(You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.)
Stories function in interesting ways. While we generally love to hear a story we haven’t encountered before, we are also very attached to the stories we already know. We don’t like people messing with our old stories – even their authors. “I love to tell the story,” goes the old-timey gospel hymn, “The old, old story of Jesus and his love.”
Yet that “old, old story” is ever becoming new in our lives. In order to really accept healing and freedom and renewal, we need to be able to believe a different narrative than the one that has defined our lives so far, a different story than the one our culture or our parents or our work has told us. We can get trapped by what we have experienced as “normal.” Jesus’ gift is to show us the new normal, to show us what can be in the midst of what is.
Bartimaeus believed this story he had heard about, and it gave him power to walk out of his old story into the new.
The blind man said to him, ‘My teacher, let me see again.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your faith has made you well.’ Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
Physical sight and following Jesus meant giving up a certain kind of identity, a degree of security. Walking into our new stories always does. That’s why we often stay stuck in situations that are less than what God might want for us.
What old stories have defined you for too long?
One way to get at that question is with this one: What are you pretending not to know?
What new story is calling you? Maybe it’s a vocation stirring in you, to use your time and gifts in some way other than how you have been. Maybe it’s a different place, a new person to love, a rediscovery of yourself. What is trying to be born in you?
Bartimaeus left his roadside and followed Jesus – right into Jerusalem, where Jesus was first lauded, and soon after condemned to a brutal death. That new story might not have been at all what Bartimaeus hoped for – and maybe it was more. For he got to witness firsthand the greatest love story the world has ever known. And he got to be around when that perfect man who had poured himself out for us, even to death, rose from the grave to usher all of us into the New, New Story God is writing.
And that story, like God’s mercies, is new every morning, as we allow it to claim us.
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