Sermon: The veneer of respectability

And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent. But he cried out all the more, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!' And Jesus stopped and said, ‘Call him.'

St Mark x. 48, 9

I have never forgotten one of the finest sermons I have ever heard praught.  It was a day about twelve years ago when the fire alarms had interrupted this service.  The Eucharist was delayed until the afternoon, so as to be part of Evensong.  In a brilliantly wrought plea for social justice, David Brown reminded his rapt hearers of the pernicious tendency of the people of Jesus's time to classify any kind of disability or impairment as evidence of the moral deficiency or ritual impurity of the one affected or even of his ancestors, and the contrast of their attitudes with the God who reaches out to those whom human beings like to scorn.  Precisely the shoes in which we find Bartimaeus.

    St Augustine says, ‘Mark has recorded both the name of Bartimaeus and of his father, a circumstance which scarcely occurs in all the many cases of healing which had been performed by the Lord...Consequently there can be little doubt that this Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, had fallen from some position of great prosperity, and was now regarded as an object of the most notorious and the most remarkable wretchedness, because, in addition to being blind, he had also to sit begging.'

    Bartimaeus is sitting in the gutter begging his bread because he has been dumped by everyone else.  Indeed, so undesirable is he considered that, when Jesus walks past him and he cries out for help, the bystanders tell him to shut up.  Ancient Jewry's equivalents of the readers of the Daily Mail aren't going to have this vulgarian shouting in the street.  He belongs in the shadows, in the silence, where he can live and die without ever pricking their badly-formed consciences.

    Of course, as David went on to say, much as we may like to pretend otherwise, the censorious and their outcasts are with us still.  As the centuries have rolled by they have had to move their opprobrium from one group to another.  One small group of people whom the greater number do not understand after another have fallen victim to bigotry and hated as year has succeeded to year.  Even the Church has had a go at it (and some would say some quarters are still doing it).  It is not beyond even bishops to declaim prejudice under the guise of ‘traditional Christian morality'. The Bible has long been sacrilegiously been invoked in support of their prejudices. Kyrie eleison.

    This has been focussed in two particularly unpleasant instances in the last fortnight.  Within days of the death of Stephen Gately, before he was even cold in the grave, Jan Moir was busy casting aspersions in her column in what Private Eye delights to call the Daily Hate Mail.  Speaking as an amateur physician she claimed that young men do not just sit down on a sofa and die; but the truth is that this is exactly what happens to about twelve young men in Britain every week.  And, setting herself up as a coroner, she tells us that death by natural causes means nothing more than that he was not murdered.  She took a great number of words to try to hide a view whose sinister basis could very quickly be deduced:  she thinks he died in the way he did because this is what happens to gay people.  All of this, and more salacious supposition besides, in a newspaper which not so many years ago trumpeted the cause of British Fascism.  Christe eleison.

    Not many days later we endure the leader of the British National Party appearing on the BBC enumerating a list of people-related prejudices that make the Domesday Book look like a raffle ticket.  As we all knew he would, he shot himself cleanly in the foot with the starting pistol, and then blamed the Question Time audience, branding them a lynch mob.  Hmm.  Had he the Ku Klux Klan in mind when he chose those words, I wonder.  But, even though he thinks Herr Hitler's Mein Kampf has some very good ideas in it, Nick Griffin assures us that he is not a Nazi.  Kyrie eleison.

    These two people trade under the thinnest veneer of respectability.  They hail themselves as among the few who are willing to stand up and say what good, ordinary people think but dare not say.  But the truth is that they are the people who want to keep Bartimaeus quiet.  Having formed a whole system of ideas about people whose characteristics are different from theirs, be they blind or gay or black, they exile their fellow human beings as threats to their own well-being.

    If I were in an uncharitable mood, I should suggest that Moir and Griffin and their ilk ought to be re-housed on domestic refuse land-fill sites, being one of the few places ghastly enough to disguise the stench of their bigotry.  But I find myself almost as worried about the well-being of the bullies as I am about their targets: they are shutting down elements of their own humanity in the same way as they do to others.

    Reflecting on Jesus's response to Bartimaeus, ‘What do you want me to do for you?' we do well to consider the words of St John Chrysostom when he says, ‘He will save assuredly, yet he will do so just in the way he has promised.  But in what way has he promised?  On our willing it, and on our hearing him.  For he does not make a promise to blocks of wood.'

    Bartimaeus is far from a block of wood, much as his contemners would prefer to see him as one.  Whilst they allow themselves to be deluded by the promptings of original sin, sating themselves with their own conceit, Bartimaeus's heart calls out to the one who he knows can draw the divinely loved man out of the mess that the blind prejudices of others have tried to make of him.  His belief accomplishes his need; and he doesn't just tittle off feeling pleased that he can see again: he sticks by Jesus on the way.

    If the Church expended as much energy proclaiming this good news as she does on internal wrangling over trivial matters she would have a far greater standing in the hearts and minds of a far greater number of people.  But while she sits around in inward-looking synods and councils one can guarantee that the Spirit of God will be finding infinitely more interesting and important things to do in the world at large, waiting for the Church and her children to come and join in.

    It belongs to the myriad different ministries of the people of God to do this in all sorts of ways, from those who proclaim God's loving justice from the house-tops to those who tend it on their hearths.  Fundamentally we must be willing, we must want to hear what Christ is saying to us, not hear what we want him to say to us: there can be a world of difference between the two.  And hearing him we must get up, and follow, and do what needs to be done.