and says that it happened as Jesus was drawing near to Jericho, not as he was leaving it. Careful readers have wondered about these differences for a very long time, and there are several old suggestions about how they might fit together. One is that Jesus passed through the old town and the new town, and that the healing took place between them. Another is that Matthew simply tells it for two men because there were two, and Mark tells it for the one who was remembered. We do not need to decide. We have told Mark's version, which is the one that has the name, and we have not tried to settle the questions the others raise.

What is Scripture, and told straight, is that Jesus and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, that Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the road, that he heard it was Jesus of Nazareth, that he cried out, Son of David, have mercy on me, that many rebuked him to make him be silent, that he cried out all the more, that Jesus stopped and said, call him, that they said, take heart, rise, he is calling you, that he threw off his cloak, sprang up and came to Jesus, that Jesus asked what he wanted, that he said, Rabbouni, let me receive my sight, that Jesus said, go your way, your faith has made you well, and that immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way.

What we have not claimed as fact is anything about Bartimaeus before that morning or after the story ends. Later Christian writers say that he became a teacher or a leader among the first Christians, and some Christian calendars remember him as a saint. Those traditions may be true, but they are not in Mark, and we have only mentioned them. We have not said where exactly on the road he sat, or what the weather was, or how old he was.

What we invented are the dust and the date palms, the sounds of the road, the idea that he could tell the sandals of the rich from the sandals of the poor, the coins on the cloak, and the guess that he had heard news of Jesus on the road beforehand. None of them are in Mark, and none of them change a single thing that Mark says.

If you are lying in the dark tonight, and there is something you have been asking for that has not come, you might remember the man on the road. He did not know whether it would work. He had no reason to think that a crowd would let him through. He only knew that when the one he was waiting for went by, he was going to call out, and that if they told him to stop, he was going to call out louder.

And you might remember that when the one he was calling heard him, he stopped. Whatever else is going on, however big the road and however loud the crowd, there is one who stops for the voice at the edge.

That is the story of Bartimaeus for tonight. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. And now, in the oldest words of all, Lord, have mercy. May you rest well, may you wake with your eyes open to the morning, and may you know that you are called by name. Goodnight, and God bless.

All episodes · Podcast feed (RSS)