30TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME B
FROM THE PERIPHERY TO THE CENTER
MK 10: 46-52
MESSAGE
The Gospel today relocates the blind man from the sidelines to the center. Bartimaeus was blind, therefore incapacitated and useless for society; thus he ended up begging for survival. His place was the roadside, the margins, the so-called periphery for he had no right to be anywhere else where he would be just a nuisance. He also had no voice. In fact, when he tried to speak to the Lord Jesus passing by, did not some of the disciples try to quiet him down? He was a nobody, invisible, insignificant. He was not a person, a prosopon, but in the language of the Greeks, was an “aprosopon,” the faceless one.
And here we see the greatness of Jesus, his wide-open heart. In the non-person, he saw the face of a brother. In the voiceless, he heard the cry of an anguished soul. From the periphery, he reached out and took the man at the center of his attention, at the center with his brothers and sisters, at the center of God’s love.
Pope Francis just concluded in September 2024 his longest foreign visit to four countries in Asia and Oceania. There he met the people at the margins – the minority Christians of Indonesia, the tribal peoples of Papua New Guinea, the hopeful but struggling Catholics of the young country of East Timor, and the minority but vibrant faithful of Singapore. In the spirit of Jesus he brought the world’s attention to the persecuted, the forgotten, the neglected, and the invisible people of society – especially the children, elderly, migrants, sick and poor.
As Catholics, we need not follow the footsteps of the pope to missionary lands. Right where we live, there are people in the peripheries calling out to us like Bartimaeus did to Jesus. Perhaps there is a Bartimaeus at home who is difficult to love, a Bartimaeus at work who is hard to forgive, a Bartimaeus in the neighborhood we are trying to avoid. When will we decide to be like Jesus and reach out to someone in the periphery of our hearts?
REFLECT
Lord Jesus, this week, make me like you, sensitive to the presence of people who need my love. May I acknowledge people with a smile and a kind word. May I listen to someone who wants to share a story with me. May I have an open heart to no longer avoid but embrace the people I have decided not to notice. Amen.
