Mark 10:46-52

“Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly.”

Bartimaeus is a blind man. He depends on the generosity of his neighbors, but they can’t do more than help him maintain his current situation as a blind beggar. Bartimaeus wants more than that, and this is central to this story, because when the people tell Bartimaeus to keep quiet, the subtext of what they’re saying is, “This is the best you can hope for.” Maybe they’re even saying, “This is just the way it is. This is normal.”

Walter Brueggemann writes that the crowd always has a stake in pretending that something that really is abnormal, in this case, blind begging, is normal. If it’s normal, it means no one needs to change. The folks around him don’t have to ask, “Why are some people forced to beg to survive, while others have more than enough? Why aren’t we taking steps to fix that? How could we fix it if we wanted to? What’s wrong with us that we are allowing this abnormal situation to continue?”

Nevertheless, Bartimaeus cries out. Jesus doesn’t hear him the first time, so Bartimaeus cries out more loudly. Eventually, Jesus does hear him, and does see him, and he heals Bartimaeus.

Silence can refer to something good: to awe before holiness, to peace amidst chaos. But in this story where the people are silencing Bartimaeus, it’s a form of coercion. This is a pattern we see throughout history and even today. Voices of dissent and voices on the margins are silenced. We see them silenced with voter suppression and gerrymandering, with smear campaigns and threats of violence, with gas lighting and mockery, with censorship and blacklisting, and with mass incarceration. It’s football season; a few years a quarterback who took a knee was silenced by teams who refused to hire him.

The Christian Church is and always has been challenged to decide whether to sign on with the silencers, or with the silence breakers. On October 31, 1517, 507 years ago this week, the story goes that Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg church, attacking the corruption of the Christian Church. When the Church attempted to silence him with excommunication, Luther is said to have defended himself, with, “Here I stand. I can do no other, so help me God.”

Luther’s namesake, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to the moderate white mainline Protestant pastors in Birmingham. They had tried to silence King and others in the Civil Rights Movement by labeling them extremists. This label implied that it was King and the civil rights advocates who were somehow dangerous, rather than racism that was dangerous. King wrote, “… though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’ … Was not Martin Luther an extremist: ‘Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.’ … So, the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?”

In Bartimaeus and in these stories from church history, we see that silencing is a way to maintain the status quo in terms of power, wealth, and inclusion, and in terms of who is heard, who is seen, and whose stories are voiced. Silence breakers, on the other hand, are those who insist that the old patterns must be disrupted where those patterns hurt or oppress, and where those patterns allow or even encourage us to keep thinking something hurtful is just normal. Silence breakers seek transformation, and, yes, reformation.

We have an important election coming up in this country. Our vote is one of the most powerful and peaceful ways for us to speak the truth, to break the silence, to cry out about all the things that we should not accept as normal; things like school shootings, white supremacy, the fact that our very planet is in jeopardy, the fact that people remain unhoused and even the middle class is struggling to afford housing. It doesn’t make any difference what political party you claim: these situations are not normal. Your vote is your voice; your vote is a way to shatter the silence.

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.