Do y’all remember the movie “Back to the Future?” You know, that time travel film starring Michael J. Fox? Well, the other day, a friend of mine posted a Back to the Future themed question on Facebook: “If you could do your own time traveling and go back to 1985, what advice would you give yourself?”
Well, you might think the premise is a little dorky, and maybe it is, but my friend got a whooping 145 responses. As you might expect, there were stock tips and bits of relationship advice. Several people reassured their younger selves that, “It’s going to be OK” and at least one said, “It’s going to be so much worse than you can possibly imagine.”
One response in particular caught my eye: “Mullets will probably be back…but not by 2021.” Remember mullets? Business in the front; party in the back?
It’s interesting to look back 30 years and consider what’s endured and what, mercifully, we’ve managed to let go of. Some ideas just don’t hold up over time. But others manage to stay fresh and relevant and true, not just through changes in fashion, but through complete upheavals in the way we understand the world.
So what would you tell your 1985 self, your 1885 self, your 1585 self, or even your 85 AD self? And I wonder what those long ago selves might see that they want to tell us?
You know, every time we read the Bible it’s Back to the Future ‘cause it’s hard to read without doin’ some time travel to understand the context. Often we can’t see what a story’s trying to challenge or celebrate or disrupt until we also see what the undisrupted, unchallenged world looked like.
You see, in the Greek-speaking world, by the time Mark was written, there was a description of the universe that everything else rested on. It was laid out in a book by the philosopher Plato a few centuries before Jesus came along, and it told the story of how the heavens came to be, how humans were made, the nature and order of all created things.
It was the second most read thing in Greek, second only to Homer. And it’s had, according to one scholar, “the longest continuous influence of any of the dialogues of the West.” Its importance can’t be overstated. It affected what almost everybody in Plato’s world thought about the shape of the cosmos for hundreds, even thousands of years.
So, Plato’s universe was carefully stratified with a clear hierarchy, from the highest realm of pure forms, down to our less than perfect physical world with our less than perfect physical bodies. Some things, and even some people, just matter more.
You see, according to Plato, human beings weren’t all created equal either. Not at all. Some were created a little higher than others. And among humans, one order was highest of all. Any guesses? The philosopher. Shocking, isn’t it? That Plato the philosopher would come to such a daring conclusion.
And to be an ordinary, non-philosopher human, well that was as bad as being blind. And in Plato’s universe, the literally and metaphorically blind were simply lesser beings.
I just realized I haven’t told you the title of Plato’s book! Well, it’s the main character’s name, the enlightened, high order philosopher who sees everything, and so understands the structure of the cosmos, is wise enough to choose the good life. His name, and the name of the book, too, was Timaeus.
In our Gospel today, “Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, was a blind beggar sitting by the roadside.” Bar-Timaeus. Bar means “son of” in Hebrew. But of course Timaeus is not a Hebrew name. It’s Greek. And for Mark's Gospel, that's weird. As if that’s not enough, Bartimaeus is the only person in this gospel who gets healed by Jesus that gets a name. Everyone else is anonymous. But not Bartimaeus.
The Gospel writers were not stupid. Greek ideas and literature floated all over the Roman empire, and what Mark is doing is planned.
Bartimaeus is the perfect inversion of Timaeus. He’s not the wise, all seeing, enlightened philosopher. Bartimaeus is blind. Sitting by the roadside. Begging for mercy from a man he’d only heard might make him well. He’s everything that Timaeus is not. He’s everything that Plato says is nothing. He’s low-order, ignorant, and broken.
Jesus actually notices Bartimaeus, reaches out to a blind beggar as though he mattered. Jesus says to the man, as his sight is restored, “Go; your faith has made you well.”
He doesn’t say, “I had pity on you, you poor thing.” No. He says, “Your faith, Bartimaeus, something within you that’s good and high order itself, that is what made you well.” He’s sayin’, “Bartimaeus, the Kingdom of God is for people just like you. The last shall be first. The meek shall inherit the earth. You know all this. Because your faith has made you well. Go.”
Now, back here in the future, so many of us are still living in Plato’s universe, with Plato's rules, not God’s. In too many ways, this is still a world made for the smart and the strong and the ones who’ve been told they can see better than anybody else.
And lately Plato’s world has been especially rough. We’ve seen fractures and breaks and a blindness, sometimes a willing blindness, to truth and love and faith. We’ve seen individuals singled out, their lives put in danger in search of the truth. This isn’t the future we wanted to come back to.
But look at why we are here today. Today we will witness Plato's world upset. We will see Jesus reaching out to the weakest of us all, two tiny little children abut to be baptized. We are going to see two children, gathered up in the arms of Christ, sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ's own...forever.
Forever.
We will see the future...the future that is the Kingdom of God.
Look the world can get a little too puffed up in its own way of seeing things. We see it all the time in our leaders and our entertainers and those who think of themselves as our betters. But that’s not Jesus. Jesus doesn’t see things that way. Jesus isn’t stopped in his tracks by clever philosophy and successful doers. Jesus’ world is ordered differently. It’s ordered differently from Plato’s, and it’s ordered differently from ours.
‘Cause what does stop Jesus, what captures Jesus’ attention, and stirs Jesus’ love is not the smart or the rich or the privileged. It’s the helpless, innocent child of Timaeus callin’ for mercy.
So, Liliana Rose, Sophia Madison, the Kingdom of God is for people just like you. And we welcome you with all our heart.