Blessed Sacrament Parish
Amherstview, Ontario

Saint Linus
Bath, Ontario

Saint Bartholomew
Amherst Island, Ontario
Homilies from Fr. Charles Ogbuagu

Homily: 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

October 27, 2024

My dear brothers and sisters, in this thirtieth Sunday of the year, this plea; ‘Lord that I may see’ by this blind beggar; Bartimaeus invites us to reflection- ‘Lord that I may see.’ We must acknowledge that Jesus is the light of the world. In John 8:12, Jesus tells us, “I am the light of the world, whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” Christ’s whole mission was to shed divine light on human life through the Gospel. Without Christ we are simply blind. Without the Gospel we go on in life aimlessly and we shall be led further and further away from God in our greed, in our ambition, in our pleasure, in our unending selfish cravings.

I remember the words of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in his popular book, the Leviathan, he argued that man is inclined to remain in the state of nature, which is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. So, human beings need a higher force, a government that will take us out of this state of nature. In the spiritual realm, this is what the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ does for us, to take us out from the state of nature, to enlighten our life. Like Bartimaeus, we must acknowledge our blindness, our misery, our powerlessness. We need Jesus, we must have faith in Jesus in order that our spiritual blindness would be cured.

Have we ever imagined the world of the blind; they cannot contemplate the beauty of nature. Darkness is simply a state of inactivity. We can recount our woes in some occasional moments of power outage because of bad weather conditions, everything stops working, we cannot see to cook our food or even to eat the one we have cooked before, everything we stored in the refrigerator begins to decay. This is how our moral life decays when the light from Christ is no longer shining in our life.

We have a lot to learn from this blind beggar Bartimaeus, his sheer persistence was amazing, nothing was able to stop him from connecting to Jesus. The crowd wanted to distract him from following Jesus by shouting on him to keep quiet but to no avail. Imagine the harm the crowd mentality has done to the spiritual life of many, a young person follows the mum and dad to go to Church, he/ she receives the first holy communion and becomes confirmed in the faith, when his/her level comes up in the high school or he/she enters the college or University, the crowd of peers would convince him or her that matters about religion are archaic and not needed, boom!! Nobody sees him or her again in the church. Bartimaeus has a message for us, the more the crowd shouted on him to be silent, the more he himself shouted for Jesus to hear him, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me.’ His cloaks wanted to be a hindrance, most probably that was the only little cloth he had to protect him from cold, but he threw it away and sprang on his feet to meet Jesus.

In essence, Bartimaeus was determined to see Jesus, he did not lack any clarity on what he wanted from Jesus, ‘Lord that I may see.’ His wishes to encounter Jesus were not just mere vague, sentimental dream. He was sincere and ready to make any sacrifice to surmount the obstacles on his way to Jesus. Bartimaeus was not like some of us Christians who are blind and know that we are blind, but we do not want our eyes to be opened. Instead, we prefer to keep them closed and dream on a time when God would miraculously do the magic for us and turn us to be saints. Which laudable goal has ever been achieved by day dreaming? Let us like Bartimaeus commit ourselves in the struggle to sincerely remove every barrier that prevents us from seeing the light of Christ.