"Healing the Blind", – Daniel Bonnell
In his poem, “The Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost tells a poignant story about the meaning of coming home.
In the poem, a farm wife named Mary comes home to find that Silas, an old, opinionated and less than dependable hired man, who has the habit of disappearing to work for someone else when he’s most needed, has returned, and is huddled up against the barn door, asleep.
Mary drags Silas into the house, fixes him tea, and tries to get him to tell her about his travels since he was last on the farm.
Silas keeps nodding off, and in his short intervals of awareness, he rambles on in a jumbled sort of way about his past experiences on the farm and his hopes for what he might get done there when he’s able to go back to work. He refuses to lie down, but sits nodding in the chair.
Mary sits with him.
In the silence, watches the flickering flame of the oil lamp as she waits for her husband Warren to get home from the market so that she can hurry out to meet him.
When Warren gets back, she runs on tiptoe down the dark hallway to the door, and shutting the door behind her so that Silas won’t overhear their conversation, she takes the packages from Warren’s hands and lays them down on the porch and the two of them sit on the moonlit steps to talk.
Warren is irritated that Silas is back.
Last time Silas decided to leave to work for someone else at the height of haying season, when Warren needed him the most, leaving Warren in the lurch, Warren had told Silas that if he left, he could never come back. Silas is undeserving.
And yet Silas has come back, and is at this very moment asleep in the house.
Mary says to Warren that Silas has come home to die, and that he won’t be leaving this time.
“Home.” Warren says this in a gently mocking way.
“It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.”
And then Warren says, still mockingly, that famous line from this poem,
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”
Mary responds with these lines.
“I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
Mary believes that home is something that we don’t have to deserve—to be able to go home and to be taken in when you get there is sheer grace– an undeserved grace.
In today’s Old Testament reading, the prophet Jeremiah writes about the people of Israel returning home from exile. Jeremiah imagines the time when God will gather the remnant of Israel, who have been scattered all over the earth, and will bring them all back home to Jerusalem.
And this remnant includes those who are weak, who would normally be left behind—the blind and the lame, pregnant women and those in labor, those who would “be worn out upon the trail.”
These weak people are the very ones that God will bring back home in an act of sheer grace.
And God is bringing them back home, not to die, but to live again.
Why?
Because God loves the people of Israel. So God will bring them home—into safety, protection, comfort, fulfillment, into a place of consolation.
The story of the blind beggar in Mark is also a story of homecoming.
The blind beggar, Bartimaeus, finds a home better than anything he has ever known—through an act of sheer grace on the part of Jesus.
Jesus and his disciples, followed by a large crowd, are leaving Jericho and heading for Jerusalem. When Bartimaeus hears that Jesus is passing by, he shouts out and says,
“Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
He is persistent and continues to call out even when the crowd orders him to be quiet.
Jesus stops and says, “Call him here.”
And so they tell Bartimaeus, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.”
And so Bartimaeus throws off his cloak, springs up and comes to Jesus. And when Jesus asks Bartimaeus what he wants, Bartimaeus says, “My teacher, let me see again.”
Jesus says, “Go; your faith has made you well.”
What happens next blows me away.
Because the first thing Bartimaeus sees when he regains his sight is his true home. He sees Jesus standing still right there in front of him.
Love, grace, mercy, protection, consolation, peace, safety—a whole new life in Jesus.
Home is Jesus, and seeing Jesus, Bartimaeus knows that he is finally at home, and that he has a new life.
At the end of the story, Bartimaeus, having regained his sight, follows Jesus on the way.
How many times in a day does Jesus pass along beside us, and we ignore him, or refuse out of pride to call on him for mercy, even when deep down inside, we know that we’ve got lots of areas in our lives that need healing? That we, too, are blind? That we, too, are weak, and worn out on the trail?
How do we come up with the courage to ask for the kind of undeserved grace that would give us the desire to ask for healing, to throw off all that holds us back and simply to follow Jesus on the way to home, into the new and everlasting life that God has laid before us?
Beloved, God loves us and wants to bring all of us home into one great merciful and grace filled fellowship of love and blessing.
Let us pray.
Lord, give us the grace and the undying desire to follow you.
“Lead us from death to life,
from falsehood to truth;
lead us from despair to hope,
from fear to trust;
lead us from hate to love,
from war to peace.
Let peace fill our heart,
our world, our universe.”
And may your peace and your undeserved grace and your everlasting love be our everlasting home.
Amen.
Resources:
Frost, Robert. The Death of the Hired Man.
The World Peace Prayer from The New Zealand Prayer Book can be found at the following website, http://liturgy.co.nz/reflection/peace.html
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