There are only two times in the New Testament that this word is used. Here in Mark 10, Bartimaeus asks for his sight back, and in John 20 Mary is undone to see Jesus after His resurrection and calls Him this Aramaic title of respect. The common thread between both of these instances is desperation. It is the desperate that open doors that ought not to be opened and find what everyone was looking for. It is the desperate that eat very little and sleep even less because they just have to have the object of their obsession. And it is desperation that causes even the King of kings to divert His plans.
We know from the context that Bartimaeus was not always blind because he asks that he might regain his sight, not receive it. As this blinded man is sitting by the road, just waiting for something to happen that would take the boredom out of being a beggar, he hears a large crowd passing and hears that Jesus of Nazareth is passing by. Still seated he begins to yell for mercy from the Son of David. The crowd tried to hush him, but he was desperate to see again. He would not be shut up, he would not be held back, he was going to see and everyone around him was going to have to deal with the awkwardness of him yelling until he got his healing. So Jesus stopped. He had planned to go on from Jericho to Jerusalem, but He heard the desperation in the voice and delayed the journey.
Now when Jesus summoned Batimaeus, it says that the word passed through the crowd to him and he threw his cloak aside. He threw aside his natural way of keeping warm at night and just went after God. If you have ever been in a room and the lights are cut, leaving you in pitch darkness, you know that you don’t throw something aside that you may need to find again. Imagine being blind. He had to have had enough faith to get healed because he would have had a hard time finding that cloak again if he didn’t get healed, plus there was a huge crowd around and it could have been stolen or misplaced.
There is a level of desperation that we need to get from Bartimaeus. He didn’t care what people thought about him, he just wanted a touch from the Nazarene. He didn’t care about his future comfort or his security blanket, he just wanted to have an encounter with God. His lack of vision did not deter him from looking for God. Sometimes the blind see what the seeing are blind to. Bartimaeus saw that Jesus would heal him, the “seeing” crowd only saw a loud beggar doing what beggars do – beg. If we do not get desperate for encounter with the Lord, we will almost certainly live out the rest of our days without encounter, bored and boring, not ever laying hold of our inheritance.
The other socially awkward, but desperate, lover of the Lord is Mary. She was delivered of seven demons and was from then on stuck to Jesus. She didn’t care what it looked like to have an ex-prostitute hanging around a Rabbi and His youth group, she knew that He alone had the words of eternal life and she would go nowhere else to find the words that set here free. When Jesus was buried, she came looking for Him on the third day and found the empty tomb and who she thought to be the gardener. She is so desperate that she becomes irrational. She told Him that she would pick up the body and carry Him away by herself if he would tell her where the Body was. Just as Bartimaeus called the Lord “Rabboni” at the very moment that he knew he would get whatever he was asking for, Mary called Him this title when she knew she had obtained that which her soul desired. They knew they had found the greatest treasure they had yet seen. The title basically means “great one of abundance of power and full of wisdom”. They recognized His greatness and their lovesick hearts no longer had their hope deferred.
*Rabboni, we are desperate to have our desire fulfilled in the Tree of Life. Amen*
