SALVATION: “LET ME SEE AGAIN”
Revelation rather than Transaction
- So we just heard Jesus ask Bartimaeus: “What do you want me to do for you?”
- To begin, may I ask each of you, as I ask myself: How would you answer that question?
Since we Christians call Jesus our Savior, the question might also be posed as: How do you want me to save you?
- Take a moment to think about that.
- I suspect that the answer that many Christians would give would be something like: “I want you to open the gates of heaven for me, and I guess that means you have to lay down your life for me on the cross.”
- Although such an understanding of how we are saved is not to be found in the New Testament, it has been the common Christian belief since the 11th Century when St. Anselm developed what is called his “satisfaction theory of atonement.”
- This “theory” taught that Jesus’ death was necessary in order to satisfy God’s demand for justice. It was by dying that he atoned for our sins and opened the gates of paradise for us.
- This is an understanding of how we are saved that may have made sense for Medieval Christians, but for many Christians today, it’s rather repulsive.
- As many have noted, it sure looks like child abuse of Jesus by his heavenly Father.
- The answer of Bartimaeus in today’s Gospel is very different from the atonement theory: “My teacher, let me see again.”
- NT scholars argue among themselves about the historicity of this story of Bartimaeus. I don’t want to get into that – mainly because I don’t think the question of historicity is that important.
- What the scholars agree on, what I think we can be quite certain about, is that this story was for the early Christian community a metaphor for Jesus as savior; it symbolized just how Jesus “saves” us – and implicitly it also tells us what we are actually saved from.
- It understands Jesus as a Teacher.
- Notice that in the Gospel, Bartimaeus addresses Jesus as “Teacher” (Rabonni), not as Lord or Savior. And he asks simply: let me see again.
- So “to be saved” meant for these early Jesus-followers to see something they have not been able to see; to realize something that they were not aware of.
- This implies that Jesus saves by enabling us to see, to recognize, to grasp something we did not see before. Which means that Jesus saves us by teaching, by revealing, by making something known to us, by opening our eyes
- Salvation, in other words, results from a revelation, not from a transaction that pays off God.
- This understanding of what being saved means is very similar, if not identical, with what Buddhists understand as “enlightenment.”
- Buddha saves or transforms his followers by enabling them to be enlightened, to have their eyes opened, to wake up.
- Interestingly, some of the earliest Christian texts talk about baptism as enlightenment.
- But what does Jesus enable us to see? What is revealed?
- What we see is what Jesus saw – what he realized or woke up to through his own Jewish spiritual practice: he saw and became aware of his oneness, his intimacy with a God whom he called “Abba” (Dad/Mom)
- He lived his life in an ever-abiding awareness of a living Presence that sustained him, that inspired him, that was his constant resouce and refuge.
- John’s Gospel is the clearest in describing this oneness. In chapter 10 Jesus announces what he has seen and experienced: “The Father and I are one.” (Jn 10:30 ) “The Father is in me and I am in him.” (Jn 14: 11) (Today, Jesus would have certainly added “Mother.”)
- But John’s Gospel goes even further and tells us that what Jesus saw and realized about himself we can see and realize about ourselves: that we too are one with this Holy Mystery that Jesus called Abba, this Living Presence that sustains and holds us:
- Again, in John’s Gospel, Chapter 17 Jesus prays: “…that they may be one…As you Father/Mother are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” (Jn 17:21)
- This is what Jesus reveals, this is what “saves” us: when we “see,” when we realize, when we trust that we can share in Jesus’ experience of being one with, held by, sustained by this Holy Mystery, this Living Presence, that he called Abba, Father/Mother.
- His experience can be our experience.
- And when it is, that’s what “being saved” means.
- Allow me to turn to spiritual teachers who can say this better than I can.
- Beatrice Bruteau, whom I had the privilege of knowing when we were colleagues at Xavier University in Cincinnati, puts it this way in her book Radical Openness:
- “Jesus [as teacher] wants us. . . . to enjoy his self-realization, his union with the Source of Being, whom he calls Father/Abba. It’s his own interior experience that he wants to share. This means that the rest of us are to have this kind of experience.”
- Alan Watts, a Christian Buddhist, is even clearer:
- “Institutional Christianity has hardly contemplated the possibility that the consciousness of Jesus might be the consciousness of the Christian, that the whole point of the Gospel is that everyone may experience union with God in the same way as Jesus himself.”
- And what the early Christians or disciples of Jesus realized shortly after his execution by the Roman authorities was that this Jesus not only reveals our union with Holy Mystery, he also enables us to personally experience and feel it.
- This is what the resurrection was all about.
- After he died, when the disciples did what he urged them to do and gathered to break bread, have a meal together and remember him, they came to feel, to know, that he was still with them, enabling them, to continue sharing his experience of oneness with the Father/Mother, with Holy Mystery.
- They realized that he was alive in them, that they were now his body, in which he continued to share with them his experience of oneness with Holy Mystery.
- St. Paul, throughout his many letters to the early community, beautifully and poetically calls on his fellow Jesus-followers to recognize and trust that this Jesus who become the Christ in the resurrection, now lives his experience of God in and as them.
- To the Corinthians he writes: “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you!” (2Cor 13:5)
- And he urges the Romans “to put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” (Rom. 13:14)
- To the Philippians he is even clearer: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” (Phil. 2:5) – “The same mind” means the same consciousness, the same awareness.
- And the amazing declaration to the Galatians: “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in and as me.” (Gal. 2: 20)
- For St. Paul the essential definition of a Christian is: someone who shares in the very same awareness as that of Jesus Christ – an awareness of being one with the Divine, of being grounded and sustained and guided by the Living Presence that we Christians call God.
- Or in the words of Alan Watts: a Christian is someone who can “experience union with God in the same way as Jesus himself.”
- So how can we nurture and sustain our sharing in the mind of Christ, our sharing in his experience of the Living Presence that he called Abba – Mother/Father?
- It certainly helps to set aside some time every day when we can sit in silence, through something like Centering Prayer – silence in which we can recall and allow ourselves to sink into this Living Presence that Jesus called Mother-Father.
- And throughout the day, especially in difficult moments of fear, anxiety, anger, hurt, we can take just a few seconds to connect with the mind of Christ and feel the Living Presence.
- But one of the most powerful ways of putting on Christ, or of letting the same mind be in us that was in Christ, is the sacrament of the Eucharist that we are about to celebrate.
- This was Jesus’ parting gift – a ritual of coming together around a table, of eating together, and of remembering him – a ritual which can enable us to see and feel his presence among us and in each of us.
- So as we gather around this table today we can ask with Bartimaeus: Teacher, let me see, let me see again, and again, and again.