Did you read Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in high school? I don’t remember too much about it, but we all read it. It was just part of getting an education at Lakeside High School in Atlanta. Required reading.

Jesus asked, “What do you want me to do for you?” “Rabbi, let me see again.” It’s the last healing miracle in Mark’s Gospel, and the Markan Jesus performs more deeds of power than in any other Gospel. He casts out an unclean spirit of a man in the synagogue. To a man with a withered hand he said, “Stretch it out.” To a man lowered through the roof he said, “Get up and walk.” He healed Simon Peter’s mother-in-law. That’s how Mark identifies her: Simon Peter’s mother-in-law. We aren’t told her name. 

My mother-in-law’s name was Ann. I introduced her as my mother-in-law, Ann. I like to claim the familial connection. But it’s never simply, “Meet my mother-in-law.” That’s too impersonal. I would introduce her with her name. I’m sure that Peter’s mother-in-law has a name, though Mark doesn’t tell us what it is. Actually, Mark doesn’t tell us the names of anyone who is impacted by Jesus’ deeds of power — that is until we meet Bartimaeus. 

And with Bartimaeus Mark tells us his name not once but twice. The Greek word for “son” is uios. So it reads uios Timaeus. Son of Timaues. But then it reads Bartimaeus. In Aramaic, the language Jesus would have spoken, the word bar means “son.” So Bar Timaeus in Aramaic means son of Timaeus. So, like twin speed bumps in the text, it reads, uios Timaeus, Bar-Timaeus — son of Timaeus, son of Timaeus. After ten chapters of telling us almost no one’s name, Mark now tells us this guy’s name twice. The name must be significant. 

Did you read The Red Badge of Courage in high school? We had to read it. I don’t remember much about it. That was just part of getting an education at Lakeside High School. I waited until college to read Whitman’s Song of Myself and Thoreau’s Walden and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. But you read those and soon discover that many folks have read them at one time or another. It’s just part of getting an education. Required reading. 

But back to Bartimaeus, this son of Timaeus with the important name. 

Lutheran scholar Gordon Lathrop says it is a name that no one would have trouble recognizing. It’s not a Jewish name. But some names are just known. If I spoke of Hamlet, you would know Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark. Or Hester Prynne, you would know this colonial Puritan. Atticus Finch, and perhaps you remember the small-town lawyer of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s the benefit of required reading. 

Well, required reading has a long history. And Lathrop says that during Jesus’ day, Plato would have been on the list of required reading (Gordon Lathrop, Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology, p. 31). One of the important works of Plato was a monologue in which Plato articulates the creation of the world. But it’s more than creation; it is Plato’s cosmology, his understanding of how the world works. Everybody read it. For Plato, what we see is never as real as that which we can’t see — there are forms there. But what we see serves to model for us the unseen. Plato believed that the creator created an intelligible world. And through observation of God’s world, we could discover the intentions of God, the mind of God. 

As a matter of fact, Plato writes, our comprehension of what is real and true results from what we see, or more accurately from seeing the world rightly. Plato observes “the chief benefit of the function of sight” is the observation of created order, from which we have derived philosophy (Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Penguin Classics, p. 65). And for Plato, the good life, the moral life, is the thinking life. To be human is to be a thinker. I like that. Plato describes the ideal ruler as a philosopher king. If you are going to be a king, being a thinker sounds like a good attribute. 

Plato continues, “As it is, the sight of day and night … made us inquire into the nature of the universe; thence we have derived Philosophy. … Philosophy is the greatest gift the gods have ever given or will give to mortals. This is what I call the greatest good our eyes give us” (Plato, p. 65). 

OK, I’m on board with Plato’s encouragement of thinking. But then Plato’s brilliance stumbles on an all-too-common, I might say universal, temptation. What about the folks who aren’t philosophers? 

Plato writes, “There is no need to recite the goods lesser than philosophy, which anyone who was not a philosopher and had lost his sight might lament in vain.” No need to waste breath on them. Plato dismisses them as the blind. They cannot see the world. 

Therefore, the one who is most human, the one to really see is the philosopher. In Plato’s cosmology the philosopher is the most human, the closest to God, and the rest are further down the chain. 

Why am I cluttering up a perfectly lovely Sunday morning, particularly one in which you got an hour less sleep, with this stroll through Plato? Because the work in which Plato expounds on all of this, of how philosophers are those who see the world rightly, that work is called Timaeus. Do you see the connection to our story? Some claim that in Mark’s day Timaeus was as identifiable a name as Othello or Madame Defarge would be in our day. 

In the nameless crowd of Mark’s Gospel there is one name, Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus. Everyone would have said, “We know who he is.” 

But rather than being the philosopher who sees the world rightly and who stands above all others, this son of Timaeus is blind, begging “Let me see.” 

If I understand this text, Jesus is doing more than healing a blind man. He is standing a cosmology on its head. And the Markan community is arguing with Greek philosophy about what makes us human.

Jesus is declaring that it’s not thinking alone that makes one human, particularly when such thinking is seen as lifting up some and pushing down others. In Plato’s cosmology he writes at one point that those who lived immoral — i.e., unthinking — lives, in the first generation are punished by being “reborn the second generation as women” (Plato, p. 122). It just goes to show that even the brightest among us has more thinking to do. 

Of course, Jesus spent time with women. Jesus welcomed the ones on the bottom. The ministry of Jesus declares that it’s not being smart that makes you human, particularly if you view being smart as meaning you are more important than others. The goal of the person is not simply to be smart but to love.

The way of Jesus was not to rise above others. That was the worldview of Timaeus — where everyone had their place and you should stay in your place.

But the way of Jesus is to crawl down among the broken and the lost, the suffering and the forgotten, and there, discovering that we are all God’s children, we are most alive, most human, most who we were created to be. Thinking is important, but loving is what we are for. 

Don’t let me mislead or lack clarity. The Gospel is not challenging the importance of thinking. Mark’s community is declaring that love is what defines us, because love is the human disposition and practice that will hold in check the universal human temptation to assume that I am better than others. 

I listened to the president this week proclaim his attack on all things related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I don’t care about the particular words of the day, but I failed to understand the celebration of this attack, which was so evident among so many of our nation’s leaders. 

I think the healing of Bartimaeus speaks to the spiritual risk of this political choice. Jesus rejects the temptation to define some people as more valuable than others. 

In the long history of this country, there has been a consistent practice to diminish women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQIA+ communities. 

Efforts at diversity have been efforts to give platform for voices long silenced and to pay attention to stories long ignored.

Those efforts have not been without flaw and at times failed to achieve stated goals, but to reject efforts at diversity is to reject the diverse way God has created us, and it is inconsistent with the call of Christ to love our neighbors, all of them, as ourselves. 

Let me put this more basically — this is my own faith and you may see it differently, but let me tell you how I see this — it seems to me that a universal human struggle is this: 

When I meet a person who in my spirit I register is not quite like me — be that difference religious, cultural, racial, economic, political — when I meet one and deem we are not quite alike — it becomes harder for me to see the full humanity of that other person. I think that is a universal human temptation. Or to borrow the words from the Timaeus, “You don’t see the world the way I see it; you must be blind — and lesser. Why waste breath on you?”

This son of Timaeus came to Jesus: “What am I missing? Where is my blind spot?”

You do not become human by rising above others and diminishing them.

You are human when you love.

And love is the practice that battles the diminishment of the neighbor.

Perhaps that is why it is so difficult for us to join Bartimaeus on the way, because the way of Jesus is not a way of power and strength. The way of Jesus is the way of the cross. The cosmology of Jesus is an understanding of the world that declares it is love, not power, not intellect, not status, not lording over, but love that defines the human creature.

Jesus did not call his church to rise above the humble masses but to walk among them. Not to lift ourselves up above the broken and hurting but to crawl down into the ditch of human suffering and to offer the salve of human compassion. 

I don’t think I have to convince you of this: you have experienced it. Rather than attempt to convince you of this truth, let me simply invite you to reflect on your own life. Let me ask you to reflect on when you were most alive, when you have felt that you were most who God created you to be. I am confident that you will turn to moments of love. You will think of moments of loving fidelity to children in difficult times. You will think of loving fidelity to parents in fragile and failing times. Loving fidelity to spouse in dry and distant times. Loving faithfulness to the community of faith when it would be easier to let go of one another, but no, love leads us to hold on to one another. You may think of loving fidelity to those whose names we do not know: we simply know them as the poor, the abused, the ill, or the marginalized. 

Was it not in moments like these that we were most alive? 

It is love like this that reminds us that we, in all of our diversity, are children of God. 

I was moved by the tribute in the Chicago Tribune yesterday by Eboo Patel, who spoke of Martin Marty.

Patel said, “Marty voiced his conviction that totalitarianism of all kinds could be avoided if we worked to build pluralism — respect for diverse identities, relationships between different communities, and cooperation for the common good.” 

I think Marty is right. 

In these days it is our calling not to put anyone down, not to rise above anyone.

Our status in this world is declared at the baptismal font when it is asserted we are children of God. We are all children of God.

One more thing. As we swim against the cultural current of supremacy and pursue diversity and collaboration, let us do so with kindness.

To quote Eboo Patel again, “Civility is everything. The quality of how we talk to each other, especially across lines of difference, is the foundation of our society” (Eboo Patel, “University of Chicago Religious Scholar Showed How Pluralism Is the Way,” Chicago Tribune, 8 March 2025, p. 5).

So in these demanding, and at times discouraging, days, let us be a people known for our kindness. Kindness is a power. And if Martin Marty is right, and I think he is, it is the power to confront totalitarianisms of every kind. 

Be smart when you can be. It’s a good thing.

But be kind always. It is what love looks like in the public square.

You don’t want to be blind to that.