Whenever I hear that the Word of God about to be proclaimed in a liturgy is coming from one of the Books of the Apocryphal, my ears perk up, my posture improves, and I lean forward in full attention, ready to hear a Word fresh and new -- new, for these Books were not included in my growing-up-Protestant canon. I hear them most often now without the temptation for, dare I say, a lazy ho-hum-ness that can come from too much familiarity with even the most profound of readings.
Today's first reading from the Book of Sirach seems particularly stunning. Have I ever heard this reading proclaimed in the Assembly? I think not. The author is a sage living in Jerusalem between 200 and 175 B.C.E. What a fervent hymn of praise he writes -- a sacred shout-out to God's power, beauty, and goodness, manifested in the mighty work of creating and preserving the universe. Each verse seems to demand the calligraphy treatment. "Perennial is God's almighty wisdom; he is from all eternity one and the same." Or, "God plumbs the depths and penetrates the heart; our innermost being he understands." We can feel Sirach struggling with fresh ways of his own to name the ineffable and the omniscient, God's perfect unity and eternity. (Bernadette Farrell's lovely and haunting hymn God Beyond All Names is a contemporary example of that same struggle.) "Yet even God's holy ones," as Sirach writes, "must fail in recounting the wonders of the Lord."
What a reversal comes in our Gospel -- a miracle healing story from Mark. Unlike wrestling with the majesty of a God beyond all names, here we find a very specific man, a blind man with the name Bartimaeus, with a very specific father Timaeus, who has come to know and believe that this teacher, this Jesus, is Son of David. We have no idea how he came to know and believe, but his persistence -- now laden with what must be desperation as Jesus and his troop are leaving Jericho, never to return -- matches the tenacity shown in Jesus' parables of the woman pleading before the judge, or the pesky man knocking on his neighbor's door at midnight. "He sprang up and came to Jesus." (Surely he would have needed the help of his community to find his way. A reflection for pondering for another day....) Bartimaeus finds the courage to answer Jesus' question, "What do you want me to do for you?" with an answer that would fulfill his deepest longing for healing, a restoration by this man, in this place. We are told that, once miraculously restored to sight, he followed Jesus. His name does not appear again in our Gospel record or early Church history. We are left to imagine the power of his witness, whose legacy spills out through the centuries.
This same Perennial God, whose love is expressed in Sirach's paean to works of nature, is most fully revealed to us in the person named Jesus. That same Jesus knows us by name, by our history, by our dreams and disappointments, by our high hopes and our high thresholds of gratitude. It is this same Jesus who is asking us, intimately, personally, "What do you want me to do for you?" In courage and in faith, how will we answer?