Homily 513 | 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time | Year B
I went backpacking this past week to celebrate my birthday. I’m definitely not as young as I used to be and found myself a little slower than the other two in my group. I reminded them that I had the keys for the car, so it wouldn’t do any good to race ahead and leave me… but I still got left behind.
There’s a natural tendency to think that we would be better off to leave the slower people behind. This happened a lot at Philmont Scout Ranch this summer where I served as a chaplain. A “crew” is normally about ten people and they go backpacking for ten days. As you can imagine, some scouts are not quite as physically able as their faster crew mates. I got called out several times to deal with crews who had decided they’d like to leave someone behind. Ya… we don’t do that. In fact, when a crew completes their trek, one of the coveted awards is the “WAMI” award… “We All Made It.” More than just covering distance or climbing mountains, the goal of Philmont is that a crew learn to work together and become a family unit. That means you can’t leave anyone behind.
In today’s readings, Jeremiah describes what it will be like when the Israelites get to return from exile. It would be a long journey from modern-day Iraq back to Israel. The temptation would certainly be to leave the weak behind. But Jeremiah says even the blind and the lame and the mothers with child will make the trip. No one will be left behind. In our gospel, we see blind Bartimaeus who certainly seems like someone society has left behind. He’s literally “on the margins” as Pope Francis likes to say, sitting by the roadside while everyone passes him by. But Jesus is not going to leave him behind.
As a practical application, think about all the temptation in society today to leave the weak behind. Recently, Iceland announced that they had “eradicated Down Syndrome” from the country. The rest of the world reacted in horror knowing what that really meant. They didn’t find a medical cure; they simply killed all the children with Down Syndrome in their mother’s wombs. In ways less tragic than this we are tempted every day to try to eliminate the weak, the poor, and the differently abled from our life. There is not only a physical sadness to this, there is also a great spiritual danger.
I think Jesus loved the physically outcast so much because it’s a reminder of how we are all spiritually “disabled” before God. We’re all blinded by sin, lame and unable to get up out of so many messes. Bartimaeus knew he was blind and wasn’t ashamed to beg for help. Let’s stop ignoring the weak in our midst. But let’s especially stop ignoring our own weakness. We’re not OK. We need help. We only need ask Jesus. Jesus will never leave us behind.