The Wounded Healer

Relection for the 30th Sunday of  Ordinary Time  27th October

The late Henri Nouwen tells this story in his book The Wounded Healer:  A young fugitive is running for his life. He comes to a small village. The people were kind to him and offered him refuge. But when soldiers came looking for him, they threatened to burn the village to the ground if they did not turn him over. The commander gave the villagers until dawn to decide.

The people went to the minister. What should they do? The minister — torn between the death of the one man or his whole village — withdrew to his room. He searched and searched through Scripture hoping to find an answer before sunrise. As the first rays of morning cracked the night sky, his eyes fell on these words: It is better that one man dies than the whole people be lost.

The minister closed his Bible, called the soldiers and told them where the boy was hidden. After the soldiers led the boy, the village erupted in celebration that they had been spared.

The minister did not join in the celebration. He remained in his room, overcome with great sadness.

That night an angel came to him in a dream.

“What have you done?” the angel asked.

“I handed over the fugitive to the enemy,” he replied.

“But don’t you realize that you handed over the Messiah?” the angel said.

“But how was I to know?” the minister cried.

The angel said: “If, instead of looking to your Bible, you had visited the young man just once and looked into his eyes, you would have known.”

In today’s Gospel, Jesus restores the sight of the blind Bartimaeus — but not just the vision of his eyes, but the vision of his soul. Jesus redirects his sight to perceive the presence of God in his life, to see and embrace the many signs of God’s grace in the world around him. As the minister learns too late, Jesus reveals God’s presence not in doctrine or dogmas or concepts, but in flesh-and-blood goodness and human experiences of light in our midst. Bartimaeus receives his sight — but Jesus also affirms the vision that he already possesses: the ability to “see” God’s love in his life, to “see” the possibilities for God’s transforming hope and re-creating love to heal the brokenness in his life, to “see” his own ability to be the means for God’s justice and reconciliation. To see our lives and our world with the eyes of faith is to recognize the radiance of God’s grace in every human being, in every place, in every moment.