Tonight at Living Vision, we were practicing the Jesus Prayer, a discipline that involves the repetition of these words: “Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us.” It’s profoundly simple and deeply transforming, as one moves more deeply into the practice. But something interesting and unexpected happened tonight as I did this practice that I want to share.
As you may know, this prayer has its origin in the Bartimaeus story in Mark 10. The scene is that Jesus is moving down a packed street to Jericho, a regular mob scene. And this blind beggar named Bartimaeus figures out who is walking by and starts shouting at the top of his lungs, “Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me!”
Well tonight in the heart of this particular prayer practice, I began to imagine myself on that street calling out with the words of this very prayer. And what came to me was the sense that Jesus probably wouldn’t have noticed me. He probably wouldn’t have heard or responded to my cry on that crowded Jericho street because I wasn’t so noticeably deformed or so visibly needy.
When you think about it, pretty much all the gospel stories have Jesus responding to and reaching out to the remarkably outcast – blind beggars, lame and disfigured lepers, and raving demoniacs. And so, from deep in the practice of the Jesus Prayer, I had the profound and enduring sense that Jesus’ attention would have been elsewhere, that his compassion would have been drawn to someone “more” obviously in need or more visibly imperiled than I.
This thought pattern and thread continued as I went more deeply into the prayer practice, and I found myself becoming very sad. I suddenly felt as though this had been the story of my entire life – that I was not remarkable or excellent in any outstanding way, but neither was I “sufficiently” needy or messed up in any particularly significant way. I was, instead, stuck in mediocrity, in the middle…and I’m not really aware of any gospel evidence that Jesus deals with us who dwell in the middle. It’s great that Jesus is filled with such compassion for the outcast and the deeply unfortunate. But wouldn’t it be nice if there were at least a story or two in there somewhere when Jesus stopped and had a beer with a guy with all his limbs in tact, with all his senses functioning, but who was dying inside? Or how about a story of a guy who may have had things reasonably together physically but who’d lost his wife and family to divorce or who couldn’t sleep at night because of his economic fears or lack of health insurance?
I can’t help but wonder how many of us are stuck in the middle? How many of us don’t have the drawing card of the alcoholic collapse or the stint in prison? How many of us don’t have the riveting and infinitely marketable testimony of some horrific fall followed by a miraculous healing and salvation? How and where does the Gospel meet US? When do we get our moment with the savior like Bartimaeus and Zaccheus did?
I guess I want to know that if I were on that crowded road to Jericho and cried out “Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me!” that he would have stopped…that Jesus would have come to me…to ME with all my limbs and both eyes…and that he would have cared…and listened…and understood. That sure would have been nice…It still would be nice.
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